Turkish Metal is part of a recent boom in studies of heavy and extreme metal. These once-marginalised genres in popular music studies now enjoy a growing scholarly literature. Pierre Hecker's monograph contributes to an emerging body of research on metal music outside the Anglophone world, including in Muslim contexts (e.g. LeVine Reference LeVine2008, Reference LeVine2009). Hecker, a cultural ‘insider’ to the metal scene, conducted 70 interviews with key figures in the Turkish metal scene and engaged in participant observation in Istanbul between 2002 and 2009. The Turkish metal scene offers a fascinating location for this kind of fieldwork. From the coup d'état of 1980 through to the loosening of cultural repressions in the 1990s and up to the ongoing tensions created by state secularism in a Muslim majority society, Turkey is an especially interesting location for analysing music's role in identity construction and resistance. The book's conclusions – that Turkish metal is subversive, empowering and emancipating for participants – are apt, even if they are somewhat predictable.

Following a literature review and discussion of methods in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 offers an engaging history of the Turkish metal scene. Unlike in the Anglophone world, where the primary audience for metal is frequently understood as working class (e.g. Walser Reference Walser1993; Weinstein Reference Weinstein2000), the Turkish scene is largely middle class, populated by students from Istanbul's liberal schools and universities. Hecker describes how the political and cultural repression following the coup d'état were instrumental to the development of Turkish metal: because access to the musical imports of the international heavy metal scene was so heavily restricted, Turkish metalheads made their own music and culture. Vivid interview data highlight the ways in which participants utilised the informal networks of the global metal underground (fanzines, tape trading, bootleg recordings, independent radio, independent labels and distros, live shows at small venues), as well as how metal culture and iconography were disseminated via a metal-themed comic strip in a popular local satirical magazine Gıgır (later Hıbır).

Chapters 3 and 4 examine a series of moral panics involving metal music and culture that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter 3 focuses on several teen suicides and the murder of a young Istanbul woman that were each attributed to a combination of heavy metal culture and Satanism. Although the majority of the news reports focus primarily on the ‘threat’ of Satanism, Hecker analyses the ways in which this motivated police crackdowns on the local metal scene and on metal fans (via intimidation, arrests, and raids confiscating metal music and magazines). Chapter 4 is based on interviews with two newspaper journalists involved in the production of news at the time, the views of dozens of metalheads who experienced the moral panics, and a series of metal fanzines that responded to the controversies.

Hecker's analysis of the moral panics follows the model of Goode and Ben Yehuda (Reference Goode and Ben-Yehuda1994), mapping the controversy onto the five core elements of concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility, and highlighting the religious, sexual, political, moral and social subversiveness of the Turkish metal scene. While it is clear that Turkish metal does indeed resist conservative Turkish morality as well as offering a barometer of the cultural and religious tensions in the country, the discussion of moral panic in these chapters would have benefited from greater nuance. For example, Hecker engages only minimally with the ‘productive’ dimensions of moral panic – that is, the ways in which panics serve to foster cohesion and community, and to legitimise music cultures as ‘rebellious’ and ‘political’. Thornton's (Reference Thornton1995) important work in this area is not cited, nor is any more recent work on moral panic. This material would have helped to develop a more complete picture of the role of metal controversies in building – not simply undermining – underground music scenes.

Chapter 5 discusses the subgenre of black metal to examine the significance of the style's deployment of anti-Christian symbols in a majority Muslim society. (The conclusion is that its iconography is used to conform to established genre conventions and not to signify any particular religious commitments.) Chapter 6 focuses on gender. Given that the book's cover photo is of the mixed-gender, female-fronted metal band Postmortem, and given that Hecker argues that metal is a means of emancipation for Turkish women (because they can violate dominant conceptions of female morality by drinking alcohol, smoking and hanging out at rock bars late at night), this chapter promised to offer interesting insights into the different ways of ‘being metal’ (and being a woman) in the Turkish metal scene. Unfortunately, however, women's voices are problematically marginalised in this discussion. Data in this chapter are based predominantly on interviews with men and focus primarily on men's experiences (including men's views on women in the metal scene); only a few pages of the chapter are devoted to women's experiences and to the voices of female metalheads. Problematically, this means that the author tends to replicate the very excription of women that he criticises elsewhere in the chapter.

The final chapter reiterates the ways in which metal is perceived as a threat to public order and morality in Turkish society, but focuses on the more ‘everyday’ aspects of being a metalhead, including its effects on listeners' experiences of work, family, community and religion. This chapter offers an important counterpoint that is largely missing from the earlier chapters, as it explores how the transgressive relates to the mundane, and how moments of moral panic contrast with the more ordinary ways in which metal music and culture are experienced. Had this been more fully integrated into the preceding analyses, it would have helped address some of the limitations of the ‘moral panic’ reading as discussed above, in much the same way as Kahn-Harris's (Reference Kahn-Harris2007) dual examination of the transgressive and the mundane assists his analysis of extreme metal scenes in London, Sweden and Israel.

But while parts of its analysis would have benefited from greater subtlety and nuance, Turkish Metal nonetheless makes an important contribution to metal studies and, in particular, to understandings of music's adaptations to local circumstances. Turkish metal is simultaneously unique and similar to metal everywhere else in the world, helping us to better understand relationships between the local and the global in underground music scenes.