Heavy Metal

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Heavy metal is a form of music characterized by aggressive, driving rhythms and highly amplified distorted guitars, generally with grandiose lyrics and virtuosic instrumentation. Heavy metal is a development of blues, blues rock, rock and prog rock. Its origins lie in the hard rock bands who between 1967 and 1974 took blues and rock and created a hybrid with a heavy, guitar and drums centered sound. Heavy metal had its peak popularity in the 1980s, during which many of the now existing subgenres first evolved. Although not as commercially successful as it was then, heavy metal still has a large world-wide following.

Stylistic origins: Psychedelic rock, European classical music and British blues

Cultural origins: Late 1960s United Kingdom

Typical instruments: Guitar - Bass - Drums

Mainstream popularity: Extensively followed by dedicated fans throughout the world.

Subgenres
Avant garde metal - Black metal - Celtic Metal - Christian metal - Classic metal - Death metal - Doom metal - Folk metal - Funk metal - Goth metal - Groove metal - Hair metal - Neo-Classical metal - NSBM - Oriental metal - Power metal - Progressive metal - Speed metal - Tech metal - Thrash metal - Vedic metal - Viking metal

Fusion genres
Alternative metal - Grindcore - Industrial metal - Metalcore - Nu metal - Stoner metal - Rap metal

Regional scenes
Gothenburg metal - New Wave of British Heavy Metal - Bay Area thrash metal - Norwegian black metal

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Early examples and influences

American blues music was highly popular and influential among the early British rockers; bands like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds had recorded covers of many classic blues songs, sometimes speeding up the tempo and using electric guitar where the original used acoustic. (Similar adaptations of blues and other race music had formed the basis of the earliest rock and roll, notably that of Elvis Presley).

Such powered-up blues music was encouraged by the intellectual and artistic experimentation that arose when musicians started to exploit the opportunities of the electrically amplified guitar to produce a louder, more discordant sound. Where blues-rock drumming styles had been largely simple shuffle beats on small drum kits, drummers began using a more muscular, complex, and amplified approach to match and be heard with the increasingly loud guitar sounds; similarly vocalists modified their technique and increased their reliance on amplification, often becoming more stylised and dramatic in the process. Simultaneous advances in amplification and recording technology made it possible to successfully capture the power of this heavier approach on record.

The earliest music commonly identified as heavy metal came out of the Birmingham area of the United Kingdom in the late 1960s when bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath applied an overtly non-traditional approach to blues standards and created new music often based on blues scales and arrangements. These bands were highly influenced by American psychedelic rock musicians including Jimi Hendrix, who had pioneered amplified and processed blues-rock guitar and acted as a bridge between black American music and white European rockers.

Other oft-cited influences include Vanilla Fudge, who had slowed down and psychedelicised pop tunes, as well as earlier British rockers such as The Who and The Kinks, who had paved the way for heavy metal styles by introducing power chords and more aggressive percussion to the rock genre. Another key influence was Cream, who exemplified the power trio format that would become a staple of heavy metal. Some also cite The Beatles as a key influence; they had increasingly used distortion and heavier arrangements as early as 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Perhaps the earliest song that is clearly identifiable as prototype heavy metal is "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks (1965). By late 1968 heavy blues sounds were becoming common: many fans and scholars point to Blue Cheer's 1968 cover of Eddie Cochran's hit "Summertime Blues" as the first true heavy-metal song; Beatles scholars cite in particular the song "Helter Skelter" from The White Album (196, which set new standards for distortion and aggressive sound on a pop album. Dave Edmunds' band Love Sculpture released an aggressive heavy guitar version of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance in November 1968. The Jeff Beck Group's album Truth (late 196 was an important and influential rock album released just before Led Zeppelin's first album, leading some (especially British blues fans) to argue that Truth was the first heavy metal album. The Yardbirds' 1968 single "Think About It" should also be mentioned, as that employed a similar sound to that which Jimmy Page would employ with Led Zeppelin. However, it was the release of Led Zeppelin in 1969 that brought worldwide notice of the formation of a new genre.

