In 1968, three bands emerged from the British and American underground to forge a sound that would redefine the limits of volume and distortion, yet critics initially dismissed them as noise. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple formed that year, creating a thick, monumental sonic architecture built on the back of blues rock, psychedelic rock, and acid rock. While these pioneers attracted wide audiences, they were often derided by music critics who found their music lacking in the melodic sophistication of the era. Black Sabbath, formed in the industrial city of Birmingham, developed a particularly heavy sound partly due to a work accident in which guitarist Tony Iommi lost the ends of two fingers. Unable to play normally, Iommi had to tune his guitar down for easier fretting and rely on power chords with their relatively simple fingering, creating a bleak, chugging, metallic sound that mirrored the noisy factories of his hometown. The 1970 releases by Black Sabbath, including the album Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Deep Purple in Rock, were crucial in codifying the genre, establishing the hallmarks of heavy metal that would persist for decades. The electric guitar and the sonic power it projects through amplification became the key element, with the heavy metal guitar sound coming from a combined use of high volumes and heavy fuzz. For classic heavy metal guitar tone, guitarists maintained gain at moderate levels to retain open spaces and air in the music, while the amplifier was turned up loud to produce the punch and grind characteristic of the style. The typical band lineup included a drummer, a bassist, a rhythm guitarist, a lead guitarist, and a singer, who may or may not be an instrumentalist, with keyboard instruments sometimes used to enhance the fullness of the sound. Deep Purple's Jon Lord played an overdriven Hammond organ, and by 1970, John Paul Jones used a Moog synthesizer on Led Zeppelin III, setting a precedent for the use of synthesizers in almost every subgenre of heavy metal by the 1990s.
The Evolution of Sound
During the mid-1970s, Judas Priest helped spur the genre's evolution by discarding much of its blues influence, taking the music straight into metal as a distinct entity. While Black Sabbath started the movement, Judas Priest were the ones who took it out of the blues and straight into metal, introducing a non-bluesy, more cleanly metallic sound with twin-guitar attacks and rapid tempos. Motörhead, founded in 1975, introduced a punk rock sensibility and an increasing emphasis on speed, straddling the punk and metal divide to create a raw, sleazy sound that would influence future generations. Beginning in the late 1970s, bands in the new wave of British heavy metal such as Iron Maiden and Saxon followed in a similar vein, toughening up the sound and reducing its blues elements to emphasize increasingly fast tempos. By the end of the decade, heavy metal fans became known as metalheads or headbangers, a subculture that would grow to define the genre's identity. The lyrics of some metal genres became associated with aggression and machismo, an issue that has at times led to accusations of misogyny, though critics like Andrew Cope have argued that claims of misogyny are clearly misguided. During the 1980s, glam metal became popular with groups such as Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, and Poison, incorporating the theatrics and sometimes makeup of earlier bands like Alice Cooper and Kiss. Meanwhile, underground scenes produced an array of more aggressive styles: thrash metal broke into the mainstream with bands such as Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, while other extreme subgenres such as death metal and black metal became and remain subcultural phenomena. Since the mid-1990s, popular styles have expanded the definition of the genre to include groove metal and nu metal, the latter of which often incorporates elements of grunge and hip-hop. The bass plays a more important role in heavy metal than in any other genre of rock, providing the low-end sound crucial to making the music heavy, with some bands featuring the bass as a lead instrument, an approach popularized by Metallica's Cliff Burton with his heavy emphasis on bass solos and use of chords while playing the bass in the early 1980s.
