Heavy Metal Rock N Roll Poetry

Heavy Metal: Rock 'N' Roll Poetry

Heavy Metal

Over 10,000 words of poetry inspired by heavy metal and rock 'n' roll music and presented as lyrics. This collection of rock 'n' roll themed poetry touches on subject matter that has fueled many a classic rock or metal song. Topics such as politics, the drinking and drugging lifestyle, suicide, the apocalypse, lost love, anger and many more themes and narratives fill this book of poetry. We all have music inside our heads and we are all capable of being poets. This book is many years in the making and captures everything that is best about the scene that I grew up in - the late 80's and early 90's metal scene.

Poetry in English and Metal Music

Many metal songs incorporate poetry into their lyrics using a broad array of techniques, both textual and musical. This book develops a novel adaptation, appropriation, and quotation taxonomy that both expands our knowledge of how poetry is used in metal music and is useful for scholars across adaptation studies broadly. The text follows both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. It identifies 384 metal songs by 224 bands with intertextual ties to 146 poems written by fifty-one different poets, with a special focus on Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton's Paradise Lost and the work of WWI's War Poets. This analysis of transformational mechanisms allows poetry to find an afterlife in the form of metal songs and sheds light on both the adaptation and appropriation process and on the semantic shifts occasioned by the recontextualisation of the poems into the metal music culture. Some musicians reuse – and sometimes amplify – old verses related to politics and religion in our present times; others engage in criticism or simple contradiction. In some cases, the bands turn the abstract feelings evoked by the poems into concrete personal experiences. The most adventurous recraft the original verses by changing the point of view of either the poetic voice or the addressed actors, altering the vocaliser of the narrative or the gender of the protagonists. These mechanisms help metal musicians make the poems their own and adjust them to their artistic needs so that the resulting product is consistent with the expectations of the metal music culture.