The article is an overview of the most important concepts in the field of musical semiotics, and at the same time an indication of which of them have potential in relation to the study of metal music. Particular attention was paid to the method of musematic analysis, consistently used and developed for almost half a century by Philip Tagg, but also appreciated and practiced by other researchers.

The starting point for the author is the state of research in the field of “metal musicology” and theory of music ‒ there is still no adequate, new methodology, and at the same time a common space and a thread of understanding between disciplines and methodologies. Such an interdisciplinary perspective can be semiotics, especially musical, which is a valuable alternative and supplement to sociological, literary and cultural studies, etc. It has potential both where music is a (subordinate) medium of the message and a “amplifier” of the text, and where, through its structure and dramaturgy expresses “itself” in a way, constituting an abstract play of sounds and timbres.

The subject of this article is the artistic work of the Los Angeles-based (heavy) metal group Otep, founded in 2000, in which frontwoman Otep Shamaya plays a special role. In the domestic music media there is still little material on the work of this singer, songwriter and performer. The female artist creates an original stage and media image. She often makes uncompromising use of verbal and non-verbal means of artistic expression. In the lyrics of expressively performed songs, Shamaya raises issues such as war violence, institutionalized religions treated as forms of oppression, pathologies in social life, the problem of access to firearms or abuse of power in political arrangements. The singer also takes up a polemic against the hegemonically patriarchal system of metal culture. The purpose of this article is to attempt to characterize the artistic articulations and manifestations of the group Otep, capturing the specifics of the components of the band’s original bricolage. Attention was also paid to the “inversion” covers created by the band, led by multidisciplinary artist Otep Shamaya.

In this article, I would like to focus on covers that reveal their strongly transgressive function, forcing the recipient to rethink and reinterpret the canon of popular music. Covers that I analyze in terms of music, text, image, etc., although they formally “reverse” only one specific song, become an opportunity to polemicize with the output of a given artist, the entire genre or style, or finally with the attitude and worldview represented by the original. Transgression on the aesthetic level is also accompanied by transgression on the level of sexual, class or racial identity. For the purposes of the article, the material will be limited to the covers from the 1970s (Ramblin’ Rose by Jerry Lee Lewis / MC5, Love Is Strange by Mickey & Sylvia / Trash by New York Dolls, Helter Skelter by The Beatles / Siouxsie and the Banshees), because in this period (on the basis of punk and post-punk music) similar practices were the most intense.

The emergence of blues from the aesthetics of the so-called “big-beat” in Polish popular music is a process that largely coincides with a parallel phenomenon observed in other European countries. With the expansion of rock and roll in the UK during the 1960s, many beat performers (e.g. The Rolling Stones, The Animals) turned towards blues aesthetics, attempting to imitate black American performers. It should be emphasised that this was done in isolation from the cultural context and “root” performance tradition and was a kind of experiment that, despite some cases of apparent stylistic deviation from the blues genre, brought many positive results, such as the emergence of the blues-rock subgenre or the penetration of blues elements into hard rock and progressive rock. The article’s title uses the term “inversion”, reflecting the reversed order of genre evolution. In Europe, blues did not imply the development of jazz or rock and roll, but through these genres, musicians and listeners became interested in the blues form and used its elements to transform the beat style into rock, eventually developing traditional blues performance. This article attempts to reconstruct the process of adapting blues in Poland and transforming the beat into a blues-rock style. The analysed phenomena’ chronological framework reaches back to jazz’s beginnings in the interwar period, while the clear boundary marking the emergence of blues-rock and its emancipation is the release of Breakout’s Blues album in February 1971.

In this text, we attempt, probably for the first time in Poland, at the synthetic presentation of the artistic achievements and not only creative personality of Bert Jansch, sometimes referred to as “British Dylan” and highly appreciated by fellow folk musicians as well as by genuine rock stars, such as Jimmy Page or Neil Young. Jansch’s career as a truly unique folk singer/guitar player/composer/lyric writer shall be dicussed here in a wider analytical perspective, with vital references to the history of the British and American folk movement as well as, first of all, to the career of his transatlantic “counterpart”. Jansch’s inability to comfortably fit into any folk or folk-rock stereotypes with respect to music, lyrics or media personality shall also be stressed, in the same comparative context.

The article is concerned with the transgressive dimension of the Pet Shop Boys’ works. As follows, the artists are situated in the cultural context that helps to understand their approach to popular music, with a focus on potentially transgressive aspects such as hybridisation, authenticity, maturity/adulthood, irony, androgyny, masculinity, and gayness. The case study to be presented here is The Resurrectionist, a song inspired by historical facts. Two possible readings of the song are suggested here; both tackle upon existing social norms, revealing their true nature and provoking the audience to question their validity.

In this text I interpret the novel by the author of Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną with special attention to the musicality present in it. Using the concept of Andrzej Hejmej, I analyze the stylistic tropes present in the novel (instrumentation, alliteration), musical references and transpositions of musical forms (aria, sonata, counaterpoint), considering what functions they perform in the novel. I pay special attention to indirect and direct references to hip-hop culture appearing in Maslowska’s book (e.g. rhythmic and rhyming narrative flow, onomatopoeias, vocal instrumentation). I show how the elements of musicality present in the novel influence its shape.

The transgressive potential of Elvis Presley’s music and stage persona remains an inadequately explored topic. He was an affective medium which catalysed a moral, racial and social revolution. He was the first beneficiary of emancipatory transformations of sexuality. The narrations and mythologies of rock culture did not problematise Elvis’s art and image transitions – the reasons for his escapes from media stereotypes. The most salient of the medially disjointed images is Elvis’s tenuous identification with the gender role of a male role model imposed upon him. Indeed, rock heroes are to embody the “macho” role. Meanwhile, the most interesting part of Elvis’s musical identity is precisely the ambiguous status of his masculinity in the 1950s and the “non-normativity” of his persona and music in 1960s–70s.