Sausagefest Rising

originally written for Epic Metal Blog by Igor Jakobsen the 14.11.2022

I went recently to a great festival with a lineup I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, during the second day I noticed that there were only men on stage, no matter what band played. 

This is not how I had hoped to find the metal scene in 2022!

The festival was Keep It True Rising 2, which was 2 days + a warm up night. They have previously booked bands with female members (Keep it True Rising 1 had Velvet Viper and Atlantean Kodex), so I’m certain that the “one-genderness” on stage was not intentional by the organisers. 

However, while many genders were represented in the audience, and my impression (having done no effort to count what so ever) was that the female to male ratio in the audience was somewhere between 40/60 and 30/70, the stage itself was a sausage party, with only Caucasian males for 3 days (and the extra concert with a well-known band on the 4th day, which I didn’t see, was also all male).

(It should be noted that on subsequent festivals, they have vastly improved the situation, showing that this was a one time occurrence.)

 

image description: author of the text, a Caucasian cis male with long dark hair and beard, behind him is the audio mixer, stage lights controller, some of the audience and the stage of Keep It True Rising.

 

Is this a problem?

It is if we believe that talent is distributed equally, indiscriminate of background, gender and so on. Everyone can unite in metal, why shouldn’t everyone be able to form a band? A band reaching a quality to be booked should therefore contain members of any gender, not just one. The same general proportions of minorities that are in the society should be expected to be on stage, or at least the same proportions that are in the audience.

If that’s not reflected at the stages of festivals, there is either some structural issues preventing this, or having a penis (and being cis-gendered) is what makes one a great metal musician. 

 

image description: horned devil from Tenacious D playing a large drumkit
with 3 bass drums, implying the middle one not beeing played with the foot

So, you don’t play the guitar with your penis? Good. Could it be that the relevant bands for the subgenres of this festival has only good all-male bands? Like, Arch Enemy or Nevrosa are great, but they don’t really fit the booking profile of Keep It True.

As mentioned in the introduction, Velvet Viper and Atlantean Kodex fit well in the profile. So do: the great Leather Leone / Chastain and Girlschool. So do also a lot of newer bands:  Chrystal Viper, Claymorean, Lady Beast, Smoulder, Cobra Spell all are getting booked to true, heavy or epic metal festivals like Up The Hammers, Courts Of Chaos, Iron Fest, Headbangers Open Air, No Playback Festival and so on.

Other bands worth checking out would be Splintered Throne, White Crone, Crystal, Kramp, Sevi, Black Sword Thunder Attack, Natthammer, Mist, Sorceress Of Sin, Savage Master and Fury. I could go on, this was just the bands off the top of my head.

If this list isn’t enough, Lee Aaron is touring again, and with Keep It True’s great track record of bringing bands back together one could try to get Rock Goddess to perform, even though
they declared they won’t tour anymore because of the developments in the music and touring business.

The bands are there, so why did we still get a sausage fest?

video description: live performance by Cobra Spell, a band consisting of a
singer, 2 guitarists, a bass guitarist and a drummer, none of which are male

Did all bands that aren’t exclusively all-male decline offers to play so that we ended up with an all-male lineup? Given the amount of bands that’s unlikely. More likely, most bands asked were all-male. 

Are booking agencies only offering “all-male bands”? That’s true for some agencies, but many of the bands I listed up are on the roster of booking agencies. Furthermore, I could not find a booking agency for several of the “all-male bands” that played Keep It True Rising 2. The bands were thus selected in some way. 

Since there’s no reason to suspect any conscious discrimination or ill will from the organisers, we have to consider structural challenges:

One reason for female absence, as well as absence of minorities (both ethnical and queer) could be due to the working class ideation of metal. Metal fans and performers like to identify with the working class, even when that doesn’t seem to be the case (just look at the reactions upon the death of the Queen of England in the metal community). 

Therefore I would describe it as an ideation rather than actual association. Instead of commenting 

on actual working class struggles, they ideate an undefined “traditional working class culture.” 

If this reminds you of the ideation of a undefined “great past” by right wingers and conservatives, 

it’s not coincidental. The same underlying mechanisms are at work.

Now, in the “traditional working class culture” a woman's place is in the home, or sexually segregated 

to be only with other women, while other minorities either don’t exist or are excluded. 

That way the complaints of African-American blues singers of their harsh woman, which was 

actually complaints about the boss, turned into whining about not getting laid enough in the 

reinterpretation by European heavy rockers. Beyond working class, heavy metal and heavy rock 

takes inspiration from 50s rocker and biker culture, both areas with exclusion or subordination of 

everyone that isn’t “white” and “male” (Brake, M., 1980, Willis, P., 1978). 

To quote Lemmy of Motorhead on the struggles of female musicians:

“All of these [female] bands, people treat them like second-class citizens because they're chicks. 

There's all this, 'Show us your tits, and we'll give you a gig.' And all of that shit. It's really like, poor."

So while females would be allowed to be in the spaces where metal is performed, they would not be 

allowed on the stage unless they could get a powerful supporter in the scene, like Motorhead helped 

Girlschool by having them on some of their tours (Music is her passion, 2020)

This makes it harder for bands that aren’t “all male – bands” to secure shows, and when festivals 

and concert promoters don’t allow them slots on the stage, they need to be called out on it, which is 

the reason for this article. The ideas about who should do what based on gender might also 

give “all male – bands” the advantage. Musical instruments are perceived as gendered and there are 

ideas about what instruments should be played by women and what instruments should be played by men. 

