Headbanging as a Legacy of Black Dance

Abstract Headbanging, metal’s distinctive dance practice, emerged within the highly racialized blues-rock scene of the late 1960s, just like the genre’s music and ideology. Many overt characteristics and underlying dynamics of headbanging show continuity with characteristics reported by scholarship on Black dance. Specifically, headbanging appears to have emerged from White audiences’ understanding of how one should move to Black music, and developed as an exaggeration of an earlier practice of nodding to blues and rock’n’roll. The similarities between headbanging, nodding, and Black American vernacular dance are interpreted through Jane C. Desmond’s dance-focused theories of appropriation and transformation. Metal’s history is often described as a process of gradually leaving the blues behind, but headbanging is a legacy of blues and Blackness that remains central to the metal genre.