A Methodological Premise

This chapter is part of a broader research project I have been conducting for several years on the modalities in which popular (‘pop’) culture narrates legal phenomenons, and international law in particular. I begin by examining the ways in which international law is narrated in comic books.

During the last phase of the latter investigation, I somehow realised that some of these modalities show peculiarities with regard to some extreme musical genres, which I know as a listener and a fan: I therefore switched to investigating the way international law issues are used in heavy metal music, trying in the meantime to understand if there were any links with the subject of my previous attention, comics.

So, this chapter, after preliminarily highlighting some themes that bring comics and general pop music together (and this in order to help the reader to walk the same thread I have been following), will highlight some of the elements of the relationship between some subgenres of pop music and international law (that will later be useful to trace some peculiarities of heavy metal approaches) and, on this basis, will then proceed to study the specific case of heavy metal with regard to some bands which, due to certain themes and modes of expression, are of particular interest because they explicitly deal with aspects of the life of States and individuals which are regulated by international law.

From a methodological perspective, I need to point out that, for rather obvious reasons, the first part of the chapter can't use the typical tools of the (international) lawyer. Indeed, it represents, for me, an incursion into an alien territory and is therefore to be benevolently read in a merely descriptive sense, and just as an instrument for what I will say later, when I will try to highlight, with a case study approach, some international law issues and rules in some songs I’ve chosen in order to try to show how this is done.