Week Two: Beginning of "This Ain't The Summer of Love" by Waksman

                This week’s reading in “This Ain’t The Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk” was particularly interesting to me because it not only speaks to the metal scene, but the punk music scene as well. While I haven’t listened to much metal music in my time, I have gone through a few punk-loving phases when I was younger.  The novel introduces a topic that I had never really thought much on: “asserting a degree of interconnectedness between them that has often been acknowledged, especially by nonacademic observers, but rarely analyzed,” (Waksman, 7).

            At a surface level, it is easy to say that there is, in fact, conflict between metal and punk music genres, as there stands conflict between any sorts of music genre; there is always a fight to justify liking on type of music more than another. Yet, Waksman takes a look at the conflict between metal and punk by looking even deeper and analyzing what he names as the four distinct differences between the two: aesthetic value, popularity, masculinity/gender, and history (4-5). I must admit that I am, in fact, one of those people who never “analyzed” the two genres together or separately, so these differences between punk and metal struck me as rather interesting and surprising.  The most shocking between the two genres was the certainly the strong environment of hate the two types of music listeners had created for one another, claiming that their own favorite music was of far more talent and value than the other. I had never considered people hating one another based on the music that they listened to versus another before.

            The following chapters were a bit less interesting to me because it began the reading on bands that I am not an expert on nor were they ones that I had listened to before. This is where the videos for the class became helpful, because it gave me a perspective of what the punk or rock bands were like as they started in the seventies.  Each group was interesting to me in their own ways, but the one that stood out to me more than others was Alice Cooper’s video in which he sang “I love the dead,” over and over again. His general seventies rock get up was strange with his big, long hair and his dark eye make-up. Everything about the song was made to shock and awe the audience, and it was quite effective.  In this song, I certainly thought about Waksman’s reference to reviving the rock and roll scene.