The Definition of Heavy Metal and It's Sub-genres

^Coheed and Cambria is on the site, as well as King Crimson and Guns 'n' Roses. 

There are a few explanations for this, but the most important thing to always remember is this: Genre definitions are entirely subjective. The view of any individual is heavily dependant on a number of things, including their generation if you want to apply the then verses now argument (but it doesn't always play a part in such things). Something may have been deemed heavy metal in the 70's because there was a noticeable difference between other hard rock of the time. But skip forward a generation or two and that difference no longer seems noteworthy due to what's come out since and that's without considering sub-genres, which are a whole other branch of discussion.

Which brings me around to the other important thing to consider with this: hindsight.

When a genre is started, no one really knows what it is. It's only just been invented and it doesn't have a name yet and in the case of metal it probably got called hard rock at first. It's the same for a new sub-genre. Early Euro power metal for instance would have been called simply speed metal or, indeed, perhaps even thrash.

A new genre is something that no one is really sure about. Then someone puts a name on it, heavy metal in this case. But it may take a while still (years even) before that name is properly defined and understood, so it gets misapplied a fair bit during the formative years.

I remember seeing something in a Black Sabbath documentary once where one of them (Iommi or Geezer, don't recall which) recalled being asked about what he thought of the 'heavy metal scene' (or some such), to which he responded by asking what heavy metal was, because he didn't know.

'It's what you play,' said the interviewer.

'Is it?' Iommi/Geezer exclaims in surprise.

The start of a new genre is a time of confusion and its only natural that bands get misclassified (or rather, are later deemed to have been misclassified as the genre gets more defined). The same goes for when a branch of the genre suddenly gets some mainstream appeal (NWoBHM, Nu-Metal) because you suddenly have mainstream media covering it, who probably don't know what they're talking about half the time if we're being fair, because to them the music is new like it was to anyone listening before these scene explosions, and a new wave of bands get miscategorised. It's widely known that many bands lumped into NWoBHM were actually just hard rock, for example.

So some of those early bands that are generally accepted to be hard rock now like Rush, Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin would have been called heavy metal in those early days, because no one understood it properly yet. It was too new. Later on people realised that they were hard rock bands even by the standards of then.

If we agree that the Black Sabbath debut marks the true birth of what we now know of as heavy metal, then the genre will be 50 years old in just a few years. That's a lot of time for it to have been defined and even redefined, but I don't think it has been except for accounting for new sub-genres, as most still accept that Black Sabbath is metal. Of course if you look at the album's votes on RYM you'll see nearly 40 people trying to insist that it's not, but that just brings me back around to what I said at the start of this post: genres are subjective. 39 RYM'ers apparently think they know better than almost 50 years of history. And I think it's OK for them to believe that even if I disagree. That's the nature of music.

Edited by 666sharon666 - 03 May 2017 at 4:39am

Coheed is misfiled as alt metal. I've moved them to Hard Rock.

aglasshouse wrote: 666sharon666 wrote: Coheed is misfiled as alt metal. I've moved them to Hard Rock. I mean I could see your thinking but was there any discussion towards this? I'd like at least a discussion because I do like Coheed and they are a pretty diverse group.

^excellent debate but i think Nicole wrote it all out perfectly! 

^ isn't that part of the game though? for newer generations to keep pushing the boundaries and making everything that came before seem tame? i always liked the tree analogy where you have the roots, the trunk and then a million branches. all those branches will eventually need new tags as they grow out

I just came across this video yesterday, which might in part explain why rock oriented bands no longer feature in the charts.