ABSTRACT
American thrash metal was forged in the early 1980s in California, primarily by bands located in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Thus chapter aims to show that thrash metal’s hybrid aesthetic can be heard as an articulation of the San Francisco Bay Area’s history of racial and ethnic diversity, cultural openness, and artistic experimentation, which had long characterized the city’s rock musicians. In the 1990s, debates surrounding the theorization of cosmopolitanism circulated within anthropology and postcolonial studies. Werbner’s question unveils the contradictory sense of cosmopolitanism within contemporary globalization. The popular music scene throughout the early 1980s in San Francisco and California as a whole was much wider than thrash metal, which remained largely an underground phenomenon until Metallica managed to break into mainstream rock consciousness.
