This multi-disciplinary book explores the textual analysis of heavy metal lyrics written in languages other than English including Japanese, Yiddish, Latin, Russian, Hungarian, Austrian German, and Norwegian. Topics covered include national and minority identity, politics, wordplay, parody, local/global, intertextuality, and adaptation.

Includes interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, this book demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form. It draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene.

Many metal songs incorporate poetry into their lyrics using a broad array of techniques, both textual and musical. This book develops a novel adaptation, appropriation, and quotation taxonomy that both expands our knowledge of how poetry is used in metal music and is useful for scholars across adaptation studies broadly. The text follows both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. It identifies 384 metal songs by 224 bands with intertextual ties to 146 poems written by fifty-one different poets, with a special focus on Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton's Paradise Lost and the work of WWI's War Poets. This analysis of transformational mechanisms allows poetry to find an afterlife in the form of metal songs and sheds light on both the adaptation and appropriation process and on the semantic shifts occasioned by the recontextualisation of the poems into the metal music culture. Some musicians reuse – and sometimes amplify – old verses related to politics and religion in our present times; others engage in criticism or simple contradiction. In some cases, the bands turn the abstract feelings evoked by the poems into concrete personal experiences. The most adventurous recraft the original verses by changing the point of view of either the poetic voice or the addressed actors, altering the vocaliser of the narrative or the gender of the protagonists. These mechanisms help metal musicians make the poems their own and adjust them to their artistic needs so that the resulting product is consistent with the expectations of the metal music culture.

Exploring the musical styles and cultures of metal, this Companion is an indispensable introduction to this popular and distinctive genre.

'Quite simply, and quite ridiculously, one of the funniest and most illuminating books I have ever read. I thought I was obsessive, but Keith Kahn-Harris is playing a very different sport. He really has discovered the whole world in an egg.' Simon Garfield A thrilling journey deep into the heart of language, from a rather unexpected starting point. Keith Kahn-Harris is a man obsessed with something seemingly trivial - the warning message found inside Kinder Surprise eggs: WARNING, read and keep: Toy not suitable for children under 3 years. Small parts might be swallowed or inhaled. On a tiny sheet of paper, this message is translated into dozens of languages - the world boiled down to a multilingual essence. Inspired by this, the author asks: what makes 'a language'? With the help of the international community of language geeks, he shows us what the message looks like in Ancient Sumerian, Zulu, Cornish, Klingon - and many more. Along the way he considers why Hungarian writing looks angry, how to make up your own language, and the meaning of the heavy metal umlaut. Overturning the Babel myth, he argues that the messy diversity of language shouldn't be a source of conflict, but of collective wonder. This is a book about hope, a love letter to language. 'This is a wonderful book. A treasure trove of mind-expanding insights into language and humanity encased in a deliciously quirky, quixotic quest. I loved it. Warning: this will keep you reading.' - Ann Morgan, author of Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer

This edited collection investigates metal music’s enduring fascination with the medieval period from a variety of critical perspectives, exploring how metal musicians and fans use the medieval period as a fount for creativity and critique.

Heavy metal is now over 40 years old. It emerged at the tail end of the 1960s in the work of bands including Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and - most importantly - Black Sabbath. In the 1970s and early 1980s, heavy metal crystallised as a genre as bands such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden removed most of the blues influence on the genre, codifying a set of basic metal characteristics that endure to this day: distorted guitars, aggressive vocals, denim, leather and spikes. In broad terms, wherever it is found and however it is played, metal tends to be dominated by a distinctive commitment to 'transgressive' themes and musicality causing it to be frequently seen as controversial music. Controversies surrounding the alleged (and often documented) connection between heavy metal and, variously, sexual promiscuity, occultism and Satanism, subliminal messages, suicide and violence have all made heavy metal a target of moral panics over popular culture. Metal has variously embraced, rejected, played with and tried to ignore this controversy. At times, the controversy dies down and the previously transgressive becomes relatively harmless - as in the transformation of Ozzy Osbourne from public enemy to loveable dad. Still, metal remains irrevocably marked by its controversial, transgressive tendencies. Indeed, the various moral panics that metal has been subjected to are not only constitutive, at least in part, of metal scenes, but are encoded in metal's transgression itself. As with hiphop's "ghetto" roots, metal's history of extreme sonic, lyrical and visual messages continue to give it credibility with new generations of fans today. The aim of this anthology is to analyse the relationship between heavy metal and society within a global context. It provides a thorough investigation of how and why metal becomes controversial, how metal 'scenes' are formed and examines the relationship between metal and society, including how fans, musicians and the media create the culture of heavy metal. Reviews: "A powerful addition to the metal studies literature, this book is overflowing with insights into the cultural politics of heavy metal music. With lively writing, interdisciplinary approaches, and a global perspective, these chapters offer ideas that have broad implications for the study of popular music scenes and their dynamics, media scandals, the relationship between music and affect, and the role of culture in social life." -- Professor Harris M. BergerTexas A & M University "Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures grants a deeper understanding of how metal's transgressive qualities have come to define how the genre is viewed from both the outside and within...its interdisciplinary and global focus, along with its often enthusiastic and engaging viewpoints, present a fascinating portrait of how the controversy surrounding metal operates within wider society." -- Craig Hayes, PopMatters "The essays...are surprisingly sophisticated conceptually and theoretically, and they demonstrate what can be accomplished by turning high-culture terms and methods on a supposedly low-culture form like heavy metal. Anthropologists have profitably studied other popular culture/music practices, like the 'rave' phenomenon or psytrance events (see for example Graham St. John's Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality, and Psytrance, reviewed elsewhere in ARD), and I look forward to reading ethnographic studies of heavy metal concerts, performers, and scenes." -- Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database, 2013