Heavy metal (music)

Identification Rock music genre

Heavy metal achieved mainstream success in the 1980s. It both appealed to a wide range of the decade’s listeners and influenced a generation of musicians.

The term “heavy metal” was derived from Steppenwolf’s 1968 hit song “Born to Be Wild,” but Black Sabbath’s 1970 eponymous album served as the starting point of the new music genre. The album’s dark tone, guitar riffs, and haunting vocals captured not only Black Sabbath’s industrial roots in working-class Birmingham, England, but also the morose mood of many Americans at the end of the 1960s. Subsequent bands expanded Black Sabbath’s sound, but at the end of the 1970s, many listeners abandoned hard rock music. Years of over-production, unrealized expectations, and internal discord had led to the declining popularity of bands such as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Kiss. These influential bands survived the decade in one form or another, but the following generation of musicians in the 1980s crafted a harder and more powerful sound than their predecessors.

Growth and Maturity

In the early 1980s, American listeners embraced British heavy metal groups such as Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Def Leppard. This second wave led to the founding and success of fledgling American heavy metal groups, including Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, and Quiet Riot. Exposure on cable television channel MTV, especially through its weekly program Headbangers Ball, and extensive touring allowed these groups to achieve commercial success. Alienated youth, working-class Americans, and white teenage males in particular found refuge in the themes and sounds of heavy metal. Long hair, often in the form of mullets, made heavy metal fans easy to identify.

Throughout the 1980s, as the genre proliferated it also fragmented. The styles, sounds, and subject matter of the various heavy metal groups diverged. Groups such as Van Halen and Def Leppard typified pop, or light, metal, which mixed heavy guitar riffs and melodic lyrics with themes of love, happiness, and sexual gratification. Glam, or hair, metal bands such as Poison and Mötley Crüe mixed these themes with androgyny, initially dressing themselves to resemble women. Speed, or thrash, metal bands such as Metallica and Slayer accelerated the tempo of the music and focused on themes of destruction, religion, and death. Speed metal groups appeared in concerts wearing simple street clothes, thus better connecting to their fans. Finally, despite their changing sounds, 1970s groups such as Judas Priest and Deep Purple became known as classic metal groups. Some other groups were harder to classify, including perhaps the most controversial heavy metal group of the 1980s, Guns n’ Roses. The group’s 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction, sold over 15 million copies, surpassing all other heavy metal albums, except for AC/DC’s 1980 album Back in Black, which sold over 21 million records.

Criticism and Decline

Heavy metal music was not well received by fundamentalist religious groups, concerned parents, and politicians. Many Americans saw it as a corrupter of youth; it was blamed for inciting murder, encouraging suicide, and promoting Satanism. In 1985, Tipper Gore, the wife of then-freshman senator Al Gore of Tennessee, cofounded the Parents’ Music Resource Center to protect youth from offensive music. The group charged that listening to heavy metal music led teens to sex, violence, drug and alcohol use, and the occult. Following congressional hearings, record companies agreed to put warning stickers on potentially offensive albums.

The press and critics also attacked heavy metal. The 1984 mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap spoofed heavy metal musicians. More serious, in 1985, Los Angeles police caught Richard Ramirez, the serial killer called the Night Stalker. He had allegedly left an AC/DC hat at one of his crime scenes, and newspapers quickly reported that the heavy metal group might have inspired the murders. During the mid-1980s, both Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne faced accusations that their songs contained subliminal messages that had led to the suicides of several troubled teenagers. In both instances, the musicians were cleared.

While these pioneerinng bands of metal were facing complications created by their music, the genre was splintering and evolving. The 1980s also saw the emergence of hair metal or glam metal. This subgenre combined theatrics of performance and costume with catchy guitar riffs and borrowed elements of 1970s glam rock. In the meantime, bands like Megadeth and Metallica went a harder route with their sound and created thrash metal. Thrash did not find quite as large of a popular audience as hair metal. In 1989, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences created a Grammy Award category for heavy metal, but the inaugural award in that category went to British rock group Jethro Tull instead of favored first-time American nominee Metallica.

The excesses of the heavy metal musicians' lives were just as damaging to the genre’s reputation. Music that celebrated drug and alcohol use, violence, and sexual promiscuity often was mirrored in the offstage self-destructive behavior by band members. An overabundance of heavy metal bands also led to parity and decreased album sales for each such band. By the end of the decade, heavy metal had receded from the highwater mark of its mainstream popularity. The arrival of grunge music a few years later forced many groups back into the underground music scene. Some metal bands found mainstream success in the 1990s, and some incorporated elements of grunge into their music, but by and large metal was eclipsed by alternative and grunge rock. Since then, the genre has continued to thrive as and underground or niche genre, with many subgenres and a dedicated fan base.

Impact

During the 1970s and 1980s, heavy metal blossomed into a number of unique musical styles and sounds. Their fast-paced rhythms, guitar solos, and provocative lyrics proved to be powerful alternatives to pop music. Heavy metal influenced music, culture, and fashion of the 1980s and beyond.

Bibliography

Christe, Ian. Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Valuable charts and insightful comments make this an exhaustive and accessible account of 1980’s heavy metal.

Konow, David. Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002. Numerous interviews give this overview of 1980’s heavy metal a first-person perspective.

Popoff, Martin. The Eighties. Vol. 2 in The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal. Toronto: Collector’s Guide, 2005. Reviews hundreds of 1980’s heavy metal albums, with commentary and cross-references.

Strong, Martin C. The Great Metal Discography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1998. The most detailed listing of band histories, recordings, and chart positions for heavy metal groups.

Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Scholarly study of heavy metal’s appeal, significance, and meaning.

Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Rev. ed. New York: DaCapo Press, 2000. Sophisticated analysis of heavy metal culture, focused on the fans, musicians, lyrics, and myths.