Deconstruction and reconstruction of identities: An interpretation on Chinese agriculture metal

Abstract

After the advent of Black Sabbath in the late 1960s, metal has existed for nearly 50 years. With the trend of cultural globalization from the West and opening-up of China in the late 1980s, metal emerged in the country in 1990 and then became a genre around 2000. The forming of Chinese metal has been experiencing a tension of acculturation, in which background agriculture metal came about as an exclusively Chinese metal phenomenon around 2010. Instead of being merely a spoof, it refers to deeper implications and reflects the issues of Chinese identity in a cosmopolitanism context. This article explores the origin and formation of the phenomenon of “agriculture metal” (农业重金属) and argues that the illogicalness, absurdity, and modern cynicism produced by agriculture metal can be understood as a deconstruction of traditional Chinese culture, mainstream popular culture, and Western metal orthodox, through which a series of unique features of Chinese metal are possibly constructed or reconstructed. This study may enrich contemporary metal studies by focusing on Chinese metal, which has usually been absent in the academia. More significantly, it emphasizes the tension between Chinese metal (localization) and Western metal (globalization), especially the former’s identity struggle in the global metal scene. Meanwhile, this study might be of more universal application, illustrating one of the possible results in the cosmopolitan process of culture in the contemporary world.

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