Heavy metal songs often make extensive use of the tritone, an interval spanning three whole tones such as C to F#, which was considered extremely dissonant and unstable by medieval and Renaissance music theorists and nicknamed the diabolus in musica or the devil in music. The thematic content of heavy metal has long been a target of criticism, with music critics often deeming metal lyrics juvenile and banal, and others objecting to what they see as advocacy of the occult and misogyny. During the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center petitioned the U.S. Congress to regulate the popular music industry due to what the group asserted were objectionable lyrics, particularly those in heavy metal songs. In 1985, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider was asked to defend his song Under the Blade at a U.S. Senate hearing, where the PMRC alleged that the song was about sadomasochism and rape, though Snider stated that the song was about his bandmate's throat surgery. In 1986, Ozzy Osbourne was sued over the lyrics of his song Suicide Solution by the parents of John McCollum, a depressed teenager who committed suicide allegedly after listening to Osbourne's song, though Osbourne was not found to be responsible for the teen's death. In 1990, Judas Priest was sued in American court by the parents of two young men who had shot themselves five years earlier, allegedly after hearing the subliminal statement do it in the band's cover of the song Better by You, Better than Me, though the case was ultimately dismissed. In 1991, U.K. police seized death metal records from the British record label 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, and in countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Malaysia, there have been incidents of heavy metal musicians and fans being arrested and incarcerated. In 1997, the Egyptian police jailed many young metal fans, and they were accused of devil worship and blasphemy after police found metal recordings during searches of their homes. In 2013, Malaysia banned Lamb of God from performing in their country, on the grounds that the band's lyrics could be interpreted as being religiously insensitive and blasphemous. Some people consider heavy metal music to be a leading factor for mental health disorders, but a study from 2009 suggests that this is not true and that fans of heavy metal music suffer from poor mental health at a similar or lower rate compared to the general population.
The Uniform of the Outsider
For many artists and bands, visual imagery plays a large role in heavy metal, expressed in album cover art, logos, stage sets, clothing, design of instruments, and music videos. Down-the-back long hair is the most crucial distinguishing feature of metal fashion, originally adopted from the hippie subculture, but by the 1980s and 1990s, heavy metal hair symbolized the hate, angst, and disenchantment of a generation that seemingly never felt at home. The classic uniform of heavy metal fans consists of light-colored, ripped, frayed, or torn blue jeans, black T-shirts, boots, and black leather or denim jackets, with T-shirts generally emblazoned with the logos or other visual representations of favorite metal bands. In the 1980s, a range of sources from punk rock and goth music to horror films influenced metal fashion, and many metal performers of the 1970s and 1980s used radically shaped and brightly colored instruments to enhance their stage appearance. Fashion and personal style was especially important for glam metal bands of the era, with performers typically wearing long, dyed, hairspray-teased hair, makeup such as lipstick and eyeliner, gaudy clothing including leopard-skin-printed shirts or vests and tight denim, leather, or spandex pants, and accessories such as headbands and jewelry. Pioneered by the heavy metal act X Japan in the late 1980s, bands in the Japanese movement known as visual kei, which includes many non-metal groups, emphasize elaborate costumes, hair, and makeup. When performing live, many metal musicians and the audience for whom they're playing engage in headbanging, which involves rhythmically beating time with the head, often emphasized by long hair. The sign of the horns hand gesture was popularized by vocalist Ronnie James Dio during his time with the bands Black Sabbath and Dio, though Gene Simmons of Kiss claims to have been the first to make the gesture on the 1977 Love Gun album cover. Attendees of metal concerts do not dance in the usual sense, using two primary body movements: headbanging and an arm thrust that is both a sign of appreciation and a rhythmic gesture. The performance of air guitar is popular among metal fans both at concerts and listening to records at home, while thrash metal concerts have two elements that are not part of the other metal genres: moshing and stage diving, which were imported from the punk/hardcore subculture.
