Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia (review)

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Reviewed by: Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia John W. Troutman (bio) Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia University of Nebraska Press, 2020 SEVERAL RECENT BOOKS have chronicled contemporary, local, and transnational Indigenous music scenes. Kyle T. Mays's Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018) charts the rise of Indigenous hip-hop generations, and the way hip-hop's aesthetics, sound, and accelerant for political mobilization have staked out innovative expressions of sovereignty within various Native communities. Kevin Fellezs's Listen but Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific (2019) posits the Hawaiian slack key guitar as a fecund site of expression of and contestation over notions of Kanaka Maoli values, aesthetics, politics, and more. Kristina M. Jacobsen's The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (2017) showcases in rich detail the vibrant, diverse, and long-standing country music scenes that proliferate within the Navajo Nation. Now, in Rez Metal, filmmaker Ashkan Soltani Stone and historian Natale A. Zappia have illuminated yet another set of multigenerational music scenes that rattle and shake the Navajo Nation's lush soundscape. The publication of Rez Metal accompanies a documentary film project by Stone and Zappia, who spent time interviewing band members and scenesters in multiple communities, as well as in the metal epicenter of Gallup. Following a brief introduction, the slim volume's chapters rely upon lengthy quotations from excerpted interviews to explore the idea of "rez metal" to describe the experiencing of bands within a sampling of the Navajo Nation's metal venues—from hogans and house parties to dedicated clubs—to introduce the readers to some of the bands through interviews and to contemplate the genre's future. Throughout, the authors and interviewees ruminate on why and how metal matters to its Diné and neighboring Indigenous adherents. "Metal is justice," says Jay Cee, a radio DJ at Gallup's KZZ classic rock station. He continues, "It helps release all my anger, all my frustration" (33). The authors queried several men and women in the first chapter who expressed their histories with the genre and why they were drawn to identifying as a metalhead. Cee celebrates the life as a means to release tension but also to let loose and have fun within a community of like-minded peers [End Page 189] who congregate through mosh pits, head bangs, and the spellbinding, deafening lockstep drones of guitar, bass, and drums. Cee speculates that those drums might provide a link to older Indigenous musical traditions, but he also points out that metal continues to conjure negative stereotypes in the minds of others: in Zuni, where he grew up, some elders consider the metal scene a distraction that prevents its citizens from fulfilling their duties to their people. Edmund Yazzie heard similar concerns from some of his elders, but his parents were metalheads, and his father, a pastor, bought Yazzie his first record as a kid, by the band AC/DC. Now Yazzie gigs as the drummer in his son's band, Testify. Yazzie is also a member of the Navajo Council, and his interview reveals how deeply metal has been embraced by members of the Navajo Nation. Stone and Zappia's work is most compelling when it reveals through anecdotes the deep multigenerational history of metal and its embrace by the Nation's government as a positive, family-friendly element of today's vibrant Diné culture. The authors interviewed current Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, who also passionately supports the Nation's metal scene and sees it as a positive tradition with the capability to heal and provide hope for many. In the first chapter, Stone and Zappia suggest that the "cathartic communal experience" of metal fuels its embrace and provides "'equipment' to deal with the historical, cultural, and economic trauma shared by Navajos . . . the music is both an escape from the day-to-day and also a saber to rattle in frustration and anger at the status quo" (13). With this power to bring people together, multiple...