ABSTRACT

Ketil Thorgersen and Thomas von Wachenfeldt explore the complex relations between music and social ordering that Kertz-Welzel raises, through a musical culture often attributed with the power to lead young people astray: black metal. They explore the role of hate in socialising musicians into the genre and gaining membership into the black metal milieu, as part of a broader political economy that invests in meaning and value construction. Locating contemporary school education within Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, the authors argue that school music education might better attend to the fear and uncertainty that often accompanies diversity through engaging with hate as catharsis, and as an invitation to the sublime.