I have chosen to explore the “Collection of Heavy Metal Music Materials”, a large collection of many types of media, all which give insight into the Heavy Metal Music world during the years of 1964 – 2016. The archive includes books, photographs, magazines, memorabilia, and many more media types.
The different sources are grouped into 6 different series based on their medium. The first series contains books and DVD’s, most of which are biographies or autobiographies. Through the use of the first hand accounts of artists we would be able to formulate a pretty accurate idea of the overall experience of musicians in this genre, as well as compare individual stories. Because the collection ranges about 50 years, it would also be possible to look at different years and the potential changes that happened over time. For example, we could look at, Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper, an autobiography written in 1976 and compare his story, to Ozzy Osbourne’s experience as told in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, written in 2009. Along with musician’s and their account’s, there are also quite a few pieces that provide a different perspective, that of Heavy Metal enthusiasts. A two page document was provided that includes a detailed explanation of a super fan’s assembly of a vest with patches from his favorite bands, which conveyed a deep appreciation for Heavy Metal and the culture associated with it.
The autobiographies and personal statements I discussed above are just a few examples of sources provided that would help to generate an understanding of the Heavy Metal world. Although we could create a fairly extensive narrative, we would not be able to gather a complete understanding of the culture. With autobiographies it is important you remember it is written in order to tell a personal story, so they will inevitably have an underlying bias. This discourages readers to place their entire faith in the source because stories could be exaggerated or dramatized.
In order to present a collection that would tell the true and entire story, I think it would be helpful if they included newspaper articles from the time period. Because newspapers are relatively unbiased, I think it would be beneficial to have an idea of what was written about Heavy Metal and it’s musician’s, or following, and presented to the general public. This could potentially help with the issue of creating a narrative based solely on the accounts of people inside the industry and those closely associated with it.
Hello,
I am not a huge heavy metal person but I chose to read this to see what kind of information I could get out of it. I think you did a great job breaking it down and finding the information that was missing. I like how detailed you are about it as well.
It’s interesting that you mentioned that newspaper articles would be good supplements to this collection. I agree that autobiographies can be biased, leading to an inaccurate representation of heavy metal during the time period, but I also think that autobiographies offer a good perspective on the music scene as well. Newspaper articles can sometimes be overtly general and capture only the bigger picture. Overall, thanks for covering this collection! I wasn’t able to look through it myself and you did a good job of describing it.