Heavy Metal and Society Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Heavy Metal and Society - Essay Example However, to "metalheads" themselves this perception seems absolutely inadequate, because heavy metal is both a message to society and a suggestion of a different type of order. If we try to look at heavy metal as an artistic movement we will see that it is communicating something with its loud, socially-unacceptable, hedonistic and barbarian sound. It does not aim for consonance, it has always had the most distorted and aggressive vocalists and its instrumentation has always been basic. Heavy metal has embraced everything that we normally don't think about socially: death, ugliness, terror, disease, warfare, sodomy. The type of heavy music, which is generalized as "heavy metal", is much larger than this only genre - it has a long history of four decades of progress and contains many different genres (Walser 15). Heavy Metal. Progressive rock from the late 1960s started the genre of heavy metal. It emerged from the proto-metal of bands like "King Crimson", "Black Sabbath", "Led Zeppelin", "Deep Purple" (often called hard rock bands). The musicians of "Black Sabbath' used power chord riffing and dark modalities to express the paranoid nihilism. The band became a proto-metal band with morbid, yet, as fans say, poetic songs. Soon this kind of music solidified into a 1970s style of heavy metal most notably represented by "Iron Maiden", 'Judas Priest" and "Motorhead". Unlike the harmony-based, short-cycle riffs of rock, metal almost exclusively used moveable power chords, which can be played in any position along the neck of the guitar in quick sequence. So, riffs are written as phrases (like classical, or jazz) more than rhythmic variations built around open chords. This both simplified the music to the point where it was highly accessible, and gave it a dark sound which lent itself, as in class ical composition, toward a narrative song structure in which riffs form motifs that resolve themselves over the course of a song. It had a gnarled, feral sound against a background of then everyday music. Speed Metal. In the early days of the cold war, speed metal arose to reflect the apocalyptic consciousness gripping heavy metal after fusion with antisocial and anarchistic hardcore punk. Bands influenced by the progressive styles of the 1970s and the abrupt, droning, explosive style of hardcore began making a fast type of metal which used palm muting as a strumming technique to produce bursts of alternating rhythmic emphasis. Classic speed metal bands are "Metallica", "Megadeth", "Slayer", "Anthrax" (these four are also sometimes called "Big Four of Thrash"), "Testament", and "Prong". Topics like war, pollution, nuclear weapons and corporate domination were sung of in either a male bass vocal or shouted in a riot style chorusing. While this music was highly complex and often inventive in structure, it remained roughly under the influence of rock-based mainstream music and passed its technique on to the underground death metal, thrash and grindcore to follow. Thrash. When hardcore and metal collided thrash emerged as a fusion of punk song stylings with metal riff styles and topics. These were one- and two-riff creations on the subject of apocalyptic and political nature. Vocals were shouted in a high-speed manner, the speed and abrupt percussive guitar techniques of the genre laid the foundation of death metal playing. Thrash remained