Leonard Pierce of the very excellent
avclub.com recently came out with this very excellent primer on heavy metal that I thought was good enough to share with you jokers. Here it is...
Heavy Metal
Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: heavy metal, organized by the major subgenres that have developed over the five decades of its existence. Moving from the best-known examples of heavy music to the deepest pits of black Satanic noise, we’ll conclude with five essential albums that belong in the music library of anyone who likes it hard.
Metal 101
Even casual fans know that the biggest name in heavy metal’s early days was Black Sabbath, and even today, Ozzy Osbourne and his Birmingham cohorts are widely considered the founding fathers of everything awesome about metal. But with so many years’ remove, it’s easy to forget what made this early form of metal so compelling: downtuned guitars, heavy bass, and crushing drums, and solos heavily influenced by, of all things, the blues—all slowed way, way down. Though it didn’t have the name at the time, Sabbath revolutionized music by inventing what would later be known as doom metal: a heady blend of a pounding rhythm section, guitars tuned chillingly low, and fearful, doomstruck lyrics, played slow enough so listeners had time to appreciate whatever drugs were coursing through their systems. By the 1990s, a new wave of doom metal would arise, tinged with the psychedelic heaviness of American bands like Pentagram and spearheaded by Electric Wizard, another Birmingham band that followed in the ironclad footsteps of Sabbath. A few years later, a number of bands concentrated largely in California ramped up the fuzzy tones, cranked up the heavy, and saturated everything in a sticky-slow haze of weed smoke, and stoner rock was born; Kyuss and its High Desert compatriots typified the genre, while Sleep took it to extremes and Earthless stripped away the frills, leaving nothing but pure, punishing heavy rock.
By the mid-1970s, a number of bands, particularly in Britain, were still drug-stuffed and in love with loudness as ever, but they were beginning to tire of playing slow and low. Retaining the rugged, rock-steady rhythm sections, they tuned their guitars up-up-up, and most of all, they got faster. The music they started making in the late 1970s was called speed metal, and it quickly became one of metal’s first global genres. The master of the form, then and now, is Motörhead, which was at the advance guard of the metal umlaut and set the loud-fast-rules aesthetic for decades to come. Lemmy throttled his bass like a lead guitar, and kicked the whole medium into overdrive. A few years later, a number of American bands mostly operating in the Bay Area took the basic elements of speed and applied them to the rhythm section as well; the heavy suffered, but the metal increased, as bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Exodus, and Anthrax popularized the finger-cracking, shredding guitar solo and brought thrash metal into existence.
While American bands turned the speed-metal aesthetic into thrash by throwing the hyperspeed switch and emphasizing technical acumen, a generation of English bands applied surprisingly poppy song structures along with a snotty, sneering, anti-authoritarian attitude to create the new wave of British heavy metal. The two scenes fed off each other, but ironically, the British movement met with more chart success in the United States, making millionaires out of bands like Saxon, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. Their slashing, dual-guitar attack and willingness to embrace the excess of the metal scene helped NWOBHM bands define the genre for decades to come.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, a number of bands concentrated in the Sunset Strip area embraced the wicked excess of NWOBHM and the flashy guitar solos of thrash, but abandoned any pretense of darkness or edge, instead embracing a wild party-time aesthetic that could only have become huge in the 1980s. Their genre started out as a more-or-less international phenomenon known as glam metal, which combined the sleazy, androgynous decadence of ’70s glam rock with speed-metal musicianship. But by the time it arrived in Hollywood, bands like Hanoi Rocks and Quiet Riot had given way to poppy, power-ballad-heavy groups like Warrant, Poison, and Great White. Traditional metal fans hated them, denigrating them as hair metal, but the bands scored huge chart successes. Their musical merit is, surprisingly, still a topic of some debate.
Just as hair metal dominated the charts in its heyday while being critically vilified, metalcore looms over today’s heavy scene, selling millions to Hot Topic shoppers while drawing the ire of traditional metalheads. Growing out of the post-hardcore scene, where bands like Cave In, Earth Crisis, and Time In Malta fused the melodic intensity and flashy play of thrash with the rhythms, vocals, and lyrical concerns of hardcore punk, metalcore prettied up the whole style, dressing it in the latest fashions and adding a strong melodic influence. If a band blends pop-metal hooks and hardcore breakdowns, combines the death-metal growl with “clean” (that is, traditionally sung) vocals, and has a long, awkward-sounding name, it just might be metalcore. But not every metalcore band deserves the “mall metal” tag; some worthwhile bands have emerged from the scene, including Bullet For My Valentine and the thrash-inspired God Forbid. Micro-genres have also emerged from metalcore, including deathcore (melodic death metal with a strong metalcore element), best heard in the Swedish “Gothenburg sound” of At The Gates and In Flames, and screamo, a much-denigrated blend of punk, metal, and emo.