About
Background
Metal can be a difficult genre of music to articulate, especially as breakout hits from metal bands may not be representative of the band’s typical style or metal in general. This can lead new fans, those with a passing interest in the genre, or musicians interested in positioning the genre within the broader scope of musical history or trends without a firm understanding of what it is or how it developed.
Metal is also one of the genres most invested in an ongoing tradition of stage pageantry, high-concept band mythology, and highly-developed stage personae. Many significant bands remain committed to the heightened theatricality popularized by precursor subgenres in the 1960s musical counterculture. One of the more famous recent examples is the Finnish band, Lordi, who made tabloid headlines for refusing to appear out of costume at any point during their Eurovision tour. This can be confusing for new listeners and difficult for casual fans to understand, especially since a band’s level of commitment to costuming and stagecraft rarely correlates with a particular subgenre, the crossover appeal of their music, or a specific time period.
Many existing sites devoted to the metal genre are commercially oriented and are focused more on steering users toward following labels and bands, making purchases, or discovering sound-alike bands than on educating users or positioning the genre within any sort of context. These make it difficult for new fans to break out of their ‘bubble’ or gain deeper understanding of the art they’re consuming. The few that aren’t tend to be encyclopedic in nature and cater to fans looking for specific facts or doing deep dives into highly specific topics, with few tools for big-picture analysis or learning. Many new fans find these sites intimidating and unhelpful, as they presume a high level of familiarity with the subject and its subcultural norms.
Mission
The Metal Menagerie will serve to gather and preserve metal memorabilia for new fans of metal through the acquiring, digitizing, and maintaining of song clips, magazines, album covers, and band interviews across several decades and genres. Tags and collections will help build a context for the music presented and the evolution of the genre that is accessible to new fans while remaining useful to researchers.
DL Goals
- To introduce metal to new listeners through interactions with metal content across five decades (1980s - 2020s) and multiple popular subgenres.
- To curate resources originally from the decade the band started for authenticity.
- To design interactive features that allow content to be sorted by subgenre or by decade.
- To contextualize metal music in the greater cultural landscape and music history in particular.