community, or religion. Most of their lives were characterized by radical
individualism, taken to such an extreme that they had little sense of oblig-
ation or attachment to others. Many of them were proud of this, and they
jealously asserted their self-sufficiency and their right to do whatever
they pleased as long as it did not directly harm anyone else. At the same
time, however, it was clear that many of them were angry or lonely much
of the time. Soon the focus of my interest had changed from the effects of
heavy metal music on adolescents to what their love for the music reflects
about their alienation and, more generally, about adolescent alienation in
the United States. This alienation became the central topic of the book.

The metalheads in the study were 13-25 years old ² (average age 17.6 for
the boys, 18.4 for the girls). There were 31 questions in the interview,
shown in the Appendix. I also had them fill out several questionnaires.
Once the information on the metalheads was collected, I compared their
responses on the interviews and questionnaires to the responses of 118
adolescent boys who preferred other kinds of music. I recruited most of
the boys (94 of them) for this comparison group of adolescents through
classrooms in a local high school, but I also included 24 male students
from college classes of mine in order to make the age range of the com-
parison group similar to the age range for the metalheads. ³ I also col-
lected questionnaire data from 199 girls who were not heavy metal fans
for comparison with the female metalheads. Chapter 8 describes the re-
sults of the interviews with the girls.

I have avoided rehashing the public debate over heavy metal. Readers
interested in that debate can find accounts in books by Deanna Weinstein
( 1991) and Robert Walser ( 1993). Also, though I present a song analysis in
Chapter 3, a more detailed analysis of the musical properties of particular
heavy metal songs can be found in Walser's book. My primary interest is
not the music but the fans: what the music means to them and what it re-
flects about their lives.

The book is based on my interviews with the metalheads, along with
many other informal conversations I have had with metalheads, as well
as my experiences in attending heavy metal concerts and listening to
heavy metal cassettes. However, this book is about not only the heavy
metal subculture but adolescence in contemporary America, using the
voices of the metalheads to illustrate various points. Throughout the book
I use information from national studies and national statistics to discuss
various characteristics of American youth, then use the material from my
interviews with the metalheads to bring these other studies and statistics
to life. This is not to say that metalheads are no different from adolescents
who prefer other types of music. As comparisons throughout the book
will show, in some respects they are quite different. But some of the most
disturbing trends among American adolescents -- the alienation, the cyni-

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