The Subculture of Alienation
It has been argued that heavy metal has outlasted many other rock genres largely due to the emergence of an intense, exclusionary, and strongly masculine subculture. While the metal fan base is largely young, white, male, and blue-collar, the group is tolerant of those outside its core demographic base who follow its codes of dress, appearance, and behavior. Identification with the subculture is strengthened not only by the group experience of concert-going and shared elements of fashion, but also by contributing to metal magazines and, more recently, websites. Attending live concerts in particular has been called the holiest of heavy metal communions, with the metal scene characterized as a subculture of alienation with its own code of authenticity. This code puts several demands on performers: they must appear both completely devoted to their music and loyal to the subculture that supports it, they must appear uninterested in mainstream appeal and radio hits, and they must never sell out. Deena Weinstein stated that for the fans themselves, the code promotes opposition to established authority and separateness from the rest of society. Musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie observed that most of the kids who come to his shows seem like really imaginative kids with a lot of creative energy they don't know what to do with, and that metal is outsider music for outsiders. Scholars of metal have noted the tendency of fans to classify and reject some performers and some other fans as poseurs who pretended to be part of the subculture but who were deemed to lack authenticity and sincerity. The ties that bind the two bands Girlschool and Motörhead started in the 1980s and were still strong in the 2010s, with Enid Williams from Girlschool and Lemmy from Motörhead shown live in 2009, both singing and playing bass guitar. In the power metal and symphonic metal subgenres, there has been a sizable number of bands that have had women as the lead singers, such as Nightwish, Delain, and Within Temptation, and by the 2010s, women were making more of an impact, with PopMatters' Craig Hayes arguing that metal clearly empowers women.
The Etymology of Thunder
The origin of the term heavy metal in a musical context is uncertain, with the phrase having been used for centuries in chemistry and metallurgy where the periodic table organizes elements of both light and heavy metals. An early use of the term in modern popular culture was by countercultural writer William S. Burroughs, whose 1961 novel The Soft Machine includes a character known as Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid. Burroughs' next novel, Nova Express, developed the theme, using heavy metal as a metaphor for addictive drugs. Inspired by Burroughs' novels, the term was used in the title of the 1967 album Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, which has been claimed to be its first use in the context of music. The phrase was later lifted by Sandy Pearlman, who used the term to describe the Byrds for their supposed aluminium style of context and effect, particularly on their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Metal historian Ian Christe describes what the components of the term mean in hippiespeak: heavy is roughly synonymous with potent or profound, and metal designates a certain type of mood, grinding and weighted as with metal. The word heavy in this sense was a basic element of beatnik and later countercultural hippie slang, and references to heavy music, typically slower, more amplified variations of standard pop fare, were already common by the mid-1960s, such as in reference to Vanilla Fudge. Iron Butterfly's debut album, which was released in early 1968, was titled Heavy, and the first use of heavy metal in a song lyric is in reference to a motorcycle in the Steppenwolf song Born to Be Wild, also released that year. An early documented use of the phrase in rock criticism appears in Sandy Pearlman's February 1967 Crawdaddy review of the Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It, albeit as a description of the sound rather than as a genre. In the 11th of May 1968 issue of Rolling Stone, Barry Gifford wrote about the album A Long Time Comin' by U.S. band Electric Flag, describing it as the new soul music, the synthesis of white blues and heavy metal rock. In the 7th of September 1968 edition of the Seattle Daily Times, reviewer Susan Schwartz wrote that the Jimi Hendrix Experience has a heavy-metals blues sound. In January 1970, Lucian K. Truscott IV, reviewing Led Zeppelin II for the Village Voice, described the sound as heavy and made comparisons with Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge. Other early documented uses of the phrase are from reviews by critic Metal Mike Saunders, who in the 12th of November 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, commented on an album put out the previous year by the British band Humble Pie, describing them as a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-leaden shit-rock band. Creem critic Lester Bangs is credited with popularizing the term via his early 1970s essays on bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Through the decade, heavy metal was used by certain critics as a virtually automatic putdown, with 1979 lead New York Times popular music critic John Rockwell describing what he called heavy-metal rock as brutally aggressive music played mostly for minds clouded by drugs. Coined by Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, downer rock was one of the earliest terms used to describe this style of music and was applied to acts such as Sabbath and Bloodrock, with Classic Rock magazine describing the downer rock culture revolving around the use of Quaaludes and the drinking of wine. The term would later be replaced by heavy metal, and apart from acid rock, the terms heavy metal and hard rock have often been used interchangeably, particularly in discussing bands of the 1970s, a period when the terms were largely synonymous.
