Quezi

Nicholas Carew plays Heavy Metal Music (artwork my Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com)

Heavy metal music is a kind of hard rock music. It’s characterised by more than just its musical attributes, but music is the obvious place to begin…

Most of all, heavy metal is loud. If it were played quietly as elevator music, it would be light metal music. It’s not the peak volume that counts, but the relentlessness of it. Sure, there may be breaks in the volume, melodic interludes even, but they’re soon eclipsed by the next onslaught of loudness.

Heavy metal emphasizes the guitar, preferably a couple of them plus the bass. Not just any guitar of course, but electric guitar, and amplified so heavily that it drives the amplifier into distortion, producing a jagged but almost overwhelming sound. In the early days, amplifiers were limited in output and distorted as the volume was turned up. Later, the distortion was deliberately introduced by means of a fuzz box and other electronic devices.

If you’re clipping your guitar chords into distortion, you need to keep them simple otherwise you end up with a jumble of harmonics. So metal music emphasizes the power chord (a chord missing the “third”). For example, the C power chord or C5 comprises one or more Cs plus a G. The missing third in this case would be E.

Next we add drums and often a keyboard. Any number of other possibilities exist and, together with variations in vocal style and lyrics, can be described by sub-genres including power metal, metalcore, progressive metal, thrash metal, black metal and avant garde metal.

The lyrics themselves are generally dark and negative, and sometimes also aggressive, gory and traumatic. The themes are overwhelmingly macho and masculine. Unlike many other forms of music, the lyrics can be subordinate to the guitars and the solid bass-and-drum backing.

Culture

Besides the musical themes, we need to consider the social culture. Heavy metal arose towards the end of the sixties. The postwar generation had experienced the massive boom of the late fifties and the sixties, and the optimism of the time had fuelled the melodic, happy and wholesome songs about love and surfing.

But by the end of the 60s the cracks in society were becoming more apparent. The Vietnam war was failing, and the youth counterculture was questioning its justification. The hippie movement wasn’t really delivering the utopia that its love and peace promised. Angry youth in the US and Europe were protesting a range of social issues including civil rights and racial equality. The time was right for metal to emerge.

Style

Stylistically, heavy metal performers wore their hair long and emphasized black clothing, although there was sometimes an element of “glam metal” with gaudy or bizarrely-decorated instruments, clothing and make-up. Accessories such as chains, crosses and headbands featured too.

Performers and audiences emphasize the rhythm, often with the head. They are united in a subculture of rejection, which can leave successful groups balancing on a knife-edge between commercial riches and the loss of credibility if they are perceived to have “sold out” to the establishment.

Origins

There is no generally-accepted origin of the term heavy metal. This surprises me, because it’s obvious to me that it’s a reference to the metal-stringed guitar, played and amplified heavily. How complicated does an etymology have to be? This matches the sense in which the term was used in the early 1970s issues of Rolling Stone magazine.

The musical antecedents of heavy metal lie in blues rock, which started to become louder in the late 1950s then became faster and more frantic in the early 1960s. We start to see heavy guitar with distortion and a solid beat around 1964, when the metal sound was starting to crystallize with You Really Got Me by the Kinks. This sound merged together with psychidelic rock, leading to songs like Hendrix’s Purple Haze in 1967, said by some to be the first heavy metal record.

By the following year, the genre had been taken mainstream by acts such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. In the 1970s it really came into its own with the new wave of British heavy metal, including Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.