To Örebro University

With the trend of globalization and opening-up of China in the late 1980s, metal music emerged in China in the late 90s and then became a genre around 2000. As a music genre spread from the West, metal music has been constantly evolving in the process of both localization and globalization in the Chinese context, trying to position itself as “Chinese metal”.

Based on this background, this research employs some cases such as album covers, stage performance, MV, lyrics, logos and dress of several Chinese metal bands mainly from Northern China, to explore how these musicians and their praxis position themselves in the Chinese context by discourse analysis. To analyze these cases as representatives of Chinese metal music, this research discovers Chinese metal’s self-positioning – inheritance, elitism, marginality, etc. – are closely related to Chinese historical heritage and sociocultural system, as well as subtly extending and connecting to the global metal spectacle and Western orthodox.

Generally, this research discusses Chinese metal’s self-position by combining local and global intervention, and explains how and why Chinese metal position itself. On this basis, this research hopes to fill in the ethnographic study of Chinese metal, and provides clues to the theoretical and empirical development of global metal scene.