Chapter 4: Theories of Leisure and Music; and Music, Identity and Place

In these strange political times, it is sometimes difficult to defend research about heavy metal, or popular music, or indeed any form of leisure. On the alt-right, there is a suspicion that all research about whiteness, racism and gender starts out by being fundamentally flawed because people like me are just being biased and selective in our research. This is how InfoWars reported my 2015 research¹:

Nowhere in the chapter did I say that dressing as a Viking is racist. All I actually suggest is folk metal bands and their fans dressing as Vikings is problematic because of what the Vikings represent – as we will see later in this book. The chapter is itself a model of rhetorical subterfuge. My research is instantly aligned with every other piece of research that makes claims the journalist does not like. For the alt-right and their ilk, all research is suspect if it does not agree with their own worldview: the mistaken belief that Jews and foreigners and women and gays are conspiring to keep white Western men from their genetic inheritance (Mudde, 2017; Neiwert, 2017). These are people who believe that the idea that humans are causing climate change is a conspiracy made-up by scientists to weaken the West (Coady, 2019). These are people who reject any research that suggests race and gender are anything other than strong determinants of status and power (Coady, 2019). These are the people convinced that we need to take the “red-pill” to see the reality of the world, and the conspiracy that has denied them as heterosexual men the right to have sex with good-looking women, and to hit them if the women talk back (Neiwert, 2017). These are people who have become avid followers of the egregious Jordan Peterson because he tells them men are naturally strong and should rule the earth (Peterson, 2018), though Peterson’s work is itself more spiritual than scientific (Lian, 2019). They dismiss people like me as “Social Justice Warriors”, academics who are not proper academics because we research things that challenge their privileges (Lian, 2019). When InfoWars are calling me “esteemed” they are not being friendly – this is the language of sarcasm. For these people, anyone in academic who researches in the humanities is instantly rejected as false – even social sciences are held in great suspicion, especially sociology, with its Critical Race Theory and its radical feminism.