The Rise of Metal!

Atualizado: 24 de mar. de 2021

So, what did you think of that? Excited to learn more or was the video enough to scare you? I hope not, because there’s so much more to this heavy music genre than what the video showed! So buckle up and let me take you on a trip to the beginning of Metal!

The origin of Metal is a highly debated topic in the music communities and to get to his transition point we first need to understand the early history of the genre. While many trace its origins to the 1960s Rock Movement, the groundwork for it was laid a generation earlier. Like so much music, Metal can trace its earliest roots to the Blues in the 1950s!

Musicians of that time began to play with heavier sounds in their music. Artists like Joe Hill-Lewis and Pat Hare played with heavier and heavier distortion creating an angry sound out of their guitars. Check out James Cotton’s “Cotton Crop Blues” for an idea of the sound:

Pat Hare also had a song called “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby”, foreshadowing the morbid subject matters that would become a staple of Metal music. This distortion then became essential to the Surf Rock movement coming out of America in the early 1960s. Ah, such a fun era!

While Surf Rock may seem like an unlikely place for Metal origins, it provided more use of distortion and, notably, riffs that used fast-picked guitar. Check out Dick Dale’s timeless “Misirlou”, which you’ll probably recognize if you’re a fan of Quentin Tarantino or The Black Eyed Peas:

And while these influences may have laid the early groundwork, Metal really started to come about in the late 60s with some of the most famous Rock bands of all time! These bands usually came out of England and were heavily influenced by the grit of American Blues. A group like The Who started playing with faster tempos and heavier distortion. They were all about pushing their music to louder, heavier places.

When The Who released “I Can See For Miles”, one reviewer famously described it as the heaviest song he had ever heard! Well, if you listen to it now it might not seem that heavy, but at that time it was! Legend says that The Beatles’ Paul McCartney read that review and took it as a challenge! And so the next year The Beatles released “Helter Skelter”, a positively thunderous song.

The song had a pummelling baseline, thick distortion and harsh shouted vocals. It was no surprise that a lot of people point it as an early influencer of Metal music! Alongside these bands, the trio Cream was also trying their hand at heavier music, but, and with all due respect to these bands, none of them really hold the title of the heaviest song of the era! That was accomplished by the psychedelic blues band Blue Cheer, which recorded a cover of the Eddie Cochran song “Summertime Blues”, check it out:

Blue Cheer’s take on that song was deep, dark and loud. To this day, many people consider “Summertime Blues” the first real Heavy Metal song! The cover was released in 1968, which became a really important year for Metal music.

Alongside “Summertime Blues”, that year saw the release of two more songs, often called, the first Metal song: Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”, which taps into motorcycle culture, an aesthetic that Metal would draw from frequently over the next few decades, and, perhaps most importantly, the song features the line “Heavy Metal Thunder”. While Steppenwolf wasn’t using the phrase to describe music, it stuck! And soon people started applying it to the up-and-coming genre.

Metal found even more staples with the release of Iron Butterfly’s 17 minute epic “In-a-gadda-da-vida”, with Doug Ingles’ iconic vocals giving an idea of what’s to come in Metal music!

Now Metal is finally getting shape! What might be more important than the songs released this year, is the new bands that were created: Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Though you don’t often hear Zeppelin described as Heavy Metal today, they were one of the groups that brought the term into the public eye! Their debut album draws from Electric Blues but cranks up the volume and tempo. A song like “Communication Breakdown” was essential to the development of Metal as a genre:

And what happens when you have a generation come of age in an economically depressed industrial town during an era of lost innocence? Well, Black Sabbath happens! The band forged an entirely new and unique musical path, marked by Tony Iommi’s brooding guitar riffs, made even darker by his false plastic fingertips that let him bend the strings like no other; Geezer Butler’s intelligent lyrics and thundering bass; Bill Ward’s pounding drums; and Ozzy Osbourne’s, well, Ozzy.

Black Sabbath started to use images of satanism and witchcraft in their music, as well as openly addressing socially taboo subjects ranging from political corruption to recreational drug use to social ostracization. Unlike some other artists who went heavy for individual songs, this was an entire album of Metal! By listening to something like “Wicked World”, it’s easy to notice that it is undoubtedly Metal (more specifically, Doom Metal):

Black Sabbath set the standard as the first proper Heavy Metal band!

Meanwhile, something was brewing in Hertford, just north of London. A quintet by the name of Deep Purple, which alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, helped establish and define Heavy Metal as a genre while simultaneously challenging its limits and conventions.

With the musical foundation laid by Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, it was only a matter of time before someone synthesized Heavy Metal into a complete and proper ethos. And there’s where Judas Priest appears! A band that successfully combined the darkness and intensity of Black Sabbath with the musicality and complexity of Deep Purple.

