I promise, I’m not trolling!
So, I’m house sitting for a friend, and the pets can’t talk, so I’ve been listening to stuff and thinking.
I’ve had a “hair metal” playlist going today. It’s called that because that’s the term that amazon uses for it. But, most of tracks on it aren’t metal at all. Like, “more than words” by extreme. Great song, but not a metal song. “Signs” 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 isn’t 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 “best” part of that, that’s my bias.
But! Another band that writes similar songs, isn’t any softer, and is often *heavier- than AC/DC is often reviled by metal heads. Yes, I’m talking about nickelback. No, I’m 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, what’s the line? What makes a band metal vs hard rock. I’m not talking sub genres here, like death vs sludge or whatever, just the general heading of “metal”. What is it that makes a band metal instead of just hard rock?
I don’t have a firm line. Metal is like porn for me, “I know it when I hear it”.
Here’s some bands I’ve 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. I’ve heard all of those called metal bands, but they don’t “feel” metal to me.
There’s some bands that definitely aren’t 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 Aerosmith’s.
Then, back to “hair” metal bands. You’ve 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 you’ve 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. They’re not really glam either, other than the way they dressed in the eighties.
So, what’s y’alls line? Do you even have a hard line where things just aren’t metal at all? If so, what is it? Anyone out there that holds the “anything that isn’t death or black isn’t real metal” view?
I’m curious as hell how this C/ views it because most of the posts here are fucking excellent, and there’s rarely any trolling or fuckery :)
Hair metal/glam metal is tricky because a lot of it has to do with image, as well as sound, with the evolution stemming from earlier stuff like New York Dolls.
I wouldn’t call Nickelback particularly heavy.
And yeah, grunge is heavy. Nirvana is fairly light for grunge (save some of the stuff on Bleach where you have the Melvins’ drummer and a lot of heavier stuff going on). I wouldn’t call it metal, but I’d say it’s heavy.
Edit: I’ll also say that I think some of it has to do with the time. A lot of what Zeppelin was doing influenced later metal bands. Maybe they weren’t as heavy as Sabbath, but just as influential
Yeah, I think that’s why “hair metal” is such a weird thing. Pretty much every other genre of metal is defined by the music itself, or at least partially defined that way. But HAIR was so much about anyone with a lot of actual hair dressing up in a gaudy way and being as much a visual show as anything about the music itself.
I’m a lazy man
I just check whether or not the band is on metal-archives and let someone else take responsibility for the controversy :)
Lmao! That’s actually a legit way to go about it.
I have a personal run of thumb. It’s got a thousand and one exceptions, but seems to work a good amount of the time, for what it’s worth.
Hard rock songs tend to have guitar-lite verses. As in, the verse seems to often feature just the bass and drums as instrumentation, or the guitar doing minimal legwork (read: a start-stop non-riff, or sometimes acoustic noodling), before exploding into existence for a powerful (pre-)chorus.
On the other hand, metal tends to be guitar-forward most of the time. The verse/chorus divide is usually heralded by switching riffs, or, in the case of symphonic and folk subgenres, the introduction of other instruments besides guitar.
Holy shit. That’s a pretty brilliant rule of thumb.
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:
- For an example you gave, AC/DC is generally classified as hard rock. I feel this is mostly because their were there “before” metal was a thing, and eventually they stayed in that category even though they could have had been classified elsewhere had they appeared later (Airbourne).
- Similarly, many people put Black Sabbath in the NWOBHM, even though the music style doesn’t match. Today we’d rather classify them as doom metal (many people do).
- Motorhead always claimed to play rock’n’roll, yet most people put they under the tag “speed metal”.
- Bands like Ulver or Alcest would probably not be classified as metal at all with the music they play today, but they are because of their black metal legacy.
The claim that “anything that isn’t death or black isn’t real metal” seems difficult to hold to me. If you want to talk about “pure” metal, i.e. without external influences, the heavy, thrash, doom and power -at least- should be included imo.
I don’t 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 “heavy metal” itself. In my mind, that that is again only my opinion, “heavy metal” is a tag that includes an aesthetic and a style of riffing and composition particularly attached to a period (1980’s), but the “heaviness” 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. ¯_(ツ)_/¯-
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. There’s a ton of examples like that, and you mentioned some of the biggest.
Tbh, that’s 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 “actual” metal. Zeppelin is like that for me too. They aren’t really metal bands, even when some of their songs are metal as fuck. But they end up fitting the “vibe” 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 didn’t exclude very much. You’d 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 “feel” works, be it by band, album, or song, I embrace it as metal enough.
I’ve never heard a “metal head” call AC/DC metal. They are part of that group of hard rock musicians like KISS and Alice Cooper that got lumped in to metal in the 70s and 80s primarily because of their style.
I feel like some people take the stance that any heavy music they like is metal and any heavy music they don’t like is not. I’m not someone who gets up in arms about people calling Slipknot metal and consider myself to be fairly flexible on my definition of metal but every band you listed is hard rock.
Metal is like porn, I know it when I see it. But there are some tricky ones like djent. Meshuggah “sounds like” metal to me while some of the instrumental bands like Arch Echo and Scale the Summit are some of my favorites but don’t really have any metal riffs or song structure. I don’t really know what to call them.
Well, in fairness, I haven’t heard many younger metal heads call ACDC metal either. It has been, in my experience, something that got phased out toward the end of the 90s. Now, I do hear non metal heads call ACDC metal, but that’s a tangent, and it still isn’t common. However, I think maybe that tangent where metal heads aren’t always the ones deciding what is and isn’t metal is a contributing factor to the blurred lines.
I grew up with a damn wide range of music played by my parents, and even more across the family. My grandmother never drew a distinction between country, country-western, and bluegrass. But they’re pretty distinctive, and most of my generation in the family refers to them all as separate genres (or sub genres). So that generational thing may be a factor as well.
I’m with you on the instrumental bands avoiding the usual structures of metal. A lot of them are more fast jazz with a bit of distortion, or updated classical pieces.
I grew up on Zeppelin, some AC/DC, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, etc… and my parents just called it all “hard rock.”