The early heavy metal bands, like Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, UFO and Black Sabbath are often called hard rock bands rather than heavy metal, especially those bands whose sound was more similar to traditional rock music. In general, the terms heavy metal and hard rock are often used interchangeably, in particular when discussing the 1970s. Indeed, many such bands are not categorised as "heavy metal bands" per se, but rather as having contributed individual songs or works that contributed to the genre; few would consider Jethro Tull a heavy metal band in any real sense, for example, but few would dispute that their song Aqualung was a quintessential early Heavy Metal song.

Many people, including Heavy Metal musicians of prominent groups, believe that the foundations of the definite style and sound of pure heavy metal were laid down by Judas Priest (another Birmingham band) with three of their early albums: "Sad Wings Of Destiny" (1976), "Sin After Sin" (1977) and "Stained Class" (197. (Although Rainbow are also sometimes cited as pioneering the pure heavy metal genre, although one could also make this claim about the later albums of Deep Purple such as Burn and Stormbringer, these bands are generally considered to be hard rock bands).

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Themes

Heavy metal, as an art form, is more than just music; it is as much visual as it is audible. Album covers and stage shows are almost as important to the presentation of the material as the music itself. Thus, through heavy metal, many artists collaborate to produce a menu of experiences in each piece, offering a wider range of experiences to the audience. In this respect, heavy metal becomes perhaps more of a diverse art form than any single form dominated by one method of expression. Whereas a painting is experienced visually, a symphony experienced audibly, a heavy metal band's "image" and the common theme that binds all their music is expressed in the artwork on the album, the set of the stage, the tone of the lyrics, in addition to the sound of the music.

Rock historians tend to find that the influence of Western pop music gives heavy metal its escape-from-reality fantasy side, as an escape from reality through outlandish and fantastic lyrics, while African-American blues gives heavy metal its naked reality side, focusing on loss, depression and loneliness.

If the audio, and thematic components of heavy metal are predominantly blues-influenced reality, then the visual component is predominantly pop-influenced fantasy. The themes of darkness, evil, power, and apocalypse are fantastic language components for addressing the reality of life's problems. Further, in reaction to the "peace and love" hippie culture of the 1960s, heavy metal developed as a counterculture, where light is supplanted by darkness, and the happy ending of pop is replaced by the naked reality that things do not always work out in this world. Whilst fans claim that the medium of darkness is not the message, critics have accused the genre of glorifying the negative aspects of reality.

Heavy metal themes are typically more grave than the generally airy pop from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, focusing on war, nuclear annihilation, environmental issues, political and religious propaganda. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", Ozzy Osbourne's "Killer of Giants" and Metallica's "...And Justice for All" are examples of serious contributions to the discussion of the state of affairs. The commentary on reality sometimes tends to become over-simplified because the fantastic poetic vocabulary of heavy metal deals primarily with very clear dichotomies of light and dark, hope and despair, good and evil, which do not make much room for complex shades of grey.

Some might differentiate by observing that pure heavy metal does not generally sing about love, while many hair metal songs are focused on love. In some respects, one might argue that the hair metal scene of the 1980s was the logical endpoint of the glitter or glam rock movement of the 1970s; the visual similarities between the two, with the make-up and fanciful costumes, makes the argument more compelling. Glitter rock, however, was lyrically focused on sexual ambiguity, free expression and individuality, while hair metal was unambiguously macho and heterosexual, with little room for diversity of political or social opinions. Ultimately, "pure" heavy metal would position itself at the periphery of pop culture, never quite at centre, and metal denizens contend that the move towards the centre was a commercialism that compromised both the artistic integrity of the form and the opportunity for messages to be taken seriously.

