I’m not sure exactly when or how it happened, but at some point in my childhood I began to think I was a white guy trapped in the body of a black girl. And not just any white guy, either—a guitar player in a heavy-metal band.

Ok, stop laughing. It’s no joke. I’m a black female metalhead. Like I said, I can’t really tell you how it happened. Maybe it was growing up in the ’80s, being fed a steady diet of Ratt videos on Chicago’s quasi-MTV uhf station. Or maybe it was coming of age at the same time heavy metal reached public consciousness as the Voice of the Disgruntled Adolescent White Male. Sure, I wasn’t white, male, or even particularly angry as a 10-year-old—but I recognized the force of those electric guitars, relentlessly pounding drums, and growling vocals. Even then, I knew that heavy metal was power, and power was irresistible.

Over the next few years, I embraced my heavy metal destiny. I wasn’t ashamed of my love for metal (well, except for maybe hair metal). I just couldn’t explain it to most people. Heavy metal has always been and will always be the red-headed stepchild of rock, much maligned and generally misunderstood. Respectable rock fans and critics dismiss it as simplistic and puerile; conservatives condemn it as “the devil’s music.” For a lot of black folks, it’s just a bunch of crazy white guys screaming, which is just as bad. Even my older sister, who is almost ridiculously eclectic in her musical tastes (Barry Manilow!), wasn’t exactly feeling metal, if you know what I mean.

But in the early ’80s, some of us kids in the ’hood did listen to metal. Radio was somewhat less segregated than it is today, but hip-hop didn’t exist to MTV or the producers of the myriad local and syndicated music video shows that aired at the time. But we did know about Quiet Riot and Poison, those mainstays of pop-metal. Later, when hip-hop came of age and a lot of my peers grew out of the Crüe and into Boogie Down Producti...