This paper explores the notion of barulho (noise) in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cabo Verde, as a contested sonic category shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary spatial politics. While scholarship von Cabo Verdean music has predominantly centered genres framed as “tradition”—such as morna, coladeira, batuku, and funaná—this paper turns to two practices that are frequently relegated to the domain of barulho: Kolá San Jon and Heavy Metal in Mindelo. In local discourse, barulho often contrasts with ideas of heritage and respectability, implying that excessive loudness, distortion, and percussive intensity fall outside the bounds of legitimate tradition. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine how Kolá San Jon’s processional drumming and Heavy Metal’s amplified rehearsals and concerts are regulated, spatially contained, and at times morally condemned. Building on Camal’s (2019) concept of “creolized auralities,” I argue that both forms articulate alternative modes of sonic belonging that unsettle inherited hierarchies of civility and musical value rooted in colonial governance. Historically, African-derived expressive forms were disciplined through spatial restriction and discourses of disorder; contemporary debates over volume, amplification, and public festivity echo these earlier regimes. Finally, this paper conceptualizes barulho as a relational category through which race, class, and postcolonial modernity are negotiated. By juxtaposing these two genres, I demonstrate how creolized aural practices challenge dominant auditory regimes and reconfigure urban space through sound. In doing so, the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discussions on sound, power, and the afterlives of colonialism in the Atlantic.

Swastikas, Sieg Heils, and claims that metal is a “white thing”: these overt expressions of white supremacy are widely acknowledged by scholars and participants as present in isolated pockets of the metal scene. Less examined, however, is how members of the scene respond when these ideologies emerge from these pockets with a violent roar or manifest as an insidious whisper.

This paper addresses this gap through a case study of US metal musician Phil Anselmo and his band, Pantera, once deemed as the “saviors of American metal” (Krovatin 2019). Although Anselmo has repeatedly expressed white supremacist views, these actions are often treated as isolated incidents, allowing both his reputation and Pantera’s legacy to remain largely intact. By recovering numerous overlooked examples of racist rhetoric from Anselmo and his bandmates, this paper demonstrates that such incidents constitute an ongoing pattern rather than discrete scandals. Because Anselmo is among the most influential musicians in metal history, this case study reveals just how deeply entrenched and normalized white supremacy has become in the metal scene.

Drawing on semiotic approaches from linguistic anthropology and analysis of interviews, media coverage, and live performances, this study shows how overt and subtle racialized discourses reinforce the metal scene’s white racial frame (Feagin 2009). This paper contributes to conversations about the enduring effects of white supremacy still inherent to the scene today (Hoad 2021; Fischer 2022; Hudson 2026), adding to and expanding the ways in which those who study this genre think about and discuss issues of race.

This paper explores the popular allure of the abject in the music of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, specifically in the song “Closer” and its accompanying music video. Julia Kristeva defined the abject as the material result of bodily waste separated from the body, like vomit, excrement, and blood, which causes simultaneous disgust and intrigue in the subject who experiences it. While the genre of industrial music as a whole often contains explicit references to Kristeva, Georges Bataille, and other philosophers who have written about the abject, Nine Inch Nails was the first to receive worldwide radio and television play without compromising on grotesque imagery, including visuals and lyrics running the gamut from sadomasochistic sex to suicide. This paper probes the public’s hidden desires and fascination with the abject through the band’s most popular single, “Closer,” and how that fascination aided in catapulting the band to stardom. In tandem, I situate the band’s cult following in a countercultural movement that felt abjected–expunged, alienated, sequestered–from the rest of society and how identification with the extreme and disturbing lyrical imagery allowed them to band together as outcasts. Using ethnographic and theoretical methodologies, I explore the abject’s ability to both unify and divide, and how that mirrors its dual nature as alluring and repulsive.