Metal has, in the last ten years, become the focus of a considerable amount of scholarly interest. It was first researched as a subgenre of rock, but it soon outgrew this home and became a fully-fledged music genre of its own. Its subgenres multiplied and developed considerably and academic research on metal has increased alongside this growth. What started with academic books and articles on the metal phenomenon in its entirety soon could not cope with the scale of metal. The research, as with the metal genre, began to fragment, and researchers started focusing upon specific aspects of the songs, scene and/or culture. This thesis is positioned within this approach to metal studies as it was designed to provide information on a particular aspect of metal. It focuses upon the nature of the metalcore subgenre of metal. It has considered a variety of aspects of the metalcore scene and culture in an attempt to define what metalcore is; what constitutes it and how this is represented in the scene. It also evaluated the creation, maintenance and reproduction of the metalcore ingroup and its position in relation to the metal culture. A major aim of this thesis was to use research methods that have not previously been used in this field of study. The methodology has taken influences from Social Identity Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and a particular conceptualisation of register. It also incorporated influences from a research approach that had been used in many other pieces of metal research: ethnography. While this is not an ethnographic research project, aspects of it have been influenced by ethnography. Important elements of the methodology of the thesis include interviews, participant observation, the collection and analysis of magazines, books and documentaries relevant to metal and metalcore, and also the observation and analysis of many online spaces important to these music cultures. Specifically, a large part of the data collection and analysis process focused on the websites MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. The analysis evaluated how elements of capital associated with the metalcore and metal cultures can be emblematic of the registers of those cultures. It considered this in connection with the ingroup nature of these groups. it has demonstrated the different values these emblems can have as parts of the ingroup/culture/register, and how the same emblems function differently within different cultures to form distinct registers. This research has exposed these distinct registers, and made them accessible to those who are not part of these cultures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:560507 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Puckey, Nicola |
| Publisher | University of Southampton |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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