The Antecedents of Metal
Heavy metal's quintessential guitar style, which is built around distortion-heavy riffs and power chords, traces its roots to early 1950s Memphis blues guitarists such as Joe Hill Louis, Willie Johnson, and particularly Pat Hare, who captured a grittier, nastier, more ferocious electric guitar sound on records such as James Cotton's Cotton Crop Blues in 1954. Other early influences include the late 1950s instrumentals of Link Wray, particularly Rumble in 1958, the early 1960s surf rock of Dick Dale, including Let's Go Trippin' in 1961 and Misirlou in 1962, and the Kingsmen's version of Louie Louie in 1963, which became a garage rock standard. The genre's direct lineage begins in the mid-1960s, with American blues music being a major influence on the early British rockers of the era. Bands like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds developed blues rock by recording covers of classic blues songs, often speeding up the tempos, and as they experimented with the music, the UK blues-based bands and in turn the U.S. acts they influenced developed what would become the hallmarks of heavy metal. The Kinks played a major role in popularizing this sound with their 1964 hit You Really Got Me, and other guitarists such as the Who's Pete Townshend and the Yardbirds' Jeff Beck were experimenting with feedback. Where the blues rock drumming style started out largely as simple shuffle beats on small kits, drummers began using a more muscular, complex, and amplified approach to match and be heard against the increasingly loud guitar. Vocalists similarly modified their technique and increased their reliance on amplification, often becoming more stylized and dramatic. In terms of sheer volume, especially in live performance, the Who's bigger-louder-wall-of-Marshalls approach was seminal to the development of the later heavy metal sound. The combination of this loud and heavy blues rock with psychedelic rock and acid rock formed much of the original basis for heavy metal, with acid rock often defined as a heavier, louder, or harder variant of psychedelic rock. American acid rock garage bands such as the 13th Floor Elevators epitomized the frenetic, heavier, darker, and more psychotic psychedelic rock sound known as acid rock, a sound characterized by droning guitar riffs, amplified feedback, and guitar distortion. One of the most influential bands in forging the merger of psychedelic rock and acid rock with the blues rock genre was the British power trio Cream, who derived a massive, heavy sound from unison riffing between guitarist Eric Clapton and bassist Jack Bruce, as well as Ginger Baker's double bass drumming. Their first two LPs, Fresh Cream in 1966 and Disraeli Gears in 1967, are regarded as essential prototypes for the future style of heavy metal. The Jimi Hendrix Experience's debut album, Are You Experienced in 1967, was also highly influential, with Hendrix's virtuosic technique being emulated by many metal guitarists, and the album's most successful single, Purple Haze, being identified by some as the first heavy metal hit. Vanilla Fudge, whose first album also came out in 1967, has been called one of the few American links between psychedelia and what soon became heavy metal, and the band has been cited as an early American heavy metal group. On their self-titled debut album, Vanilla Fudge created loud, heavy, slowed-down arrangements of contemporary hit songs, blowing these songs up to epic proportions and bathing them in a trippy, distorted haze. During the late 1960s, many psychedelic singers, such as Arthur Brown, began to create outlandish, theatrical, and often macabre performances that influenced many metal acts. The American psychedelic rock band Coven, who opened for early heavy metal influencers such as Vanilla Fudge and the Yardbirds, portrayed themselves as practitioners of witchcraft or black magic, using dark, Satanic, or occult imagery in their lyrics, album art, and live performances, which consisted of elaborate, theatrical Satanic rites. Coven's 1969 debut album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, featured imagery of skulls, black masses, inverted crosses, and Satan worship, and both the album artwork and the band's live performances marked the first appearances in rock music of the sign of the horns, which would later become an important gesture in heavy metal culture.
