ABSTRACT
Back when I was studying the death metal community-where celebratory images of slaughter, satanism, and sexism abound-I was part of the “in crowd”: I got the theater of it all-the wink behind the grimace; the outlandish, over-the-top, in-your-face goofi ness; the deliberate mockery of self and society.1 To me, it was fun. It was fantasy. And I could laugh along with the folks who thought efforts at censorship and restrictionlike trying to prevent kids from accessing the next Cannibal Corpse album-were a total joke. Such eff orts, I thought, must be emanating from a reactionary fear of freedom, of exploration, of creative play with the dirty, sexy, beastly things that go bump in the night. Sure, a few of the voices against death metal came from progressives worried about a world that would force-feed their children constant sex and violence. I could sympathize with them, but I thought they were fundamentally misguided. Why didn’t they get it? It was just fantasy.
