THE HISTORY OF HEAVY METAL 1

Heavy metal music, born fighting, rose out of popular music in opposition to both the dominant culture and the rock counterculture. Its heritage was equal parts the heavy guitar rock that replaced the blues, progressive rock and the neoclassical sounds of horror movie music. Its name, composed of "heavy" meaning epic and having emotional weight outside the individual, and metal, meaning the gritty mechanical truth of reality, signified its sound and message: a wake up call to hippies and bourgeois listeners alike that reality is not the simplified, individualistic, pleasure-seeking consumerist illusion.

1968-1978
[Heavy Metal 1969-1978 started with proto-metal band Black Sabbath and expanded into a fusion of proto-metal and hard rock called heavy metal, but really a hybrid of rock and metal that became large in stadium rock, driving metal underground with Motorhead]

First bands like Blue Cheer demonstrated the distorted sound, then Iggy Pop and the Stooges brought proto-punk into the equation, then progressive rock bands like King Crimson and Jethro Tull expanded on the idea, and finally, Black Sabbath released the first heavy metal album in 1970, Black Sabbath. Following this, bands merged the Led Zeppelin style of Celtic folk-influenced hard rock with the Gothic horror movie soundtrack-influenced Black Sabbath, and created the first genre heavy metal, a rock hybrid which immediately began to typecast itself and drove the creation of underground metal with Motorhead.

1979-1987
[Heavy Metal 1979-1987 saw heavy metal split into the extreme version, 'metal', and the hard rock that would dominate the radio but be called 'heavy metal,' at the same time offspining Motorhead-inspired punk hardcore hybrids like speed metal band Metallica and thrash band Dirty Rotten Imbeciles]

Heavy metal became popular in the 1970s and got absorbed by the hedonistic, individualistic, pleasure-seeking culture of the time. This produced a type of stadium heavy metalish rock that sold well but lost sight of the artistic ambitions of the genre. At the same time, bands like Motorhead and the Sex Pistols were popularizing the punk sound that had intensified since innovators like MC5, Iggy Pop and Link Wray began experimenting with it in the 1960s. In response, the more alert heavy metal bands added more gothic and neoclassical elements to distinguish themselves from the fray. The fusion of these two threads, hardcore punk and neoclassical heavy metal, produced an explosion of genres, but only two, speed metal and thrash, matured directly.

At the same time, starting with the explosion of the most nihilistic and yet thoughtful punk band to date, Discharge, releasing Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing in 1982, new genres expanded in nascent form from 1983-1985. These were black metal and death metal, but they did not diverge into clearly distinct genres until later when the associations of death/deconstruction/structure and melody/Satan/emotion were established.

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