When Canadian filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen made their first film, Headbanger: A Metalhead’s Journey, they set out to find the heart and soul of heavy metal music and provide a handy little primer for anyone who can’t tell their Judas Priest from their Iron Maiden. With their new film, Global Metal, Dunn and McFadyen move beyond the basics and out of the Western Hemisphere to educate themselves as well as their audience.
Even those of us who grew up listening to Duran Duran and Madonna in the ’80s know the basics of Metal 101: Priest, Maiden, Metallica, Slayer. However, even the most tried and true North American metalheads probably don’t have records by the likes of Tang Dynasty, X Japan or Orphaned Land in their collection. That’s because these bands (from China, Japan and Israel, respectively) come from international metal scenes that most westerners aren’t even aware of. After releasing Headbanger (which, incidentally, was a global success), Dunn and McFadyen received tips from metal fans everywhere, who told tales of vibrant metal scenes in Asia, Latin America and even the Middle East. Eager to find a meaty topic for a “sequel” to their first film, the two directors decided to start globe-trotting.
“We thought what would be interesting would be to look at heavy metal through globalization or to look at globalization though the lens of heavy metal to see how metal is spread around the world,” Dunn says. “It was something that we didn’t know too much about, but we had a hunch that there were a lot of metal scenes around the world, because we were getting emails from metal fans and we had been to film festivals around the world. We knew about Brazil and Japan, but all of the other places we went to in the film we really had to dig deep and find out what was going on.”
These places include Indonesia, Dubai, Israel and India — not spots you’d expect to see long-haired dudes wandering the streets in Slayer T-shirts. McFadyen and Dunn both say that the stop that surprised them the most was China. Not only does metal exist in the country — which is not exactly known for allowing its citizens personal self-expression — but China plays home to one of the East’s most popular and longest-running metal bands, Tang Dynasty.
“I think we were surprised to find metal in China, period,” McFadyen says. “We knew nothing about Tang Dynasty before we started doing research, and we didn’t know anything about Kaiser Kuo, this guy who grew up in the States and moved to China. He has a Chinese-American background and basically started Tang Dynasty. And that was one of the pleasures of making this film for us, that it was a real process of discovery.”
While Dunn and McFadyen were surprised to see how popular metal has become around the world, once they began to talk to global fans, the phenomenon made perfect sense. The kids in China, Indonesia and Iran (where the pair tried to film but were denied access) are doing the same thing that kids in every town across North America are doing: they’re rebelling. The thing is, bangers living under oppressive political regimes have a whole lot more to rebel against.
“We found that for young people in developing countries where there are political problems like government corruption, the fans identify more personally with the lyrics of metal than kids do in the West,” McFadyen says. “Bands like Slayer and Metallica have for a long time talked about war and violence and these kinds of things, but they were talking about it from an arm’s length. They weren’t experiencing these things. But when we went to countries like Indonesia or Israel, these are the realities that a lot of these young people are living in.”
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