Attitude, identity and social struggle: a corpus-based appraisal analysis of Heavy Metal music lyrics

Heavy Metal as a music subculture is often considered a reference to ‘violence’ ‘sex’ ‘the occult’ ‘drug abuse’ and ‘Satanism’; however, this assumption is just taken for granted by the general public without doubts. Though a steady increase of literatures from diverse research perspectives have been dedicated to study the Metal scene, few attempt to testify whether the accusation is valid and based on truth. It is this paper’s aim, by systematically scrutinising
attitudes negotiated in a corpus of Heavy Metal lyrics, to identify the characteristics of ‘Heavy Metal identity’ in the lyrical sphere and to study how the identity is constructed to resist sociocultural hegemony as a counter-discourse. This paper applies the Appraisal System to evaluate affect, judgement and appreciation expressed in lyrics, and then studies how such attitudes contribute to construct the Heavy Metal identity. It is found that, with the downsampling of lyrics corpus and the appraisal analysis of 1,876 selected concordances, the lyrics by large represent a feeling of ‘insecurity’ ‘sadness’ and ‘desire’. We can see that the bands value their ‘capability’ but despise others’ lack of morals such as hypocrisy; they find the world ‘unpleasant’, yet they still have faith in objects which have a value and can be used to struggle against oppression. Finally, Critical Discourse Analysis of the identity struggle and
the dialectic relationship with social practices would shed light on the difficulty for Heavy Metal to get rid of such oppressions.