This weekend marks the 16th-Annual Women’s Music Festival in Iowa City, an event full of performances by female musicians at various local venues. There will be a diverse range of music present at the event, but there is one genre missing from the list — heavy metal.
The trend of women in metal bands has been a hot discussion topic in many recent issues of music magazines, but the headlines and descriptions tend to read more like Maxim than typical band profiles. Revolver is a heavy music magazine that has an annual edition dedicated to “The Hottest Chicks in Metal.” The 2007 edition’s cover featured “20 smokin’ pages” of women decked out in leather and lingerie.
“I kind of feel like women have always been told it’s not really ladylike to be aggressive and powerful,” said Tasha Hoffman, the lead singer of the Iowa City death-metal band Identity Crisis. “I think that women nowadays are just realizing that they can do the stuff that men are doing, if not as good, then even better. And screaming in people’s faces is not really considered attractive, but, you know, it shows power.”
The last few years have seen an emergence of female-fronted metal bands. The Agonist, In This Moment, and Luna Mortis feature female growlers with a commanding stage presence that rivals their male counterparts.
“My favorite thing about [being a female metal vocalist] is just the surprise from people who don’t know what to expect when they see me on stage,” Hoffman said. “People look at me, and I’m like a small girl, and they don’t think a noise like that can come out of me.”
She has been in Identity Crisis for a little over a year, but she has been into metal music much longer. She was turned on to the heavier style of vocals after hearing Arch Enemy — a Swedish metal band that features a frontwoman who has some of the most intense growls in the metal community.
“I never pictured myself ever doing this, and I don’t think anyone that knows me would ever expect I would be in a metal band,” Hoffman said. “I found out about Arch Enemy, and I listened to it a lot. I knew that [lead vocalist Angela Gossow] was a female and she was doing crazy death vocals, and I was really inspired by it, and in a couple of weeks I taught myself how to scream.”
Bands such as Arch Enemy have been innovators in the genre of death metal for years, and Gossow and other feamle frontwomen have paved the way for the recent resuragance in female metal musicians. These women serve as a testament to how far the genre has come since the days of ’80s hair metal, when such bands as Guns ’n’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, and Poison often sang of drug-fueled sex stories with groupies and female musicians such as Lita Ford were known more for their looks than their music.
That being said, the gender gap in society has not yet been breached. Magazines will continue to use the sex appeal of female-fronted bands to sell issues. There will also continue to be people that say women metal bands are just a gimmick contrived by record companies to make a dime in the dying industry.
But in order to reach equality in the metal world, listeners need to keep an open mind and judge bands based on the music they play and not the sex of the members.