Lum, Chee Hoo

If music of popular culture is a lived curriculum - one that has suffused young people’s lives – can popular musics’ presence in everyday space be extended to educational space? In this paper, we introduce a group of graduate serving music teachers to the musical practice of Rudra, a local Extreme metal group, and invite discussions of their practice and consideration of Extreme Metal through Rudra, among the repertory of the diversity of musical practices in their school music curriculum. This paper reports on the dynamics of these discussions as well as accounts by teachers who subsequently introduced musical excerpts by Rudra to their classes. Finally, this paper considers their responses and reflects on the practice of Vedic Metal and relationship/s with local practice, popular music with the implications for education. More importantly, the feasibility and viability of challenging curricula is very much a function of the classroom teacher as agent in and of that change.