Rock of Pages identifies how the "dangerous" heavy metal of the 1980s can be analyzed through literary criticism, how heavy metal helps us understand what''s dangerous about literature, and why this matters. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), led by "Washington Wives" Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, conducted a moral and legal crusade against the Filthy Fifteen, a list of songs they found to be objectionable from the likes of AC/DC, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, and Motley Crue. Each chapter of this book takes the PMRC''s own criticisms of metal - that it promotes violence, drug use, sexuality, and the occult -and uses them as channels of literary and cultural analyses. Contrary to the critics, 1980s heavy metal was good . It was even smart . Heavy metal, it turns out, is part of the same literary tradition teens were supposed to be learning about in English class. With a broad, fun approach, Jesse Kavadlo explains how heavy metal may have gotten its name from The Heavy Metal Kid, a character in William Burroughs''s 1961 novel The Soft Machine . How Metallica thought it was adapting the film version of Ken Kesey''s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo''s Nest but may have been channeling Sigmund Freud. How heavy metal, just maybe, ended the Cold War but helped elect, of all people, Tipper Gore''s husband Al as Vice President. And much more. Rock of Pages explores histories of literature, art, culture, and music from which ''80s heavy metal was, and still is, excluded.

Autorentext
Jesse Kavadlo is Professor of English and Humanities at Maryville University of St. Louis, USA, where he teaches a variety of classes about literature and culture. He has published four books, over thirty academic articles and book chapters, and contributes to the online magazine PopMatters. Jesse is also the lead guitarist in Top Gunz: The St. Louis '80's Party Rock Experience, playing under the name Dr. NoiZe.

Klappentext

Rock of Pages provides contexts and close readings of 1980s heavy metal with forty years of hindsight, drawing upon analytical frameworks usually associated with literature and literary studies.

Based on decades of work as a professor of literature and as a musician, Jesse Kavadlo analyzes the ways in which 1980s heavy metal aligns with and develops many of the themes prevalent in the canon of literature. In doing so, the book examines some of the contexts of 1980s heavy metal, including Cold War, the rise of MTV, and the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and subsequent congressional hearings.

Rock of Pages takes the PMRC's own objections to heavy metal and uses them as titles and topics to analyze the intersections between heavy metal and literature: representations of violence, but the connected concerns about justice; images of substance abuse, and the interrelated issues of obsession, madness, suicidal ideation; sex and love, with, concomitantly, representations of women and relationships between men and women; and the references to the occult, with the depictions of Satan, the afterlife, and morality on earth itself. In doing so, the book suggests that 1980s heavy metal displayed more artistry and intelligence than people imagine, but that literature is rebellious and subversive as well.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Preface: My Double Life
Introduction: Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?
Chapter 1: Nothing. But: A Good Time? Heavy Metal, the Cold War, and the Long 1980s
Chapter 2: V for Violence
Chapter 3: D/A for Drugs and Alcohol
Chapter 4: X for Sexually Explicit
Chapter 5: O for Occult
An Ode to Guitar Solos
Conclusion: Let Me Get It Back
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Selected Discography