In 1993 the General Social Survey, the long-running poll of American adults, asked its respondents which kinds of music they disliked. The sociologist who took those answers apart and published what they showed in the American Sociological Review in 1996, under a title that did most of the arguing for her, "Anything But Heavy Metal", was Bethany Bryson, in volume 61, pages 884 to 899.
Her finding cut against the obvious guess. Better educated Americans turned out to be more tolerant of other people's music, not less, but their tolerance ran out at a very particular fence: the genres they declared anathema, a pencil driven through the box, were the ones whose fans had the least schooling, gospel, country, rap and heavy metal. The dislike was not about the sound. It was about who was thought to be listening.
That is how metal fan stereotypes have always worked. An automatic telephone exchange of the Strowger type needs no operator: the caller dials, a bank of stepping switches clacks round and up one notch for every pulse, and the call drops into whichever line the digits point to without anybody in the building hearing a voice. Dial the words metal fan and the selectors step to the same four extensions every time, the dropout, the angry young man, the lost cause and the room with no women in it. Nobody checks who is calling.
The sticker, the courtroom and the pulpit belong to the wider story. The stereotype outlived all of them, and it has been tested line by line.
The dropout: a class line drawn with a record
The two psychologists who asked college students in Texas to describe the typical fan of fourteen different genres, and then set those descriptions against what real fans reported about themselves, were Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling, and their paper in Psychology of Music in 2007 found that people carry sharp, detailed pictures of every audience, and that many of those pictures hold a kernel of truth.
A kernel is not the whole crop. The pictures were accurate in places and badly wrong in others, and the wrong parts clustered where Bryson's did, on class and schooling, the one axis on which a taste can be turned into a verdict about a person. Put the two studies side by side and the dropout turns out to be a portrait of the people drawing it.
The ethnomusicologist who spent 1992 and 1993 in the rehearsal rooms and clubs of Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, taping local metal musicians as they talked through their own songs bar by bar, was Harris M. Berger. His book Metal, Rock, and Jazz, published by Wesleyan in 1999, set those players beside the rock and jazz musicians he also studied. The metal players came out every bit as exact about form, tempo and the weight of a single chord change, and a good deal more exact than the stereotype allowed.
The dislike was not about the sound. It was about who was thought to be listening.
The angry young man, under the personality tests
For thirty years the loudest of metal fan stereotypes worked like a loudhailer held over a picket line, pitched to drown out the speaker underneath, so that anyone passing heard only the noise and assumed there was nothing else being said. Research was the passer-by who stopped and listened past it. What came through was quieter than expected, and a good deal more interesting: a set of personality scores that read less like a police file than like the profile of any subculture whose members chose it on purpose.
The team that questioned 414 British adults about their personalities and their taste for contemporary heavy metal was led by the psychologist Viren Swami, and its paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts in 2013 described the fans as higher than average in their need for uniqueness and lower in religiosity, with a lower average self-esteem, and found men more drawn to the music than women.
That is a profile of people who want to stand apart. It is not a profile of people who want to hurt anybody, and nothing in the results matches the snarling figure the heresy hunters of the eighties described. The findings are attested only as averages, and averages describe crowds, never the one person at the barrier.
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)
The kids a town had written off
On 11 March 1987 four teenagers died together in a garage in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and the town's explanation arrived before the funerals: they were the kids who wore the jackets and played the records. The sociologist who went there for the Village Voice, stayed, and spent months with the young people the town had already filed under a single word was Donna Gaines.
Her book, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids, published by Pantheon in 1991, found a generation boxed in by shrinking jobs, schools that had given up on them and adults who read a taste in music as a diagnosis. The records were not the cause. For many of them the records were the only thing in town that had taken them seriously. It is the most humane book the subject has, and it neither excuses nor condemns anyone.
The room with no women in it
The researcher who interviewed women fans of hard rock and metal across Britain and set what they said against the way the music papers had written about them for decades is Rosemary Lucy Hill, and Gender, Metal and the Media, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, takes apart the oldest of the four pictures.
The magazines, Hill argued, had cast women at shows as girlfriends or groupies and almost never as listeners, and her interviewees described pleasures in the music far richer than the aggression and virtuosity the stereotype assumes. She rejected outright the claim, repeated in reviews for decades, that the genre is masculine by nature. Swami's numbers had men more drawn to the music. Hill's women were there all along, in the same halls, simply missing from the photographs. Both things are true, and the stereotype survives by printing only the first.
Metal fan stereotypes, sold back at full price
The Los Angeles four who took the whole caricature, hair, spandex, bravado and the sneer at every other genre, and turned it into a career are Steel Panther, and Feel the Steel, released by Universal Republic in 2009, opens its account with "Death to All but Metal", a song that damns every style from pop to hip hop in the voice of the most narrow-minded fan imaginable. The joke only works because the audience knows the man in the song does not exist. The faithful shouting it back are laughing at the picture, not at themselves.
The fans answered the stereotype in the one way no survey could, by buying a ticket to see it performed and singing along at the top of their voices, and the parody did more to disarm the caricature than any lecture against it. No study was needed to prove the point. The ticket sales were enough.
None of the four pictures was made from nothing. Each took a real average, fewer women in the hall, a taste for standing apart, a class line that ran through the American suburbs, and stretched it into a verdict on every fan at once. The studies put the averages back where they belong, on the crowd, and handed each listener back to himself or herself.
The researchers who spent three decades testing the four pictures, from Bryson's survey to Hill's interviews, built a whole field out of the work, and the story of how the universities came to take the music seriously is told under metal studies. What they found fits in a sentence. The picture was always of someone else.
