Heavy metal music

• 1. Introduction

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  Heavy metal began with three British bands founded in 1968: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Critics often derided them, even as wide audiences gathered. The sound they helped shape was thick and monumental. It leaned on distorted guitars, extended solos, emphatic beats, and sheer loudness. One psychologist, Jeffrey Arnett, called a metal concert the sensory equivalent of war. Where did this loud, dark, divisive music come from? Why did it splinter into death metal, black metal, thrash, glam, doom, and power metal, each with its own code? And why have parents, police, courts, and a U.S. Senate committee all tried, in their own ways, to silence it? The answers begin in the blues clubs of Memphis and stretch to church burnings in Norway.

• 2. Forging The Sound

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  Pat Hare captured a grittier, nastier, more ferocious electric guitar sound on James Cotton's "Cotton Crop Blues" in 1954. That tone, traced through early 1950s Memphis blues guitarists like Joe Hill Louis and Willie Johnson, points toward metal's quintessential riff-driven style. Link Wray's 1958 instrumental "Rumble" and Dick Dale's early-1960s surf rock pushed it further.

  The Kinks helped popularize the loud, distorted guitar sound with their 1964 hit "You Really Got Me." Around them, the Who's Pete Townshend and the Yardbirds' Jeff Beck experimented with feedback, while British bands sped up covers of American blues. The Who's bigger-louder-wall-of-Marshalls approach proved seminal to the volume that metal would demand.

  Cream, the British power trio, derived a massive, heavy sound from unison riffing between guitarist Eric Clapton and bassist Jack Bruce, with Ginger Baker's double bass drumming behind them. Their albums Fresh Cream in 1966 and Disraeli Gears in 1967 are regarded as essential prototypes. The Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut Are You Experienced was also highly influential, and its single "Purple Haze" is named by some as the first heavy metal hit.

  Acid rock, the rawest and most intense side of psychedelic rock, fed directly into the new style. American garage bands like the 13th Floor Elevators epitomized its droning riffs, amplified feedback, and occasionally demented lyrics. As Frank Hoffman put it, when rock turned back to softer sounds in late 1968, acid-rock bands mutated into heavy metal acts. One of those bands, Coven, opened for Vanilla Fudge and the Yardbirds while portraying themselves as practitioners of witchcraft, and their 1969 debut Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls marked the first appearance in rock of the sign of the horns.

• 3. The Unholy Trinity

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  Blue Cheer released a cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" in January 1968, on their debut Vincebus Eruptum, and many consider it the first true heavy metal recording. As Blue Cheer's Dick Peterson put it, all they knew was that they wanted more power. That same month, Steppenwolf's self-titled debut carried "Born to Be Wild," whose lyric about heavy metal thunder described a motorcycle.

  Led Zeppelin made its live debut in Denmark in September 1968, billed as the New Yardbirds. Its self-titled debut reached No. 10 on the Billboard album chart in January 1969. The band defined central aspects of the genre through guitarist Jimmy Page's highly distorted style and singer Robert Plant's dramatic, wailing vocals.

  Birmingham's Black Sabbath developed a particularly heavy sound after guitarist Tony Iommi lost the ends of two fingers in a work accident. Unable to play normally, he tuned his guitar down for easier fretting and relied on power chords. The bleak, industrial, working-class environment of Birmingham, full of noisy factories and metalworking, has itself been credited with shaping that chugging, metallic sound. Their 1970 self-titled album is generally accepted as the first heavy metal album, followed the same year by Paranoid.

  Deep Purple, the third band in what is sometimes called the unholy trinity, fluctuated between rock styles until late 1969. Vocalist Ian Gillan and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore then steered it toward heavy metal, and 1970's Deep Purple in Rock proved crucial. In 1973, Deep Purple released "Smoke on the Water," whose riff is usually considered the most recognizable in heavy rock history.

