Abstract

In this chapter, I wish to explore some conceptual issues regarding metal and community. Community is one of those words that is widely used and applied to a range of social contexts, but quite hard to pin down. Metal too is notoriously difficult to define. To discuss community in the context of metal music and its culture then will require some concessions to the multiple ways in which community can be conceived. I will first briefly discuss issues concerning the defining community, then move on to explore some aspects of community as understood in Aristotle’s writings and Immanuel Kant’ political philosophy as means of illuminating and clarifying problematic issues in speaking of metal and community together in one breath. To explore the nature, or even the very possibility of metal and community, one can approach it from a purely theoretical perspective, or one can simply satisfy oneself by going out and observing metal culture in practice at music events for example; or do empirical work on certain questions pertaining to the subject as is presented in other chapters in this volume. I would like to present something somewhere in between and look into the notion of how community might be understood in the context of metal, by delving into conceptual offerings from Aristotle’s and Kant’s ideas on community and using these to unpack three examples from the world of metal music and its culture.