That's told me!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_metal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_metal

 

http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/liste_groupe-indexStyle-Alternative_Metal-l-en.html - http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/liste_groupe-indexStyle-Alternative_Metal-l-en.html

 

http://www.last.fm/tag/alternative%20metal - http://www.last.fm/tag/alternative%20metal

 

http://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Alternative+Metal/ - http://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Alternative+Metal/

 

Etc etc

 

Quite a common term actually  

To a lesser degree I would also say Symphonic. Now there's many albums that a really rather heavy in the genre, but then you get a few which aren't very heavy at all, like Tarja's My Winter Storm, for example.

I suppose there are borderline groups in most of the subs though.

 

A metal band in the 1970s/80s wasn't complete without some eyeliner and spandex - I'm thinking Ozzy, Maiden, Def Leppard, Saxon et al - Motorhead were an exception that smashed the rules.

 

Even Venom wore makeup - and their stage show was outrageously theatrical, in the same school as Glam, even if with a different intent. Like most (dare I say other) Glam bands, Venom couldn't play very well, and the stage show was a great way of taking attention away from that fact.

 

Most of the Doom Metal I've heard sounds like 1970s Hard Rock - not very metal, so I'll probably vote that once I've considered the other genres a bit - Alternative Metal? What's that? An Alternative to Metal?

 

 

 

Maybe not - I'm as guilty as anyone of exaggerating for effect, but I would point out the following (deliberately skewed!) historical facts;

 

1. There has been a shift to "honesty" in the music, largely brought about during the NWoBHM, when bands simply made the music they wanted, under their own steam. The precedent for this can be seen in The Sweet, who constantly pushed away from songwriters Chinn/Chapman to write their own material, and become less of a "puppet" band, which they indisputably were in their early days (like many mid-late 1960s pop groups, it should be pointed out).

 

2. The most noticeable shift from "vanilla" hard rock can be seen around 1974, in Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy" and A few pieces by The Sweet - notably "Set Me Free", and other songs from "Fanny Adams" onwards, which are more uptempo, energetic - and straight up metallic. I'm still digging through piles of proto metal albums, and nothing yet compares to those two songs as representing a sea-change from hard rock to metal, excluding Black Sabbath and their imitators (or the bands Sabbath imitated) - which represents the darkest side of metal, and is in itself not wholly representative of the entire genre - as disparate as it is.

 

3. In terms of attitude again, look no further than Queen and The Sweet in the early 1970s - the whole posturing thing is right there. Kiss were directly inspired, as were Quiet Riot - although QR differed in two aspects; 1) Randy Rhodes and 2) they were rubbish at songwriting.

 

4. Don't be fooled by the outward imagery - the music can be far more revealing than the band's commercially tailored appearance - and it's a fact that some found The Sweet's image too outrageous to take at the time, so it didn't have as wide appeal as you might think; The song Ballroom Blitz was written after they got seriously bottled off stage at a gig in Scotland, and contains some quite violent imagery; "The band started leaving, 'coz they all stopped breathing" (IIRC).

 

...OK, so I probably don't mean Glam as a genre - but I think that bands within that genre get unfairly tarred with the same brush - there is utter nonsense in Glam, and it probably deserves all the knocking it gets, but later bands like Girl are well worth checking out as a different side of metal in the 1980s.

 

When I think of Metalcore, I think of something extreme that I probably wouldn't like - and hence not representative of the music I grew up with (which is troo metal to me), so prejudice exists everywhere!

 

There is no accounting for taste (if you are pedantic like me  )

 

When I Googled it I came up with "disputing" - and taste tends to be the only thing that ever gets disputed around here... (I mean the entire Internet, by "here" of course...)

who voted for grindcore?

Maybe my statement was superficial, I dunno; Just compare bands like  Motorhead, Maiden or Priest to the likes of Ratt, Poison or Motley Crue... there are many differences.