The collection of heavy metal music material is a collection of published works, archival material, and ephemera related to heavy metal music and fan culture. It is written in English and located in UCLA SRLF. I will be able to tell narratives on the production of heavy metal music from 1960s through the present. I can tell stories on archived musicians producing metal music, also subgenres such as glam metal and death metal. Geographically, narratives will also include relevant events and performances mainly in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, especially in Los Angeles around the Sunset Strip area of West Hollywood, where was home to a vibrant heavy metal scene particularly in the 1980s. Moreover, the narratives will also contain stories on heavy metal fans’ activities.
If my narratives are completely based on this database, I won’t be telling stories about heavy metal musicians who didn’t publish any work or recordings. I will also lack the information to tell stories on the heavy metal scene outside of California, since the database mainly include collections of data that fall within such geographical boundary. The sources were mostly acquired by purchasing in bookstores, so my narratives will not include sources that are not contained in bookstores, such as personal letters and newspaper articles. I also won’t be telling stories in genres other than heavy metal.
In order to fill in the gaps of those potential missing narratives, I need to collect additional data and archives according to what I am interested in creating a narrative on. To tell stories about musicians who didn’t officially publish any work, I will need to collect data that are not from a book store, such as stories from interviewing people who were actively involved as a heavy metal fan during the target time frame. To cover regions other than California, I will need to look for heavy metal databases focusing on other parts of the country or the world.
I found it interesting that in the types of documentation you listed that were present in the archival collection, none of them were audio samples of music. I think it would be important to capture the popular songs of the time period, and even songs that were just emerging that would later become popular. If you’re going to have an archive about music, why doesn’t it have music in it? I personally find it very interesting to know where genres and sub-genres of music came from and what other cultural or musical movements they were influenced by, which is something I believe this collection would lack.