However, the lasting legacy of Judas Priest was the introduction of the indelible image of Heavy Metal: leather and studs! Co-opted from London’s Soho gay club scene, Rob Halford (who is openly gay) incorporated the fashion into Priest’s stage show in the late 1970s. No one could anticipate at the time that the look would become synonymous with Heavy Metal. Nevertheless, Metal now had a look that matched the power and intensity of its sound!

We're in the early 1980s now and Heavy Metal has gotten a lot faster and a whole lot more aggressive, and because of the aggressiveness and creativity displayed on some shows, Metal was popularized beyond the UK.

Later on, in the mid-80s, people decided that Heavy Metal wasn't fast enough, wasn't hard enough, and that it wasn't as loud as it should be. This led to a sub-genre of Metal called Thrash. Along with the heaviness and intenseness Heavy Metal usually have, they incorporated complex riffs that they play at an incredible speed! Megadeth's "Holy War" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets" are great examples of what Thrash is.

This sub-genre would later be deemed as too extreme for the mainstream audience, so some of the big names in the Thrash industry had to go for a more streamlined approach to their music so they could attract people that weren't exactly Metalheads.

Metallica, for example, was successful with their song "Enter Sandman" and Megadeth with the song "Symphony of Destruction".

Some of the big names in Heavy Metal were able to have successful careers onwards, but because of the fame that Grunge had, Metal was starting to decline in popularity! And with that, a lot of Heavy Metal bands simply stopped making music. But some people say that this leave of absence was something that Metal needed.

It wasn't until the 21st century that we saw a resurgence of Heavy Metal! This is the time when we can see a lot of variants in Metal, such as Death Metal, Power Metal, etc.

(I'll leave a video about this at the end of this post)

Now let's take a look at some myths concerning Metal! There have been a bunch of stereotypes surrounding this particular genre that state that Heavy Metal is just a bunch of discordant guitar riffs with a bunch of screaming (that’s hurtful!), that it is a bad influence for children (it’s as much of a bad influence as any other music genre!), or even that Heavy Metal music is satanic and anti-religion.

People say that Metal bands are full of people that are always angry and hate everyone, etc. (go listen to some Metal Ballades, and then we can talk about feelings). Others state that Metal doesn’t need any skill to play (what?!), because with the guitar you have distortions to hide your mistakes and all you need to do is scream on the mic (I don’t have enough energy to comment anymore). Totally untrue!

You know, there was a time in which I was a little insecure about Metal fans too, more specifically, about what to expect of them when I went to my first Heavy Metal Festival! I was a bit nervous at first when I got there and saw the typical Metalheads everywhere… black t-shirts, black pants, black (leather) jackets, and (incredible!) black boots, not that I wasn’t expecting it, but still it was a unique view!

And you know what? Suddenly I wasn’t nervous anymore, because I realized how, besides the “scary and crazy” figure (oh yeah, I saw some seriously crazy things that day, like a woman pulling a man on a leash!), no one seemed to be looking for trouble. On the opposite, they seemed happy and fun, and above all things, proud and confident about the way they looked! I felt comfortable and somehow understood there, as no one seemed to care about being different.

It was one of the best days of my life! Everyone there was so nice… you know, appearance can be really deceiving! Even the police seemed at ease… there was this lady, all Rock'n Roll, that after the police told her she couldn’t enter the concert zone with food, she started offering her sandwiches to everyone around! It was curious to realize how such a supposedly loud crowd could be so calm and respectful at the same time!

I’m not saying that no one was drunk, because that’s a lie (hey, what were you expecting, it’s a music festival we’re talking about!), but everyone respected each other's space. So I can assure you that Metal fans are just like everyone else, just because they like to wear black or have a lot of tattoos and long beards, it doesn’t mean that they're aggressive or bad people.

Hey, I’m not trying to get you to love Metal, but I’m hoping to change your view about it so that you might want to give it a shot sometime!

Being a Metalhead isn’t about getting drunk or being aggressive, it’s about being yourself! And if you don’t like Metal, that’s totally fine too! Just don't say that without actually giving it a chance (please!). You have the liberty to choose what you like and what you don’t. That being said, my objective with this post is to introduce you to this genre that I really love and, hopefully, make you want to give it a shot! Maybe start with something softer, like a Metal Ballade or with Symphonic Metal (my personal favorite!), believe me when I say that there’s nothing more satisfying than listening to the junction of a Metal band with an Orchestra! It’s simply crazy!

And also, don’t you think that to be a Metalhead you’ll always have to dress in black or have all those stereotypical characteristics of a Metal fan to be one! Hey, look at me, for example… I like the rainbow color and I still consider myself a Metalhead! So try and be yourself and do things you really like, even though other people might not agree with/understand you!

Be proud of who you are! And if you aren’t yet, do what you can to be, because no one can decide for you!

(except your parents… be kind to them!)

Bye, see you next time!

Curiosity: Portugal has its own super metal band... Moonspell! They're a key figure in Gothic Metal and the first Portuguese metal band to have a record certified gold status!