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Heavy Metal: Whiteness, Masculinity and The Reparations Framework with Xaviera Simmons

Artist Xaviera Simmons talks with music critic Brandon Stosuy and musicians Melissa Auf der Maur (Hole, The Smashing Pumpkins), M. Lamar, and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy) on how the metal genre has created and sustained mythologies of whiteness and masculinity, while its audience is markedly more complex. The group will also reach towards thinking collectively on methods of teasing out the conditions of whiteness in the United States and how the genre, like most aspects of American Life, can make ways towards restorative justice and into a reparations framework. By disrupting conventional notions of musicality, heavy metal’s performative structures of reverence and resistance take on a renewed relevance today, with a cross-cultural generation of listeners and musicians engaging with the genre’s visibility as a site of active resistance.