4th Blog Entry 4/15/11

            The reading this week concerning metal, punk and the crossover was very interesting to me mostly because I never really considered metal and punk to be related at all, but to my surprise at one point in history it was almost the same genre.  But out of this point in time we have the birth of Heavy Metal as a distinct and independent genre and that perhaps we have punk to thank.

            In the mid 1970’s there was a lot of development going on in the punk/metal scene that eventually led to the stand alone genre of metal we know today.  I will focus mainly on the musical styles and how their roots are somewhat similar and how they eventually evolved to become two different styles of music.

            Fast, trashy, and loud.  That can pretty much sum up metal and punk music.  Bands would turn up their amps as loud as they can and play.  The trashier it sounded the better because they didn’t want to sound too sophisticated.  And while they were at it they played as fast as possible regardless of their accuracy because they were more concerned with getting energy out than with their musicianship.

            But somewhere in the mid 1970’s you start to see a distinctive split developing.  We can start with the band Motorhead.  Although their playing style mirrored punk in the fact that the songs were short, loud, trashy, and played fast.  The songs included a guitar solo, which is essential to Heavy Metal.  Their image also changed from the trashy punk look to the leather/outlaw biker look.  The outlaw biker look is not quite essential to Heavy Metal, but leather sure is.  So in the case of Motorhead we see the beginnings of the split between metal and punk.

            A little later down the line punk had been clearly defined and adopted by the media but this left metal out in the cold.  Here steps in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.  Although these bands played fast, they paid more attention to their musicianship.  Along with playing fast they were more accurate in their playing; their arrangements were longer and had more time changes, they were cleaner sounding than punk, and they had more of an emphasis on being in control of their instruments rather than making noise.

            It is in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal when we first see what is considered to be Heavy Metal.  We have bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple who set the foundations, then we have the metal/punk scene that infused the music with speed and attitude, then we have Motorhead who crossed over both genres, then finally we have the birth of a true metal genre in bands like Iron Maiden and Angelwitch.  A band like Iron Maiden has it all; it has the attitude, the speed, the accuracy, the tone and sound, and the control.

            I have heard many times in my life that metal music would not exist today without punk.  I never believed it before now, because if you take a serious, non bias look at the history and how intertwined the music was in the past, it becomes easy to see how the punk scene helped to develop the sound of metal and eventually push it into evolving into its own identity.