f power and control that is built up through vocal, guitar power chords, distortion, and sheer volume of drums. Also visually, metal musicians typically appear as males, leaping about the stage, leather clothing punctuating their performances with phallic thrusts of guitars and microphone stands. In Western Society, for much of its history metal has been appreciated and supported primarily by a male teenage audience. This is a group lacking in social, physical and economical power but besieged by cultural messages promoting such forms of power, insisting on them as masculinity. The purpose of a genre is to reproduce a particular ideology, and the aim of heavy metal until mid 1980s was for young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity. However these representations can never be definitive and they are always open to transformation and changing figures. Since soci
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