Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Appropriating the extreme: Interculturality and the decolonization of the image in extreme metal in México and Colombia

2020; Intellect; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/mms_00036_1

2052-4005

José Omar González Hernández,

Public Spaces through Art

In this short article, I engage in a musical iconographic analysis of album covers from extreme metal bands, specifically those belonging to the subgenres of death metal and grindcore, in both México and Colombia. Both countries have gone through socio-historical processes marked by violence, which, by extension, have resulted in the popularization of consumer media products based on said violence (e.g. war against drug traffickers). My analysis rests on a transhistorical outline of the constant forms of domination that both countries have suffered since the conquest of the American continent and the ways in which Latin American extreme metal represents these experiences through the artwork of their albums, thus engaging in a process of decolonization of the imaginary through the reappropriation of imagery traditionally used in extreme metal.