The Anatomy of a Battle Jacket: A Multimodal Ethnographic Perspective

Abstract

The battle jacket—a sleeveless denim jacket customized with band patches—is a staple item of clothing for heavy metal fans. This paper brings together social semiotic analysis and ethnographic insights to explore three different types of battle jacket: the “classic” jacket, the “tribute” jacket, and the “modern” jacket. It discovers that, despite the jacket’s assortment of bold images, colours, typography, and symmetrical arrangements, owners, in fact, consider aesthetics as secondary to the jacket’s function as a “channeler” of memories, relationships, beliefs, and ideologies. For each owner, the jacket serves a unique purpose, whether acting as a biography of their musical life (“classic” jacket), representing social ties and connections with loved ones (“tribute” jacket), or promoting particular political and religious beliefs (“modern” jacket). Through a multimodal ethnographic approach, battle jackets are revealed to be sophisticated and multifaceted artefacts with a range of sociocultural functions embedded in a rich history.

Music for Mental Health: An Autoethnography of the Rory Gallagher Instagram Fan Community

“…Research shows how listening to or playing music can be beneficial for mood, cognition, and behavior, helping sufferers manage their physical and mental health, improve self-esteem and confidence, and build interpersonal relationships (McFerran and Saarikallio 2014; Rebecchini 2021). The growing fields of rock music studies and metal music studies have also identified similar benefits of music-related activities, whether playing in a band (Shadrack 2021), attending concerts (Hogan 2021), dressing in particular subcultural clothing (O’Hagan 2021), or making fanzines (Bestley and Burgess 2018). However, to date, little attention has been paid to online music fandoms and how these communities can serve as a positive environment for mental health and well-being (with the exception of Quinn 2019).…”

“…Beyond the act of listening to music, engagement in collective music-related activities has also been shown to have positive effects on a person’s mental health (O’Hagan 2021; Shadrack 2021). With people unable to meet face-to-face during the pandemic, the digital sphere, thus, has become a space for many people to socialize and partake in conversations around the music.…”

Introducing ethnohistorical research to multimodal studies

“…Indeed, multimodal ethnography (cf. Dicks et al, 2006; Moretti, 2021) is now a well-established approach for the study of contemporary multimodal artefacts, particularly in the areas of linguistic landscape studies, geosemiotics, visual sociology and New Literacy Studies (O’Hagan, 2020b), which enables everyday experiences to be disentangled through material texts. It stands to reason, then, that its historical equivalent—ethnohistory—would also offer similar benefits in tracing the narratives behind the semiotic choices of multimodal artefacts and how they signal elements of a person’s lived experience that might otherwise be hidden without primary evidence from the producers themselves.…”