million voices wrote:TIMING - The phrase "Metal" was only coined (I think) in the early 80s so bands before that they were "Rock" and bands after that tend to be called "Metal".
eg If one takes Glam as an example in the early 70s it was "Glam Rock". When it was revived in the early 80s it was "Glam Metal". Although the 80s bands were a lot "heavier" than the 70s originals.
Of course there are many variations to these rules or they wouldn't be true
That got me thinking - I mean, how and why do we refer to music in terms of "metal" and "rock"?
Rock is perhaps a little easier. If we accept the origin of "juke box" as a reference to a brothel (or "juke joint") (which apparently comes from a gullah word,
joog meaning "rowdy", then it follows that the act of
rock and roll referring to
the manufacture of the two-backed beast would come to describe the music that one might typically hear in a
juke joint.
Since the qualification for "rock & roll" might be reasonably considered to be the inclusion of an electric guitar (at least, originally), and is generally in 4/4 time (borrowing from a standard blues template), all later genres of "rock" (garage, prog, surf, folk, etc.) have this foundation. "Hard" rock (perhaps, because it's hard to listen to, featuring distortion and raucousness) still follows the fundamentals - I tried this out with the 'head's
Ace of Spades and it definitely follows a clear 4/4 time sig. We might conclude, therefore, that they're a rock band, rather than a metal band.
Metal is a bit more difficult. Burroughs used "heavy metal" to refer to addictive drugs, and one of his novels features The Heavy Metal Kid. There's also a tie-in to hippy-speak,
heavy to mean deep or profound with
metal describing the mood. Iron Butterfly's
Heavy album, and Steppenwolf's
Born to be Wild (with its reference to "heavy metal thunder" may be the earliest references to "heavy metal" in terms of a distinct musical genre.
As to what makes a band metal? More difficult. I'd be inclined to say Priest was metal rather than rock, and they've been around since the last 60s (I suspect Halford's been wearing the same codpiece since then), but their earlier work (thinking Rocka-Rolla Woman and similar) definitely sounds more rock than metal. Sabbath, Deep Purple and Zep are often credited with being the progenitors of NWOBHM (a term coined in 1979), with Fleppard and Maiden being the most obvious bands in this genre (although the Flep, aside from album art, strikes me as more rock than metal).
Or maybe there isn't a clear line that can be drawn. I've known people who like Metallica (a band for whom, quite honestly, there is no excuse - I appreciate that this may be a minority opinion, but Lars Shouty-Pants would have been better off sticking to his old job at the local Orange Julius), Megadeth, and that ilk, look down on Priest and Sabbath as "not being metal" which baffles me - aside from the frankly desperate clutching at names in the hopes of sounding "more metal" (Anthrax? Really?), they seem to have lost the point of "music" and gone down the "What's your loudest amp, Mr. Shopkeeper? Right - we'll have 4 of those, please" road. Fair enough, I suppose.
But then again, perhaps we can confound the Mail readers and the "Angry from Worksop" brigade who think that people who listen to metal or rock are all uneducated - since we're clearly having some reasoned discourse on this topic, perhaps it's enough that we can share the music we love, maybe introduce people to bands that they've not otherwise have heard ("Oh, if you like
Syphilitic Swans From Uranus then I think you'll really enjoy this - they're called
Fuzzy Wuzzy Fuckpigs From Hell and they've got a new album out called "I Came Blood And Your Daughter Drank It And Asked For More".)
)
