Overview

Peripheral Linguistic Brutality is a sociolinguistic investigation into the production of ""metalness"" through language in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on the ways local music scenes adopt, reject, and modify linguistic ideologies, Jess Kruk and Wesley Robertson (hosts of the podcast Lingua Brutallica) examine how translocal participation in metal settings shapes how and why specific language forms are used to construct ""metal language."" Although much research has been done on language flows and use in global subcultures, their volume intervenes in two key ways. First, most prior work has focused on hip-hop, which unlike metal has an established ""origin"" dialect, namely AAVE (African American Vernacular English), linked to concepts of authenticity in the scene. Secondly, writing on global language flows has centered around what happens when a language, mainly English, enters a new space or context—not on how individuals employ imported forms and reimagine already extant linguistic resources as indexes, or markers, of new identities. Through interviews with practicing metal lyricists from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan, Peripheral Linguistic Brutality therefore fills gaps in the knowledge of language’s role in translocal subcultures. Specifically, it sheds new light on how global subcultures spawn new local beliefs about the meaning and purpose of language forms, the sociolinguistic conflicts that can arise and influence language use when a scene enters a new locale, and metal itself as a global practice.

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Reviews

Kruk and Robertson have written a wonderfully approachable and empirically informed sociolinguistic book about metal music across Asia Pacific. Their work makes valuable contributions to both sociolinguistic scholarship and the study of metal, and its accessible writing style and clear explanations make it a solid introduction to either subject.--Lydia Catedral, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Peripheral Linguistic Brutality is thorough-going and highly original. Based on detailed ethnographic interviews and close readings of metal lyrics and textual material, it offers a finely tuned engagement with metal music studies that is important not only for its presentation of new research on extreme metal cultural production--especially discursive production--but also for (super!)diversifying the relatively homogeneous focus in metal music studies on Western spaces.--Rosemary Overell, University of Otago

Author Information

Wesley C. Robertson is a senior lecturer in Japanese studies and discipline chair of Languages & Cultures in Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature. Jess Kruk is a lecturer in linguistics and Indonesian studies at the University of Western Australia.

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