Crime and Popular Music
Dr Eleanor Peters is a world-leading expert in the relationship between crime and popular music.
Introducing crime and popular music
Music and criminology may be two very different subject areas, but there are many crossovers, and my research area is on the impact music can have on crime and vice versa. There is quite a small but growing area of criminology considering music. In 2019 I published my book The Use and Abuse of Music: Criminal Records which looked at the ‘dark side of the tune’, as Cloonin and Garofolo say, murder, torture, and the use of music in the criminal justice system.
‘A Criminology of Popular Music’
My new book A Criminology of Popular Music was published in September 2025 – this draws on common themes in popular music such as sex and love, death and violence and hope and charity to consider how a critical criminological approach can be used for the study of music. I have also edited a multidisciplinary publication drawing on areas as wide as Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, death metal in Indonesia, black metal in Norway, American protest music and how prisoners in a London prison use music while incarcerated.
Growing up in the home of heavy metal
My interest in music goes back a long way. I was born and raised in the Black Country, near Birmingham – famous for being the ‘home of heavy metal’. References to metal in the media and in academic texts have long-portrayed it as a misogynistic, devil worshiping cult followed by greasy working-class white young men – a picture I found unrecognizable from my involvement in a local metal scene. My interest in how music relates to criminology began when I read about the use of music as a method of torture during the Iraq War in the 2000s where various types of music were being used as part of what was called ‘torture lite’; treatment that obviously breached the human right not to be tortured or subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
Censorship, power, and musical freedom
There are other forms of injustices that a criminological study of music can uncover because music is more than just a form of entertainment; for example, if state authorities think that music has negative consequences, they may censor it through laws. There are power issues at play in what music is labelled as deviant, and this can lead to an erosion of liberty; for example, heavy metal has often been at the centre of debates about censorship and is banned or suppressed in several countries around the world. Closer to home, censorship can be also explored through the example of UK drill music, a close relative of rap, deemed to be ‘responsible for gang related deaths and knife crime’. So-called ‘urban’ musical genres have been targeted by the police as generators of violence and as a result artists find it difficult to perform or release music.
