Moral boundaries and deviant music: public attitudes toward heavy metal and rap

Since the mid-1980s, collective efforts to define deviant music have focused increasingly on two genres-heavy metal and rap music. Most of these claims assert that heavy metal and rap music represent a type of audio pornography that endorses sexist, violent, and anti-religious behaviors. While scholarly research has addressed a number of issues related to this controversy, few, if any, have examined negative attitudes toward heavy metal and rap music within the general public. Our research uses data from the 1993 General Social Survey to examine the determinants of public attitudes against heavy metal and rap music. Along with selected control variables, we include a number of measures that reflect the claims-making rhetoric of social movement organizations and other moral entrepreneurs. Our analysis focuses on evaluating the degree to which these claims are related to shared attitudes within the general population.