The Codification of Metal
In 1968, the sound that would become known as heavy metal began to coalesce, with San Francisco band Blue Cheer releasing a cover of Eddie Cochran's classic Summertime Blues as a part of their debut album, Vincebus Eruptum, and many consider it to be the first true heavy metal recording. The same month, Steppenwolf released their self-titled debut album, on which the track Born to Be Wild refers to heavy metal thunder in describing a motorcycle. In July, the Jeff Beck Group, whose leader had preceded Page as the Yardbirds' guitarist, released its debut record, Truth, which featured some of the most molten, barbed, downright funny noises of all time, breaking ground for generations of metal guitarists. In September, Page's new band, Led Zeppelin, made its live debut in Denmark, but were billed as the New Yardbirds. The Beatles' double album The Beatles, released in November, included Helter Skelter, one of the heaviest-sounding songs released by a major band at that time. The Pretty Things' rock opera S.F. Sorrow, released in December, featured proto heavy metal songs such as Old Man Going and I See You. Iron Butterfly's 1968 song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is sometimes described as an example of the transition between acid rock and heavy metal or the turning point in which acid rock became heavy metal, and both Iron Butterfly's 1968 album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Blue Cheer's 1968 album Vincebus Eruptum have been described as laying the foundation of heavy metal and greatly influential in the transformation of acid rock into heavy metal. In this counterculture period, MC5, who began as part of the Detroit garage rock scene, developed a raw, distorted style that has been seen as a major influence on the future sound of both heavy metal and later punk music. The Stooges also began to establish and influence a heavy metal and later punk sound, with songs such as I Wanna Be Your Dog, featuring pounding and distorted heavy guitar power chord riffs. Pink Floyd released two of their heaviest and loudest songs to date, Ibiza Bar and The Nile Song, the latter of which being regarded as one of the heaviest songs the band recorded. King Crimson's debut album started with 21st Century Schizoid Man, which was considered heavy metal by several critics. In January 1969, Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album was released and reached No. 10 on the Billboard album chart. In July, Led Zeppelin and a power trio with a Cream-inspired, but cruder sound, called Grand Funk Railroad played the Atlanta Pop Festival. That same month, another Cream-rooted trio led by Leslie West released Mountain, an album filled with heavy blues rock guitar and roaring vocals. In August, the group, now itself dubbed Mountain, played an hour-long set at the Woodstock Festival, exposing the crowd of 300,000 people to the emerging sound of heavy metal. Though often identified now as hard rock, the band's official debut album, Mountain Climbing in 1970, placed 85th on the list of Top 100 Metal Albums compiled by Hit Parader in 1989. In November, Love Sculpture, with guitarist Dave Edmunds, put out Forms and Feelings, featuring a pounding, aggressive version of Aram Khachaturian's Sabre Dance. Grand Funk Railroad's Survival in 1971 placed 72nd, and Mountain's proto-metal or early heavy metal hit song Mississippi Queen from the album Climbing! is especially credited with paving the way for heavy metal and was one of the first heavy guitar songs to receive regular play on radio. In September 1969, the Beatles released the album Abbey Road containing the track I Want You She's So Heavy, which has been credited as an early example of or influence on heavy metal or doom metal. In October 1969, British band High Tide debuted with the heavy, proto-metal album Sea Shanties. Led Zeppelin defined central aspects of the emerging genre, with Page's highly distorted guitar style and singer Robert Plant's dramatic, wailing vocals. Other bands, with a more consistently heavy, purely metal sound, would prove equally important in codifying the genre. The 1970 releases by Black Sabbath, which is generally accepted as the first heavy metal album, and Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Deep Purple in Rock, were crucial in this regard. Birmingham's Black Sabbath had developed a particularly heavy sound in part due to a work accident in which guitarist Tony Iommi lost the ends of two fingers. Unable to play normally, Iommi had to tune his guitar down for easier fretting and rely on power chords with their relatively simple fingering. The bleak, industrial, working-class environment of Birmingham, a manufacturing city full of noisy factories and metalworking, has itself been credited with influencing Black Sabbath's