In an example from Mavis Bayton (1989) it’s shown how girls were denied access to instruments relevant

 to play metal:

 

“E2 said that at her school, "the girls had tambourines and did all the singing and the boys

played the drums. Girls played the glockenspiel. It was a jingly sound and they thought that was feminine. 

I would have liked to have a go (at the drums) but I didn't because girls don't do those things...

Girls don t have a chance. We're not introduced to these things."

 

The situation is probably not as dire today, but there is still a perception that it is more masculine to play 

a guitar and more feminine to play keyboards and violins (Abeles, H., 2009), instruments that are often 

more common in folk, goth and symphonic metal, although no one would have raised an eye if Skyclad 

were booked to a heavy and true metal festival. If one wants to combat the “masculine metal ideal” it 

becomes even more important to book bands where non-male performers play the “conventional” metal 

instruments.

image description: gendered, “masculine” instrument, 

a guitar shaped as a penis with the guitar body shaped as scrotum

 

The “feminine” and “masculine” instruments are often rehearsed in different spaces. And being in a 

band would also place one in a rehearsal space, outside of the home. Not everyone can afford that, and 

youth would be dependent on their parents allowing that instrument and the rehearsal. Minorities are 

often poor and might not afford to support this. In addition girls risk not being supported to practice 

“masculine” instruments, or not allowed to go to rehearsal spaces. 

 

The first venues an aspiring metal band would play could also be problematic as not all spaces would 

be inclusive enough for women, LGBTQ+, people of colour or other minorities to feel safe there. 

Also bigger venues and concerts, as well as established bands might be an issue, shown in this citation 

from Solid Rock Magazine :

"Our new.., symbol is a bent over blonde stripper in garters. That's what Motley Crew are all about". 

 

Another example is the very popular band Steel Panther that claims everything they do is humor, and 

yet want their female audience to come up on stage and strip. This doesn’t lead to a perception of a 

safe and secure space, instead one would think that “Rock… is a male musical form; women performers 

are rare.” (Bayton, M., 1989)

 

Most of the same arguments applied to non-male bands apply to other minorities. Here it’s important 

to acknowledge that Keep It True and many other festivals do great at accommodating artists where 

someone happens to use a wheelchair, or with vision impairment, as well as accommodating people 

with mobility difficulties at the venues. 

 

However, where are the people of colour on stage? 

In Germany, people with "migrant background" make up 27.2% of the population (Janjevic, D. 2022). 

While most of them are from other European countries, there’s still around 5% that are from Asia and 

Africa (destatis.de). Yet there were no bands with members that represented this. Out of 27 bands, with an average 

of 4 members, giving an approximate of 108 people on stage, It would have been expected that at least 5 

would have been people of colour. Again, those bands exist, like Black Death or Skinflint:

image description: photo from a live performance by the band Black Death
showing a black man in black leather west holding a white pointy Dean guitar,
parts of a drum kit to the left, and a black man playing a
bass guitar in front of a bass amp

 

I don’t know if there were any LGBTQ+ people on stage, but if they were, that was certainly not 

spoken of in any way. With 2 of the greatest heavy rock and metal singers being Rob Halford and 

Freddie Mercury, it’s really surprising that queerness seems to still not be a topic on stage. Again, the 

audience represented this minority much better, and there were many rainbow coloured patches on the 

battle wests of the audience. 

 

It's interesting to note that while rock (and thus by extension metal) was invented by a queer woman of 

colour, credit went to a white man that didn’t write his own songs. The same structural issues that led 

to this seem to still be in place today, as we get a metal festival with only “all male bands” of Caucasian 

descent on stage.

video description: music by sister Rosetta Tharpe, considered

 by many to be the founder of Rock & Roll music

It is very clear that having someone to identify with, be it on stage as with the band Girlschool, in a 

tv show as with the last actor picked to play the doctor in Dr.Who or in politics, where too much is 

decided by older white men, is important for recruitment and participation. As said by McAuliffe of 

Girlschool:

 

“Every time we play … there’s always loads of girls at our gigs, always coming up going, ‘We’ve got a 

band! And we were inspired by you. That’s really good. You think: at last!”

And without seeing bands with members of the same gender, orientation or skin colour that themselves, 

these metal fans are less likely to start a band on their own, and we lose out on a lot of potentially great 

metal tunes. 

 

To conclude, it’s possible, as shown by other festivals, to be mindful of representation while booking. 

No Playback Festival did a “Female Fronted Friday”, and generally books bands beyond the 

“all-male bands”, even though setting aside a day instead of mixing these bands in with the rest of the 

lineup might not be the best solution: see Holly Frances Royles article on it here.

 

 I would hope that Keep it True be mindful of their position and importance in the metal community
and take it upon themselves to set an example for other bookers to increase, rather than decrease the 

diversity on stage. If this doesn’t become the development of our scene, I worry that there will be a 

sausage fest not only on stage, but also in the audience, with a big part of the audience feeling alienated 

or kept out from the music we all enjoy and want to share.

video description: live performance by Girlschool, 

a band consisting of 2 guitarists, a bass guitarist and a drummer, 

with musicians that are in their 60s, none of which are male