A Meadow Full of Ants. A Subcultural Field Approach to the Italian Black Metal Scene

Black metal is an extreme metal subgenre that has existed in Italy since the late 1980s. Since then, several attempts to construct a scene were made, without success. Therefore, because of its fragility and ephemerality, it represents a unicum in the wider metal scene. In this contribution, we aim to look at the Italian scene, combining Straw’s theoretical perspective and conceptual tools of Bourdieu’s field analysis, thus conceiving it as a subcultural field where musical practices are interpenetrated with aesthetic and social practices. Combining documentary analysis of bands, labels, and bottom-up support activities, with in-depth interviews to privileged witnesses, our purpose is to understand if the Italian Black Metal scene has the criteria spotted in the sociological literature of music scenes and, if so, how this concept fits the characterization of this national and musical specificity.