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Classical influence

The appropriation of classical music by heavy metal typically includes the influence of Bach and Paganini rather than Mozart or Franz Liszt. Though Deep Purple/Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had been experimenting with musical figurations borrowed from classical music since the early 1970s, Edward Van Halen's solo cadenza "Eruption" (released on Van Halen's first album in 197 marks an important moment in the development of virtuosity in metal. Following Van Halen, the "classical" influence in metal guitar during the 1980s actually looked to the early eigtheenth century for its model of speed and technique. Indeed, the late Baroque era of western art music was also frequently interpreted through a gothic lens. For example, "Mr. Crowley," (1981) by Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Randy Rhoads, uses both a pipe organ and Baroque-inspired guitar solos to create a particular mood for Osbourne's lyrics on the legendary occultist Aleister Crowley. Like many other metal guitarists in the 1980s, Rhoads quite earnestly took up the "learned" study of musical theory and helped to solidify the minor industry of guitar pedagogy magazines (such as Guitar for the Practicing Musician) that grew up during the decade. In most instances, however, metal musicians who borrowed the technique and rhetoric of art music were not attempting to be classical musicians. (An exception can arguably be found in Yngwie Malmsteen, though many argue that his music relies more on virtuosity and the use of classical-sounding elements such as the harmonic minor scale to appear classical without actually being classical).

The Encarta encyclopedia claims that "when a text was associated with the music, Bach could write musical equivalents of verbal ideas". As heavy metal uses apocalyptic themes and images of power and darkness, the ability to translate verbal ideas into musical ideas that successfully convey the ideas of the words is critical to heavy metal authenticity and credibility. An excellent example of this is the theme album Powerslave, by Iron Maiden. The cover is of a dramatic Egyptian pyramid scene, and many of the songs on the album have subject matter that requires a sound suggestive of life and death, including a song entitled "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", based on the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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Key artists

The above discussion of the history of heavy metal, from its 1960s precursors to the proliferation of heavy metal sub-genres of the late 1980s, can be summarised in the following key artists from three main waves of bands that to a large extent came out of Britain:

influential rock bands like The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones in the 1960s;
"early" heavy metal exemplified by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in the early and mid 1970s; and
the New Wave of British Heavy Metal pioneered most successfully by Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Importantly, it was this last generation of metal musicians who first self-consciously marketed themselves as "heavy metal" bands. By the mid-1980s, as the term "heavy metal" became the subject of much contestation, heavy metal had branched out in so many different directions that new sub-classifications were created by fans, record companies, and fanzines, although sometimes the differences between various sub-genres were unclear, even to the artists purportedly belonging to a given style (see List of heavy metal genres). Notable early 80s sub-genres where the overarching term "heavy metal" is occasionally still in use include the faster thrash metal, pioneered by the 'Big Four Of Thrash' (including Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer, with San Francisco quintet Testament sometimes being included in this group), and a hard-edged form of pop-metal (sometimes categorised pejoratively by purists as hair metal), from bands like Guns N' Roses and Def Leppard that brought pop-friendly music to mainstream audiences (to a mix of critical acclaim, mainstream popularity and purist disavowal).

Later styles of heavy rock music in the 1990s, such as grunge (the typical example being Seattle's Nirvana), show influences of heavy metal but are typically not labelled sub-genres of heavy metal, as opposed to thrash metal and hair metal. The general absence of virtuosic guitar solos is perhaps one reason grunge bands have not been considered heavy metal bands. Later work by Megadeth, combined the relentless, speedy thrash metal riffs with the fancy guitar soloing of classic metal ala Judas Priest.

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Heavy metal dance styles

Although most heavy metal fans would disagree with the term "dance," there are certain body movements that are nearly universal in the metal world, including:

Headbanging
Moshing


Crowd surfing
Air guitar
Stage diving

Nicknames for heavy metal fans

Headbanger (or just 'banger)
Metalhead
Metaller
Mosher
Rocker
Hammer head
Thrasher (mainly one who listens to Trash metal)
Hessian/Hesher

[CheshmAsali]

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[Rasputin]

Mona ye niga bendaz inja .

[Michellica]

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[green_president2004]

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