{"id":370,"date":"2011-01-16T20:56:40","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T20:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=370"},"modified":"2012-11-11T05:02:58","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T05:02:58","slug":"heavy-metal-before-subculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/01\/16\/heavy-metal-before-subculture\/","title":{"rendered":"heavy metal before subculture"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anyone who went to an American high school in the 1980s or later, when black t-shirts displaying stylized band logos were a common sight, is likely to be confused by what \u201cheavy metal\u201d meant in the prior decade. I\u2019m still unsure, frankly. Today, the consensus is that in the 1970s, heavy metal was whatever Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were playing out of the gate (their first albums appeared in 1970 and 1974, respectively). However, that ignores how broadly the term was applied in this decade to bands across the spectrum of acid rock, boogie and progressive rock. Using Google, I found a 1973 concert review in Billboard Magazine of Blue \u00d6yster Cult (mustn\u2019t forget that umlaut!) lauds their \u201cquintessential heavy metal style.\u201d Who today recognizes the Cult as heavy metal pioneers?<\/p>\n

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By the late 1970s, things were further complicated by that\u00a0other<\/em>\u00a0heavy metal that teenage guys might obsess about: the soft-porn illustrated sci-fi\/fantasy magazine originating out of France. The first American issue of\u00a0Heavy Metal<\/em>\u00a0came out in 1977; four years later, \u201cHeavy Metal\u201d the animated feature film became a midnight movie staple. You might expect by this point that its soundtrack would borrow liberally from the identically-named genre. You would be wrong, of course. A Dio-era Black Sabbath track (the ripping\u00a0\u201cMob Rules\u201d<\/a>) pretty much exhausts what today we\u2019d consider heavy metal on that double album. Okay,\u00a0Sammy Hagar\u2019s title track<\/a>\u00a0is pretty rocking, too, but the\u00a0other title track<\/a>\u00a0that got bigger play came from Eagles guitarist Don Felder; needless to say, no way was\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0metal. And Devo? Donald Fagen? Stevie Nicks?<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m thinking it was the \u201cNew Wave of British Heavy Metal\u201d that established heavy metal as a musical style or genre that bands could be categorically associated with. But NWOBHM didn\u2019t happen until the late 70s, and probably none of those bands made a dent on American popular culture before the 1980 debut album by Iron Maiden (the\u00a0ultimate<\/em>\u00a0black t-shirt band). This argument is supported by an internet search of \u201cheavy metal\u201d in the Google Book archives. In the 1970s, this term almost entirely calls up geology and chemistry publications; by the 1980s, the music books and magazine articles rise to the top.<\/p>\n

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Rather than a musical style or genre, heavy metal in the 1970s seemed to refer to a musical aesthetic, even a dynamic, that a group might use on particular songs. Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are perennially identified as two heavy metal groups, but really neither band was easily confined to the label. Just to focus on Zeppelin, the driving riffs of \u201cWhole Lotta Love\u201d certainly qualifies that song as proto-metal, but would you call their sock-hop slow-dance anthem \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d metal? \u00a0Compare this to the case of Metallica: when they recorded their first ballad, \u201cFade to Black,\u201d for their second album in 1984, no one would doubt it was a\u00a0heavy metal ballad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What was this heavy metal aesthetic of the 1970s?\u00a0Wikipedia\u2019s entry on \u201cheavy metal\u201d<\/a>\u00a0states, \u201cIn 1979, lead\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0popular music critic John Rockwell described what he called \u2018heavy-metal rock\u2019 as \u2018brutally aggressive music played mostly for minds clouded by drugs,\u2019 and, in a different article, as \u2018a crude exaggeration of rock basics that appeals to white teenagers.\u2019\u201d That’s pretty good; come to think of it, that\u2019s not too bad a characterization of what the illustrated\u00a0Heavy Metal\u00a0<\/em>magazine was striving for in its approach to sci-fi\/fantasy, either. But for sheer poetry, I prefer the opening passage of Chuck Eddy\u2019s\u00a0Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The turbulence that calls itself \u201cheavy metal,\u201d or the best of it anyway, is a triumph of vulgarity, velocity, verbal directness, violent apathy, conceptual simplicity, pissed-off punkitude, adolescent overeating. Once upon a time, for years and years and years, it was the one place financially and familially and fornicatively frustrated post-pube brats (musically inclined or otherwise)could turn to vent their drunken distress or hear others approximate the same. (Misery loves company.) Best of all, metallic heaviosity had NO REDEEMING SOCIAL VALUE, and it was real\u00a0loud<\/em>about it and funny too, and sometimes (once in a while) it still is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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(Chuck Eddy is, of course, no conventional music critic. With this criterion, he undertakes possibly the most idiosyncratic ranking ever in the name of heavy metal: the New York Dolls\u2019 debut comes in at #6, [R.I.P.] Teena Marie\u2019s\u00a0Emerald City<\/em>\u00a0at #9 [!!!!], etc. Still, it\u2019s seems significant that he identifies himself as \u201ca seventies snob.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about what heavy metal meant in the 1970s as I re-read Will Straw\u2019s 1984 article, \u201cCharacterizing Rock Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal.\u201d Examining the pre-punk, pre-disco era \u201cfrom 1969-70 to 1974-6,\u201d Straw identifies important context for the teenage wasteland that Eddy rhapsodizes about:<\/p>\n