• 4. Anatomy Of Heaviness

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  The guitar power chord is one of the signatures of the genre. In technical terms it is simple, involving one main interval, generally the perfect fifth, though an octave may be doubled on the root. Played loud and distorted on low strings, it generates extra low-frequency sound and an effect of overwhelming power. Guitarists keep gain at moderate levels for classic tone, retaining open spaces and air while turning the amplifier up loud for punch and grind.

  Traditional heavy metal tends to employ modal scales, particularly the Aeolian and Phrygian modes. The tritone, an interval spanning three whole tones such as C to F sharp, was considered extremely dissonant by medieval and Renaissance theorists, who nicknamed it diabolus in musica, the devil in music. According to Robert Walser, metal's harmonic relationships are often quite complex, and the analysis done by metal players and teachers is often very sophisticated.

  The bass plays a more important role in heavy metal than in any other genre of rock, providing the low end that makes the music heavy. Metallica's Cliff Burton popularized the bass as a lead instrument in the early 1980s, with heavy emphasis on solos and chords. Lemmy of Motorhead often played overdriven power chords in his bass lines.

  Heavy metal drumming relies on a trifecta of speed, power, and precision, and requires exceptional endurance. A characteristic technique is the cymbal choke, striking a cymbal then immediately silencing it by grabbing it. Black metal, death metal, and some mainstream metal bands all depend on double-kicks and blast beats, with tempos reaching a quarter note at 350 beats per minute. Where the elements of pop and house are melody and rhythm, sociologist Deena Weinstein argues that powerful sound, timbre, and volume are the key elements of metal.

• 5. Naming The Beast

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  William S. Burroughs gave modern culture an early use of the term, with a character called Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid, in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine. His 1964 novel Nova Express developed the theme, using heavy metal as a metaphor for addictive drugs. Inspired by his books, the phrase appeared in the title of a 1967 album by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, claimed by some to be its first musical use.

  Sandy Pearlman lifted the phrase to describe the Byrds and their supposed aluminium style. His February 1967 Crawdaddy review of the Rolling Stones declared that the Stones go metal, that technology is in the saddle. Steppenwolf's 1968 "Born to Be Wild" gave the first use in a song lyric.

  Metal Mike Saunders used the term in print early. In the 12th of November 1970 issue of Rolling Stone he called Humble Pie a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-leaden shit-rock band, and dismissed their latest release as more of the same 27th-rate heavy metal crap. Lester Bangs of Creem is credited with popularizing the term through his early 1970s essays on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

  For years the phrase was nearly an automatic putdown. In 1979, a lead New York Times critic, John Rockwell, called heavy-metal rock brutally aggressive music played mostly for minds clouded by drugs. Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward coined an earlier label, downer rock, applied to Sabbath and Bloodrock, a culture that Classic Rock magazine linked to Quaaludes and wine.

• 6. Mainstream Ascent

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  Sales of heavy metal records declined sharply in the late 1970s, squeezed by punk, disco, and mainstream rock. Yet newer British bands absorbed punk's aggressive, high-energy sound and do-it-yourself ethos. Motorhead, founded in 1975, was the first important band to straddle the punk-metal divide.

  Sounds writer Geoff Barton christened the movement the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Def Leppard re-energized the genre, toughening the sound and emphasizing fast tempos. By 1980 the movement had broken into the mainstream, and in 1981 Motorhead topped the U.K. charts with the live album No Sleep til Hammersmith.

  Eddie Van Halen established himself as a leading guitarist of the era, his solo on "Eruption" from the band's 1978 debut considered a milestone. His sound crossed into pop when his guitar solo appeared on Michael Jackson's "Beat It," which reached No. 1 in the U.S. in February 1983. Inspired by that success, a scene grew on L.A.'s Sunset Strip, with bands like Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Ratt, and W.A.S.P.

