Seeing Metal Music in Latin America and the Caribbean

For many music fans, metal was visual before it was aural. The album artwork that caught one’s attention, the t-shirt worn by a friend, or the film that introduced fans to new bands were important to metal culture even before one musical note was heard. Varas-Díaz and Nevárez Araújo explore the visual dimensions of metal music from the specific socio-historic, geographic, and political positionality of Latin America and the Caribbean. They position metal music’s visual dimensions as storytelling devices to understand and challenge the legacies of social oppression faced in these parts of the world, a process marked by coloniality. In this context, the visual register of metal music allows creators and consumers to engage in four distinct strategies (i.e., seeing, revealing, inverting, and appearing) as part of what the authors have termed extreme decolonial dialogues. The authors support their position by using a diverse lens to examine a plethora of essential aspects of the visual dimensions of metal music: album artwork, clothing, film, traditional and virtual sites, activist practices, and even their research endeavors, all of which are constituent of metal music’s visual culture. You will never see metal music in the same light again.