I love my 80s metal! The 70s had some pretty good **** as well though.

As far as I remember, it was coined to refer to the song "Whole Lotta Love" Whether that phrase came at the time or much later on I`m not sure, but I`m sure even the reference to that song is debatable though.

The differentiating between heavy metal and hard rock though, is far more open to personal opinion. Scorpions, UFO, Rainbow, Kiss, Van Halen, AC/DC, Uriah Heep etc to name just a few, often get labelled as one or the other and usually as both.

Good insight! ^, Despite this differentiation, hard rock and heavy metal have existed side by side, with bands frequently standing on the boundary of, or crossing between, the genres. Hard Rock is a derivative to Heavy Metal.

Anybody into 80`s metal, would probably like all of those above groups, as they were all pretty much influential on the metal scene at that time.

Another way of looking at it is the British and American models of what was heavy metal as they were very different:

British-Leather, chains, denim, satanic messages, sword & scorcery etc and shaking your fist at the audience (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Rainbow despite having an American vocalist)

American- Glam, make-up, theatrical, glamouros as opposed to glam and more open to pop elements (Kiss, Alice Cooper, Van Halen)

Even the so called American version of Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult were really just in essence a hard rock biker band, but because they sang about dark musings etc they got labelled metal or proto-metal.

Long before that.
It was coined in the late 60s to describe American bands like Mountain, Steppenwolf & Vanilla Fudge and bands like that who were heavier than most other bands around at the time who were popular with bikers & hells angels.

In that case we could say 1967, as that was the year the debut Vanilla Fudge album came out, and its always described as a key proto-metal album, despite the fact its full of covers. The likes of Steppenwolf, Mountain, Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly all groups that played heavy at that time had their debuts out in 68 and 69, so late 60`s would be right.

"Whole Lotta Love" was out in 1969 and probably had the biggest impact both sides of the atlantic, probably for this reason it was referred to as the first heavy metal song! Which is an oxymoron, considering that the above groups were putting heavy stuff out before that.

Ok, after spending about 15 minutes trying to hunt down the source of the term, it appears as though nobody has any idea. Seriously. Although this isn't the only place I looked, I refer you all to the wikipedia article. The first sentence is "The origin of the term heavy metal in a musical context is uncertain."

Heavy metal music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The article is debatable, but the one thing that most articles like this have in common, is that they agree, that it started amongst bands that were playing either blues rock or psychedelic rock loudly. Hence the term dating back to the 67 or 68 era.

Explain why it couldn`t be the 90`s? I think a lot of great metal came out in the 90`s, and its probably my favourite decade for metal.

The 90s definitely had some good metal but unfortunately I think it also had the largest amount of shitty metal out of any decade. For my money I'd actually say the 00s were my favorite decade for metal so far. The variety and level of creativity in the past decade was really astonishing.