What Is Metal?

I get asked this all the time. And I get asked if hard rock and metal are the same thing. The answer is no.

Hard rock comes from rock and roll. What is rock and roll? What is any music? The only way to correctly label music is by beat. Polka has a polka beat. A waltz goes dum-dat-dat dum-dat-dat. The cha cha has a cha cha beat. Disco has a disco beat.

So how are rock and roll and metal different? By beat. Rock and roll has dum-dat dum-dum-dat dum-dat dum-dum-dum-dat and a hundred variations of that. Metal is simply boom-BASH boom-BASH boom-BASH boom-BASH and hundreds of variations of that.

To make it more confusing, metal borrows from a lot of different styles. The main metal beat actually comes from jazz, not rock and roll. That's why a lot of the best drummers in metal studied jazz. Or sometimes you'll see a metal drummer in a jazz band, like Cherry Poppin' Daddies (well, swing, but you get the point) comes to mind.

Black Sabbath is the band that gave us heavy metal. Their music was doom and gloom and if you ask Tommy Iommi what kind of music he plays, he says "heavy jazz." Coincidence? Of course not.

Heavy Metal was born in industrial working class towns. The constant boom-BASH boom-BASH of the machines got repeated into the music. That's why it's always appealed to working class peoples.

Judas Priest took Sabbath and added the twin lead guitar sounds, the look, and eventually started heavier metal styles like speed metal and thrash metal. In the 80s, heavy metal broke into all kinds of separate parts, with the heavier parts calling the lighter parts "poseurs," a word stolen from the punk elements (punk is metal's socially retarted cousin). Some say the lighter bands sold out, as bands like Quiet Riot and others went on to have mainstream success.

Contrary to popular opinion, metal never died. It just kept changing form.

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-The Zombieslayer