Rock of Pages

Rock of Pages identifies how the "dangerous" heavy metal of the 1980s can be analyzed through literary criticism, how heavy metal helps us understand what's dangerous about literature, and why this matters.

In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), led by "Washington Wives" Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, conducted a moral and legal crusade against the Filthy Fifteen, a list of songs they found to be objectionable from the likes of AC/DC, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, and Motley Crue. Each chapter of this book takes the PMRC's own criticisms of metal - that it promotes violence, drug use, sexuality, and the occult -and uses them as channels of literary and cultural analyses. Contrary to the critics, 1980s heavy metal was good. It was even smart. Heavy metal, it turns out, is part of the same literary tradition teens were supposed to be learning about in English class.

With a broad, fun approach, Jesse Kavadlo explains how heavy metal may have gotten its name from The Heavy Metal Kid, a character in William Burroughs's 1961 novel The Soft Machine. How Metallica thought it was adapting the film version of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but may have been channeling Sigmund Freud. How heavy metal, just maybe, ended the Cold War but helped elect, of all people, Tipper Gore's husband Al as Vice President. And much more. Rock of Pages explores histories of literature, art, culture, and music from which '80s heavy metal was, and still is, excluded.