  MTV began airing in 1981, and sales often soared when a band's videos screened. Quiet Riot became the first domestic heavy metal band to top the Billboard chart with Metal Health in 1983. Between 1983 and 1984, metal's share of all recordings sold in the U.S. rose from 8% to 20%. Kerrang! launched in 1981 and Metal Hammer in 1984. By 1985, Billboard declared that metal was no longer the exclusive domain of male teenagers, having grown older, younger, and more female. New Jersey's Bon Jovi then broke through with its third album, Slippery When Wet, in 1986.

• 7. Splinters In The Underground

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  Metallica brought thrash into the top 40 in 1986 with Master of Puppets, the genre's first Platinum record. Thrash had emerged in the early 1980s under the influence of hardcore punk and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, faster and more aggressive than the original bands. The Big Four of Thrash were Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer, while Germany's Kreator, Sodom, and Destruction carried the style to Europe. Slayer's Reign in Blood in 1986 brought heavier guitar timbres and explicit depictions of death and suffering.

  Death metal grew directly from Slayer's influence, according to MTV News, with the NWOBHM band Venom an important progenitor. Florida's Death, the Bay Area's Possessed, and Ohio's Necrophagia are recognized as seminal, all credited with inspiring the name. Possessed's 1984 demo was titled Death Metal, and the style favors guttural growls, down-tuned guitars, and blast beats. Deicide's Glen Benton branded an inverted cross on his forehead and wore armor on stage.

  Black metal's first wave rose in Europe in the early and mid-1980s, led by the United Kingdom's Venom, Denmark's Mercyful Fate, Switzerland's Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, and Sweden's Bathory. By the late 1980s, Norwegian bands like Mayhem and Burzum led a second wave, emphasizing shrieked vocals, tremolo picking, and intentionally lo-fi production. Some in the Scandinavian scene became linked to church burnings, and the 1993 murder of Mayhem's Euronymous by Burzum's Varg Vikernes provoked intensive media coverage.

  Power metal came together in the late 1980s, largely in reaction to the harshness of death and black metal, focused on upbeat, epic melodies. Germany's Helloween established the prototype with their 1987 and 1988 Keeper of the Seven Keys albums. Doom metal, meanwhile, rejected speed entirely, slowing its music to a crawl, with mid-1980s bands like California's Saint Vitus, Chicago's Trouble, and Sweden's Candlemass tracing their roots to early Black Sabbath. New York's Sunn O))) later crossed doom, drone, and dark ambient, a sound the New York Times compared to an Indian raga in the middle of an earthquake.

• 8. Trials And Tribes

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  Dee Snider, frontman of Twisted Sister, was asked in 1985 to defend his song "Under the Blade" at a U.S. Senate hearing. The Parents Music Resource Center alleged it was about sadomasochism and rape; Snider stated it was about his bandmate's throat surgery. That group had petitioned Congress to regulate the popular music industry over what it called objectionable lyrics, particularly in metal.

  Ozzy Osbourne was sued in 1986 over his song "Suicide Solution" by the parents of John McCollum, a depressed teenager who had died by suicide; Osbourne was not found responsible. In 1990, Judas Priest was sued over a claimed subliminal statement, do it, in a cover song, a case that drew media attention before being dismissed. In 1991, U.K. police seized death metal records from Earache Records in an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the label for obscenity.

  In some predominantly Muslim countries, heavy metal has been officially denounced as a threat to traditional values. Egyptian police jailed many young metal fans in 1997, accusing them of devil worship and blasphemy after finding recordings in their homes. In 2013, Malaysia banned Lamb of God from performing, on the grounds that the band's lyrics could be interpreted as religiously insensitive.

  Down-the-back long hair is the most crucial distinguishing feature of metal fashion, adopted from the hippie subculture. The uniform adds ripped blue jeans, black T-shirts emblazoned with band logos, boots, and leather or denim jackets. Vocalist Ronnie James Dio popularized the sign of the horns during his time with Black Sabbath and Dio. Rob Zombie observed that metal is outsider music for outsiders, the place where all the weird kids end up together, and scholars note that attending live concerts has been called the holiest of heavy metal communions.