This edited collection is an interdisciplinary study of heavy metal culture in Argentina between 1983 and 2002. Contributors address the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and intertexts, allowing readers to rethink the place of national heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics, after the end of the dictatorship.

An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.  

Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.

This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.

The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.

Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.

The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

Preface to the Second Edition vii

Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA)

Foreword ix

Emiliano Scaricaciottoli

Translator’s Note xiii

Juan Manuel López Baio

Introduction: A Window into Heavy Metal Scholarship in the Global South xv

Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araújo, and Emiliano Scaricaciottoli

1. Heavy Metal as a Subculture in Argentina: Identity and Resistance 2

Gustavo Torreiro

2. Genre Violence: Argentinean Heavy Metal in the Music Market 16

Luciano Scarrone

3. Heavenly Hosts and Other Demons: Reflections Concerning a

Difficult and Transversal Relationship in the History of Our Heavy Music 28

Gito Minore

4. Walkabout, Just Walking about for the Sake of Walking: The Journey

as an Ethos in the Poetics of Ricardo Iorio 46

Manuel Bernal and Diego Caballero

5. Passion and Ethics: A Space for Voice and Tradition in Iorio’s Lyrics 58

Juan Ignacio Pisano

6. The Reason Behind My Writing: Another Day of Being 72

Ezequiel Alasia

7. Piedra Libre: Referential Tensions in Argentinean Heavy Metal

Lyrics Since the Political Crisis of 2001/2002 84

Emiliano Scaricaciottoli

Notes on Contributors 100