Suburban life is incompatible for a number of reasons with regular attendance at clubs where one may hear records or live performers; its main sources of music are radio, retail chain record stores (usually in shopping centres), and occasional large concerts (most frequently in the nearest municipal stadium)\u2026\u00a0 [T]his institutional network\u2026 in conjunction with suburban lifestyles, [\u2026] defined a form of involvement in rock culture, discouraging subcultural activity of the degree associated with disco or punk, for example. Heavy metal culture may be characterized in part by the absence of a strong middle stratum between the listener and the fully professional group\u2026 Observation suggests that heavy metal listeners rarely become record collectors to a significant extent, that they are not characterized by what might be called \u2018secondary involvement\u2019 in music: the hunting down of rare tracks, the reading of music-oriented magazines, the high recognition of record labels or producers. To the extent that a heavy metal \u2018archive\u2019 exists, it consists of albums from the 1970s on major labels, kept in print constantly and easily available in chain record stores.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Upon reading these claims, maybe your first impulse is to shake your head in disbelief and state the obvious:\u00a0he\u2019s wrong<\/em>. I know that\u2019s what I did. As everyone knows, heavy metal as established by NWOBHM and then the American thrash scene\u2014think of all those black t-shirts for Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Exodus, Testament, and on and on and on\u2014is associated with a subculture of demo cassettes, import zines, bootleg videos, independent record labels, and specialty record stores. And cities have been at the heart of this subculture: London, the Bay Area of California, New York\/Long Island, and so on. This counterargument, however, adopts today\u2019s revisionist, 80s-centric viewpoint. History may have proved Will Straw wrong (he concedes as much in the 1993 second edition of\u00a0The Cultural Studies Reader<\/em>\u00a0that I have), but that doesn\u2019t mean he was wrong for the 1970s. So again, I ask: What was \u201cheavy metal\u201d in the 1970s?<\/p>\n

Finally, it\u2019s worth noting the theoretical binary that Straw\u2019s argument leaves us with: urban\/subculture versus suburban\/mass culture. This is a framework deserving of further scrutiny. Are cities the ideal platform for that \u201cstrong middle stratum between the listener and the fully professional group\u201d? Are they the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0such platform? And, perhaps most importantly, what role do cities play still now that the internet disembodies so much of the DIY institutional networks that musical subcultures thrive upon?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who went to an American high school in the 1980s or later, when black t-shirts displaying stylized band logos were a common sight, is likely to be confused by what \u201cheavy metal\u201d meant in the prior decade. I\u2019m still unsure, frankly. Today, the consensus is that in the 1970s, heavy metal was whatever Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were playing out of the gate (their first albums appeared in 1970 and 1974, respectively). However, that ignores how broadly the term was applied in this decade to bands across the spectrum of acid rock, boogie and progressive rock. Using Google, I found a 1973 concert review in Billboard Magazine of Blue \u00d6yster Cult (mustn\u2019t forget that umlaut!) lauds their \u201cquintessential heavy metal style.\u201d Who today recognizes the Cult as heavy metal pioneers? By the late 1970s, things were further complicated by that\u00a0other\u00a0heavy metal that teenage guys might obsess about: the soft-porn illustrated sci-fi\/fantasy magazine originating out of France. The first American issue of\u00a0Heavy Metal\u00a0came out in 1977; four years later, \u201cHeavy Metal\u201d the animated feature film became a midnight movie staple. You might expect by this point that its soundtrack would borrow liberally from the identically-named genre. You would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43763,43776,43660,43696,43697],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-genre","tag-heavy-metal","tag-music-industry","tag-subculture","tag-suburbanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1179,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/1179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}