Year: 1996
Author: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett
Genre: Monograph
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN: 0813328128, 978-0813328126
English language
Format: PDF
Interactive table of contents: No
Number of Pages: 189
Heavy metal is a violent, head-bashing music complete, in its live performances, with its own arena of rage and celebration, the mosh pit. It is a music in the red corner of society, loud, angry, and, to a well-tuned ear, practically intolerable. And yet, the art form radiates a message about American adolescents well worth examining and comprehending: Its devotees, primarily adolescent boys, are alienated from their world and angry about its future. Heavy metal speaks throbbingly the message of rage, loneliness, and cynicism.
In this sensitive book, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett synthesizes the stories and experiences of seventy male and thirty-eight female “metalheads” in a successful attempt to understand the often crippling results of a society and an image of the nuclear family steeped in conformity, self-denial, and obedience. The vacuum such an atmosphere creates in the individual can be temporarily obliterated by a heavy metal concert, which Arnett sees as a substitute manhood ritual. This conclusion is just one of the many striking hypotheses the author advances in this dynamic study of a music and its followers.Of the one hundred metalheads interviewed for this volume, ten have allowed themselves to be profiled in depth—the reader becomes fully acquainted with Jack, for instance, and with the multiple crosses decorating his body, his black rose tattoo, and his tumultuous family life; or with slim and well-groomed Jean dressed entirely in black, her favorite color, and wearing the temperament of withdrawal.This is a unique study filled with compassion for a disenfranchised subculture and the respect to want to understand it.
About the author:
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a researcher, professor of psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He also taught at the University of Missouri. In 2005 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research and the author of the book, "Growth: a twisting path from teenagers to twenty" (Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties), published in 2004 by the publishing house Oxford University Press. He is also known as the author of one of the most popular textbooks on adolescent development, Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach, (2009, Prentice Hall, 4th Edition). Arnett has two children, twins Miles and Paris, born in 1999. His wife, Lene Jensen, is also a professor at Clark University. Arnett periodically appears on television and in print media, including a cover story in the New York Times Sunday in August 2010.
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