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Opeth not metal: making sense of the symbolic boundary work in the leisure spaces of musicians and fans

2018; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s41978-018-00024-w

2520-8691

Karl Spracklen,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

The Swedish band Opeth have had a long, sustained and successful career in the heavy metal industry. Their early albums were well-received as important contributions to melodic death metal, but the band struggled to survive. A collaboration with producer Steven Wilson on Blackwater Park (2001) gave the band an album that allowed them to build a higher profile in the metal scene, which led to signing to Roadrunner Records and becoming festival regulars. In recent years, however, lead singer and songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt has abandoned death-metal growls and metal riffs for songs that are inspired by his record collection: seventies rock and prog. In this paper, I will explore the band's justification of their evolution into a progressive rock band through on-line interviews and my own analysis, before showing how metal fans on-line have reacted strongly (and negatively) to this evolution. In the final parts of the paper, I will analyse both the motivations of the band and the fans, which revolves around reactions to the hegemonic status of the cultural industries in modernity, and what Bauman identifies as the crisis of liquid modernity. For the band. I will argue that their search for an authentic musical identity based on vinyl nostalgia is an expression of contempt for the instrumental rationality and in-authenticity of modern metal. For the fans, I will argue their anger is the anger of Bauman's flawed consumers in leisure spaces.