Metal: The Sub-genre Motley 
(2017-2018)

 

 

I'm going to be honest here—as much as I love heavy metal, it is a confusing genre of music. While it's normal to expect some variation between different groups within the same musical genre, metal and its subsequent sub-genres turn that concept up to eleven. In the process of writing this first paragraph, I have listened to songs from The Dillinger Escape Plan (American mathcore) Mötley Crüe (American glam/hair metal), and Amon Amarth (either Swedish Viking metal or melodic death metal, depending on who you ask). Differences in the times and places of origin aside, these three bands sound so different that it is remarkable that they are all considered to be part of the same genre. The list of metal's sub-genres—including such groupings as nu metal, power metal, and hero metal a cappella (no, I did not make that one up)—is so expansive that it would take me several pages to write them all down (and even then, I'd be guaranteed to miss at least a few) and a doctoral thesis-length paper to compare them. A far more manageable task, however, would be to explain just how the culture of heavy metal has shifted in the decades since its advent to create the hodge-podge of sub-genres that define the genre today. 

While the first metal bands began to emerge in 1968, the history of metal technically begins with the rise of the "third generation of rock and roll” earlier in that decade, with such groups as the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and the Who. These bands, and others like them, all helped to create the "rock band” archetype: loud, rebellious, and unpredictable. An even bigger influence on the metal genre came in the form of late-60s hard rock bands, such as Led Zeppelin and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. These new bands were louder (and blunter with their commentary on social injustice) than the blues and rock-and-roll bands that inspired them, and they quickly became popular in a world that was rocked by the Vietnam War. These hard rock bands also helped introduce the heavily distorted guitar sound that would become a cornerstone of the metal genre. Beyond their musical predecessors, the metal genre had one other major inspiration: steel. 

While some elements of heavy metal music had existed long before the 1960s, heavy metal first burst onto the scene in 1968 Birmingham, an economically depressed steel town in the midlands of England. Disaffected with the current state of the world, and inspired by the hulking metal refineries that they grew up around, Black Sabbath burst onto the scene with a sound that combined elements of blues music, rock and roll, and a dark tone that stood in stark contrast to its 1960s contemporaries. Like their hard rock predecessors, Black Sabbath's music addressed taboo subjects like political corruption and drug use. Unlike those bands, however, Black Sabbath's music was far less complex, and it relied more on its sheer intensity to attract audiences. While the band's eponymous debut album did not make much of a splash, their 1970 release Paranoid was incredibly successful, and set the standard for all metal bands to follow. 

The next two decades would see a boom in the metal genre. In 1972, five musicians from Hertford, England, formed the band Deep Purple and created a sound that was just as intense as Black Sabbath's, but with far more complexity. Then, in 1978, another band from Birmingham, Judas Priest, burst onto the scene with music that combined the dark themes of Black Sabbath with the complexity of Deep Purple. One of Judas Priest's greatest legacies, however, is its introduction of the studded leather look to the metal genre, which lead singer Rob Halford had borrowed from London's gay club scene (there is a deep irony in this when one considers how "macho” metal is considered to be). 

In 1982, a new movement in the heavy metal scene began to emerge with bands such as Motörhead and Iron Maiden, which was called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (referred to hereon as NWOBHM, an acronym that is only slightly less unwieldy). While still heavily-inspired by their heavy metal predecessors, members of the NWOBHM incorporated elements of 1970s punk into their music, and all but ignored metal's blues influence. NWOBHM bands also synthesized the dark, socially active themes of their predecessors' music with lyrics that explored elements of myth and fantasy, and were prone to putting on far more elaborate stage productions than their predecessors, which helped to launch heavy metal onto the global stage. Despite its tonal and thematic evolution, it was not until the mid-1980s, when heavy metal appeared in the United States, that the genre underwent the first of what would become many, many splits. 

When heavy metal first began to spread to countries beyond the UK, it was obvious that different people would interpret the genre in different ways. Once heavy metal began to spread within the U.S, however, the new American metal scene decided that another civil war was in order, and it is here that we see the appearance of the first two named sub-genres of heavy metal: glam and thrash. Led by bands such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Bon Jovi, glam metal (also known as hair metal) was a far more spectacle-driven movement of heavy metal that forsook the politically-charged lyrics of its predecessors in favor of simpler, party-like, and politically neutral lyrics. Meanwhile, the thrash metal movement, which included bands like Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer, went in the exact opposite direction, retaining the socio-political commentary of their British progenitors. Thrash was far more rhythmic than its contemporaries, and its bands employed complex guitar riffs played at high speeds in order to win a musical arms race with their rivals in the NWOBHM. While glam metal was considered to be one of the most commercially-successful iterations of metal during its time, thrash was considered to be one of the most extreme. As time wore on, glam metal began to die out, while thrash continued to get more and more extreme, eventually culminating in a dark age of metal called the 1990s. 

By the year 1990, heavy metal found itself slowly sinking into obscurity. The once commercially-palatable glam metal had given way to grunge music, while thrash metal's competition with the NWOBHM had led it to become too extreme for most mainstream audiences. Furthermore, several of metal's most successful groups were suffering from internal turmoil, with the departures of metal legends such as Rob Halford (of Judas Priest) and Bruce Dickinson (of Iron Maiden) causing their respective bands to sink into irrelevancy. Meanwhile, in the United States, thrash metal had experienced yet another split. Many bands, such as Metallica and Megadeth, left thrash metal in the early-to-mid-90s in order to join bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains on the more marketable grunge scene, adopting a simpler, yet far more nihilistic sound (a product of the recessions of the early-to-mid-1990s).

While bands like Metallica and Megadeth were synthesizing metal with grunge, other metal bands, such as the commercially-successful Pantera (which is considered pedestrian when compared to some of its contemporaries), decided to forsake mainstream approval and went underground, where they continued to up the intensity of their work. Eventually, this trend created a whole new subgenre of metal–extreme metal–and its offshoots, black and death metal, which took every defining element–distorted guitars, harsh vocals, fast tempos, and taboo lyrical topics–to its (il)logical extreme. This trend, when combined with the grungy turn of other metal bands, led many observers to conclude that the entire metal genre was fated to fade away almost as fast as it had appeared. 

 

As it turns out, this obscurity wound up being a blessing in disguise for many metal bands. Without any significant mainstream attention, many heavy metal bands, supported by their hardcore fans, found themselves free to evolve their sound through a synthesis of metal and elements of other musical genres, creating new sub-genres which subsequent bands would then further combine to create entirely new sub-genres (or sub-sub-genres, if you prefer). Eventually, metal burst back into the eye of the American public with the advent of nu metal bands like Linkin Park, which combined heavy metal with hip-hop, alternative rock, funk, and grunge. Meanwhile, the European metal scene has migrated from its birthplace in Great Britain, and found a new home in Germany and the Nordic countries. Finnish metal band Lordi won the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest (while dressed as horrifying monsters, mind you). On top of that, several classic metal bands, including Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath, have had several reunions throughout the 2000s and 2010s, with some of them still creating new content.

Strangely enough, the split of heavy metal into so many sub-genres has both doomed it to obscurity, and then saved it from extinction, with only its hardcore fans to keep it alive. How such a thing is possible is something that I cannot begin to understand. At this point, however, the real question is: what happens next? In answer to that, all I can really do is offer up a quote by the power metal band, Sabaton: "No, we'll never fall, we're the masters of the world."