I promise, Iām not trolling!
So, Iām house sitting for a friend, and the pets canāt talk, so Iāve been listening to stuff and thinking.
Iāve had a āhair metalā playlist going today. Itās called that because thatās the term that amazon uses for it. But, most of tracks on it arenāt metal at all. Like, āmore than wordsā by extreme. Great song, but not a metal song. āSignsā by Tesla. Same thing; awesome fucking song, but not a metal song.
So I started running through things in my head. Once metal started becoming newcomer heavier, and more extreme, it feels like the goalposts shifted.
It got me thinking about what people think is and isnāt metal, vs what people would call hard rock.
An example is AC/DC a long time favorite of metal heads everywhere. But are they really metal, or just the best hard rock band ever? Okay, ignore the ābestā part of that, thatās my bias.
But! Another band that writes similar songs, isnāt any softer, and is often *heavier- than AC/DC is often reviled by metal heads. Yes, Iām talking about nickelback. No, Iām not trolling (though I used to troll with that on reddit lol. I respect the people on this C/ too much to do that here).
So, whatās the line? What makes a band metal vs hard rock. Iām not talking sub genres here, like death vs sludge or whatever, just the general heading of āmetalā. What is it that makes a band metal instead of just hard rock?
I donāt have a firm line. Metal is like porn for me, āI know it when I hear itā.
Hereās some bands Iāve heard called metal that I think are either hard rock, or even just plain rock. Aerosmith, Def Leppard, some of KISS, Led Zeppelin, Extreme, AC/DC. Iāve heard all of those called metal bands, but they donāt āfeelā metal to me.
Thereās some bands that definitely arenāt metal, but are heavier than some of those bands. Fucking Nirvana could be heavy as hell, despite not being metal, and most of their albums were way heavier than most of Aerosmithās.
Then, back to āhairā metal bands. Youāve got stuff like Poison that are really just glam rock on maybe their first album and go into hard rock for the rest, but still get tagged as hair metal because so much of hair metal was glam rock dialed up.
Then youāve got Ratt, who made some fucking great blues metal and blues rock. Those two bands are miles apart from each other, other than being from the same era and doing the whole hair&makeup thing. Cinderella, another perfect example because, like Ratt, they are definitely metal (imo), but not heavy metal. Theyāre not really glam either, other than the way they dressed in the eighties.
So, whatās yāalls line? Do you even have a hard line where things just arenāt metal at all? If so, what is it? Anyone out there that holds the āanything that isnāt death or black isnāt real metalā view?
Iām curious as hell how this C/ views it because most of the posts here are fucking excellent, and thereās rarely any trolling or fuckery :)
Man, labels are hard, and rock and metal have a ton of overlapping ones, making it even more difficult to see what it going on.
Here is my two cents: it is more about the influences, what the band itself claims, the general public consensus and the history rather than about the music itself. In my mind, two bands could play the exact same music and be classified into two completely different categories if the extra-musical elements are different enough.
Here are some examples I have on the top of my head:
The claim that āanything that isnāt death or black isnāt real metalā seems difficult to hold to me. If you want to talk about āpureā metal, i.e. without external influences, the heavy, thrash, doom and power -at least- should be included imo.
I donāt know enough about some of the bands that you are talking about in your post but another point that might help you is about the term āheavy metalā itself. In my mind, that that is again only my opinion, āheavy metalā is a tag that includes an aesthetic and a style of riffing and composition particularly attached to a period (1980ās), but the āheavinessā of the band is not a criteria at all.
Eventually, it also comes down to the way you feel about a band. If you think that a band should be labeled in a way, because they make you think of other bands labeled in the same way, nobody can stop you. ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ-
Yeah, someone else banging mentioned the timing too, and it really does play a big role in what people think of as metal vs other genres. Thereās a ton of examples like that, and you mentioned some of the biggest.
Tbh, thatās why I end up lumping a lot of quasi-metal stuff in my playlists. Stuff like Deep Purple, as an example, that are more proto metal than āactualā metal. Zeppelin is like that for me too. They arenāt really metal bands, even when some of their songs are metal as fuck. But they end up fitting the āvibeā when listened to alongside more definitively metal bands.
I kinda grew up with some of those heavily influential, but not quite metal bands playing a lot. And, as I started becoming a metal head later on, there was this kind of flow to it. Growing up listening to Sabbath, Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple, Steppenwolf, that kind of thing, I never really thought of as metal until after I was listening to thrash in the 80s and noticed similarities.
And a lot of the kids my age back then were a lot less rigid in defining metal for that same reason. They grew up with some pretty heavy bands being played by their parents, so the evolution of harder, heavier music didnāt exclude very much. Youād find plenty of guys back then lumping Queen in with all the rest of it, or Pink Floyd and Rush, and all three of those bands barely flirted with the kind of music bands like Exodus, Metallica, and what have you that were coming to popularity among metal heads back then.
For my own uses, I follow what you ended with; if the āfeelā works, be it by band, album, or song, I embrace it as metal enough.