heavy, chugging, metallic sound and the sound of heavy metal in general. Deep Purple had fluctuated between styles in its early years, but by 1969, vocalist Ian Gillan and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had led the band toward the developing heavy metal style. In 1970, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple scored major U.K. chart hits with Paranoid and Black Night, respectively. That same year, two other British bands released debut albums in a heavy metal mode: Uriah Heep with ...Very 'Eavy... Very 'Umble and UFO with UFO 1. Bloodrock released their self-titled debut album, a collection of heavy guitar riffs, gruff style vocals, and sadistic and macabre lyrics. The influential Budgie brought the new metal sound into a power trio context, creating some of the heaviest music of the time. The occult lyrics and imagery employed by Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep would prove particularly influential, and Led Zeppelin also began foregrounding such elements with its fourth album, released in 1971. In 1973, Deep Purple released the song Smoke on the Water, whose iconic riff is usually considered as the most recognizable one in heavy rock history, as a single of the classic live album Made in Japan. On the other side of the Atlantic, the trendsetting group was Grand Funk Railroad, who was described as the most commercially successful American heavy-metal band from 1970 until they disbanded in 1976, establishing the Seventies success formula of continuous touring. Other influential bands identified with metal emerged in the U.S. such as Sir Lord Baltimore, Blue Öyster Cult, Aerosmith, and Kiss. Sir Lord Baltimore's 1970 debut album and both Humble Pie's debut and self-titled third album were among the first albums to be described in print as heavy metal, with As Safe As Yesterday Is referred to by the term heavy metal in a 1970 review in Rolling Stone magazine. In Germany, Scorpions debuted with Lonesome Crow in 1972. Blackmore, who had emerged as a virtuoso soloist with Deep Purple's highly influential album Machine Head in 1972, left the band in 1975 to form Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, singer and bassist for blues rock band Elf and future vocalist for Black Sabbath and heavy metal band Dio. Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio would expand on the mystical and fantasy-based lyrics and themes sometimes found in heavy metal, pioneering both power metal and neoclassical metal. These bands also built audiences via constant touring and increasingly elaborate stage shows. There are arguments about whether these and other early bands truly qualify as heavy metal or simply as hard rock. Those closer to the music's blues roots or placing greater emphasis on melody are now commonly ascribed the latter label. AC/DC, which debuted with High Voltage in 1975, is a prime example, with the 1983 Rolling Stone encyclopedia entry beginning, Australian heavy-metal band AC/DC. Rock historian Clinton Walker wrote, Calling AC/DC a heavy metal band in the seventies was as inaccurate as it is today. They were a rock 'n' roll band that just happened to be heavy enough for metal. The issue is not only one of shifting definitions, but also a persistent distinction between musical style and audience identification. Ian Christe describes how the band became the stepping-stone that led huge numbers of hard rock fans into heavy metal perdition. In certain cases, there is little debate. After Black Sabbath, the next major example is Britain's Judas Priest, which debuted with Rocka Rolla in 1974. In Christe's description, Black Sabbath's audience was left to scavenge for sounds with similar impact. By the mid-1970s, heavy metal aesthetic could be spotted, like a mythical beast, in the moody bass and complex dual guitars of Thin Lizzy, in the stagecraft of Alice Cooper, in the sizzling guitar and showy vocals of Queen, and in the thundering medieval questions of Rainbow. Judas Priest arrived to unify and amplify these diverse highlights from hard rock's sonic palette. For the first time, heavy metal became a true genre unto itself. Though Judas Priest did not have a top 40 album in the United States until 1980, for many it was the definitive post-Sabbath heavy metal band, its twin-guitar attack, featuring rapid tempos and a non-bluesy, more cleanly metallic sound, being a major influence on later acts. While heavy metal was growing in popularity, most critics were not enamored of the music. Objections were raised to metal's adoption of visual spectacle and other trappings of commercial artifice, but the main offense was its perceived musical and lyrical vacuity. Reviewing a Black Sabbath album in the early 1970s, Robert Christgau described it as dull and decadent, dim-witted, amoral exploitation.