New here, but had to chime in after having a similar discussion on Reddit.
First of all, this kind of seems like you’re giving too much credit to the British blues rock and proto-metal bands you label as metal. Stylistically, a lot of the bands you list aren’t different from the American bands you list - Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, etc.
Led Zeppelin is first and foremost blues rock. They’re as much “Metal” as Jimi Hendrix, Blue Öyster Cult, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore, Coven, etc, are, and the same largely goes for Deep Purple, Budgie...
I’ve always said that there’s a kind of obnoxious strain of British musical chauvinism on the internet that rests on the refusal to offer an angle of comparison in the American scene - which is absurd when the American scene was simply more prolific and original in the genres it created. You can’t do that when the entire cannon of British contemporary music is derivative of American musical development.
There’s absolutely no reason you should be sitting here attributing Thrash metal to anything “European” when it was a genre largely codified in the US. Glam metal was glam metal. It was a different movement. The attempt at passing it off as somehow the only true “American metal movement” strikes me as a biased attempt to dismiss American musical prowess, which is especially rich, considering British/European heavy music and metal is derivative of American music entirely, going all the way back to Acid Rock and even earlier. So you don’t just get to cherry pick crappy bands and genres for America from late in the game to force a win for “Europe”.
Europe, the continent, saw its first robust metal scene come later than the US did, which was one of the only two founding locations of the genre. Look at any robust list of proto-metal bands. Surprise surprise, the vast majority of them will be American, but this is something forums choose to ignore because there’s too much anti-American cultural insecurity involved.
