In 1994, Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg, drummer of the notorious Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, professed in an interview that “Black metal is for white people.” This sentiment speaks to how and why the genre of black metal has become an international hotbed for neo-Nazi activity and propaganda. An associated sub-genre, National Socialist black metal (NSBM), began with a handful of bands in Europe and the United States in the early 1990s, with a steadily growing presence ever since. Despite this growing foothold, NSBM’s impact on the metal scene often goes unacknowledged or unrecognized by many of its participants.

In recent years, however, several anti-fascist black metal (AFBM) bands have formed in response. This paper analyzes these burgeoning oppositional voices in black metal as a form of contestation against the metal scene’s “white racial frame” (Feagin 2009). To examine this phenomenon, I draw on public discourse in the metal scene among music critics, bands, and fans, as well as interviews that I have conducted with members of the Anti-Fascist Black Metal Network. I also explore AFBM’s sonic characteristics and lyrical themes to shed light on the ways in which these bands manipulate black metal conventions to subvert its white patriarchal order. This paper reveals how members of a music scene with diametrically opposing political ideologies navigate these tensions and, in some cases, work to reconstitute the genre to make it more inclusive for its otherwise marginalized participants.

Women in country songs are often represented as one of a myriad of hyper-feminized characters. Since the late-1990s, women have responded to these tropes via an unnamed category of angry country music that stands apart from earlier songs about revenge by telling explicitly violent stories that speak to the real experiences of many women. Artists such as The Chicks and Miranda Lambert tell stories about being victims of abuse and infidelity via songs that sound much harsher than their more “ladylike” counterparts. In this paper, I argue that the stories that are told in what I refer to as revenge anthems draw clear boundaries between what is and is not acceptable within the confines of idealized behavior in North American country music (Pecknold and McCusker 2004; Hubbs 2014; Leap 2020). Building on conceptions of authenticity and sincerity in the genre (Goldin-Perschbacher 2022; Peterson 1997) I perform brief narrative analyses of three revenge anthems: “Goodbye Earl” (The Chicks, 1999), “Gunpowder and Lead” (Miranda Lambert, 2007), and “Martha Divine” (Ashley McBryde, 2020). I argue that when the man in these stories deviates from the ideal masculine archetype, his bad behavior provides the woman license to behave outside the norm, an opportunity they then take full advantage of. Working within this framework, I demonstrate a possible line of thinking that moves away from the woman-as-victim trope that arises in other violent song types, and towards a way of thinking that highlights women’s agency as they loudly and violently reclaim power in song.

This paper explores how musicians and media workers contend with contemporary radio and make it their own. I focus on how Black artists respond to the virulent discrimination they face in country radio (Watson 2021, 2023) and ask how musicians whose sounds, life experiences, and identities sing their countryness, but who are nevertheless deemed unworthy of the genre’s label, contend with radio’s exclusion. I explore this question primarily through the genre-redefining efforts of Nashville-based country music collective Black Opry. Drawing from four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nashville, at Black Opry Revue shows in the southern and northeastern U.S., as well as ongoing digital and in-person ethnographic research, I explore what radio means to Black country artists and how its materialities, practices, and aesthetics are sounded in their songwriting and performances, orientation towards fans and industry, and community building. I argue that Black Opry responds to radio discrimination by forming collective physical and digital spaces independent of mainstream industry, by exploring radiophonic alternatives, and by sounding the medium in their music. This work is inspired by contemporary literature in radio studies that seeks to expand and deepen definitions and conceptions of the medium (Fisher and Bessire 2012; Lacey 2008; Hilmes 2022; Bottomley 2020). Through an exploration of radiophonics in Black Opry’s sounds, performances, and social framework, this chapter brings attention to how musicians contend with radio in their everyday lives, finding meaning in a medium often deployed to further segregate American life.

Fifty mariachi bands gather in a rural Texas town to play corridos. Twenty Florida students write songs and release an album. Teenagers across the country reimagine Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Separated by geography and genre, tying these performers together are their musical responses to school shootings. In recent years, musicians impacted by school rampage shootings have invoked singing, performing, and recording to cope with the aftermath of firearm catastrophes, revealing how expressive cultures unified by action can form a social network of mutual aid and advocate for change. In this space, people sound a resistance against violence and counter institutional and political inaction with song. While these musicians have clear reasons to invoke art for collective coping, healing, and recovery, understanding how to document and theorize these events as a community of practice is important. Here I attempt to frame the growing collection of songs and performances addressing school rampage shootings as a distinct and emerging musical tradition. Rooted in applied epistemologies and disaster studies that foreground expressive cultures as tools for coping, this paper argues for the field to archive and critically explore these sonic enactments. Towards realizing that concept I reflect on the robust musical responses staged by the communities of Uvalde, Texas and Parkland, Florida, where defiant acts of hope answered firearm catastrophe. Through conceptualizing a cultural practice tied to school shootings, this paper strives to show the transformative capabilities of music as cultural action and its potential to center an unnerving yet crucial discourse.