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PIERRE HECKER, Turkish Metal: Music, Meaning, and Morality in a Muslim Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), Pp. 230. £55.00 cloth
This monograph, derived from a PhD dissertation completed in 2009 at the Department of Oriental Studies at Leipzig University, is a most welcome study of a genre of popular music in Turkey that has received almost no previous academic attention. Despite the relatively small size of the milieu of musicians and fans, heavy metal and hard rock music in Turkey have at various moments since the early 1990s had a high public profile in Turkey due to the moral panics the Turkish media created around sensationalized allegations related to Satanism and (alleged) connections between metal music and several high-profile murder and teenage suicide cases. The book is especially relevant and important for its carefully documented, critical appraisal of these moral panics and for its respectful presentation of the perspectives of the young people who find metal music and the associated fashion and lifestyle to be meaningful resources in their everyday imaginations and performances of their identities in contemporary urban Turkey. The study is based on extensive fieldwork (primarily in Istanbul) during the period 2002-2009, including participant observation and some 70 formal ethnographic interviews (and several dozen less formal conversational interviews) with musicians, fans ("metalheads"), and journalists, as well as extensive archival and documentary research covering both mainstream media and fan-produced documents such as photocopied fanzines and flyers. This careful documentation gives the author a deep well of empirical material to draw on, and is the primary strength of the book.
Hecker's study can be comfortably placed within the realm of cultural sociology based on qualitative research methods, with relevance to media studies as well. It is informed by various pertinent theoretical perspectives, but explicit theoretical discussions is kept to a minimum in favor of presenting the empirical material. Analysis throughout the book is based on close textual readings of the many excerpts from interview transcripts in which Turkish metal musicians and fans reflect on their participation in metal and its meaning in their lives, mainstream media stories and editorials, and the fan-produced texts. While the author is a musician, who played metal in Germany during his youth, this is not a specifically musicological study, as there...