BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Unknown Read Free Book Online

suffering the delayed effects of some childhood head injury and classmates accused me of betraying my blackness or flirting with satanism. Instead of trying to change people’s minds, I settled for screwing with them. My friends and I wore our metalhead status like badges of honor: We all felt like outsiders for one reason or another, and it was no coincidence that we were all attracted to music that made difference into a source of pride.
    It’s this sense of self-imposed alienation from “normal” society that’s a big part of metal’s appeal. In her 1991 examination of the genre, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology , Deena Weinstein aptly calls heavy-metal fans “proud pariahs.” Metal has never been particularly trendy, even in its heyday, but that outsider element adds much to the music’s appeal. “Some people get into music that’s not really popular, like heavy metal, to make themselves distinct from their peers,” Weinstein told me during a phone interview. “It makes sense that you’d be attracted to it. Teenagers use music to distance themselves from their parents, their upbringing.”
    There’s also the sense of camaraderie and acceptance that is unique to metal fans (well, and Deadheads): a loyalty that borders on obsession. Metalheads are not casual fans. We memorize every word to every song of every album by our favorite bands, we wear tour T-shirts until they literally fall apart, we see our heroes in concert dozens of times, we spend hundreds of dollars on bootlegs and import LPs even if we don’t have a turntable to play them on.
    But though I was drawn to the outsider appeal of the music in the first place, it was difficult for me to forget my double outsider status at concerts, where guys would gawk and point at me and my metalhead clique as if we were Martians instead of black girls, and we could count the number of black faces on one hand. But once the lights went down and the band came onstage, we were all headbanging and moshing and howling the words to the songs. The music took over, and we could all share that universal bond of loving it, if only for a few hours.
    Of course, as in all of rock’s subgenres, female metal fans have had to walk that fine line between sighing teen-dream fandom and balls-to-the-wall solidarity. A lot of women embrace and identify with the music and musicians the same way male fans do, while also grafting very girly wants
and desires onto metal’s aggressive vibes. We want to be tough and emulate our heroes and start our own bands—but, yeah, we also fantasize about hanging out with the guys, dating them, fucking them.
    And so female fans found ways to connect with each other: as pen pals, chatting in the women’s restrooms during concerts, at record stores, wherever we could. We even had our own magazine, the aforementioned Metal Edge, the late-’80s and early-’90s incarnation of which was a strange amalgam of Kerrang! and Tiger Beat. Glossy pinups and wall-size foldouts sat next to ads for instructional videos like How to Play Guitar like Yngwie Malmsteen and classifieds from aspiring musicians trying to start bands. Metal Edge never explicitly billed itself as a metal magazine for teen girls, but Gerri Miller, the magazine’s longtime editor in chief, had an uncanny knack for appealing to the desires of female metalheads. One of my favorite sections was “When They Were Young,” a three-page spread of B-level pop-metal bands’ goofy baby photos and high-school yearbook pictures. (“That’s how you knew that Metal Edge was really for girls,” recalls my friend Christina. “No boy cares about what the guys from Slaughter looked like as babies.”)
    Was Metal Edge exploiting our conflicting desires? Maybe. But the magazine was one of the few forums where we female fans could simultaneously indulge our lustful groupie desires and our dreams of being in the band without losing our hard-core credibility.
    By the time I entered college, I’d