ABSTRACT
Despite ongoing contestation by both fans and musicians as to what constitutes the genre and which acts should be included under its banner, heavy metal and its close derivatives have been a vibrant, successful and influential musical genre for over thirty years. This chapter partially subverts the vagaries of fashion and 'coolness' by being a consistently successful commercial genre. This geographical determinant is seen as an important element by many critics for Robert Walser 'that heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during a period of American deindustrialization'. The nature of the music, its lyrical subject matter, and its core audience all contributed to a widespread antipathy towards metal, both within the industry itself and in ‘polite society’ as a whole.
