Question about origin of metal

[SymphonyXV]

I constantly hear that the rock and roll genre was created by african americans, so does that technically mean heavy metal is an african american genre because it evolved from rock? I'm not racist I was just wondering where the metal genre came from.

 

[EyeballKid]

Not at all. If you look at it that way, than ALL music is technically an African-American (or African) genre. It's widely assumed that Africans were the first to populate the Earth and one of the first people to share music as an oral tradition. Thus, music from Africa influenced a good majority of other music. If blues influenced rock which influenced metal, does that make metal African-American because African-Americans were the creators of the blues? Certainly not. To label anything this way seems pretty pointless.

You could similarly argue that metal partially evolved from classical music, which is largely European in origin. Does this make metal an African-American/European musical genre? I guess if you look at it with extreme technicality the answer is "Yes." Other than traditional music indigenous to any given region, I don't think it's fair to judge any whole genre as belonging to a specific race/culture.

 

[DoomsdayZach]

The origins of metal are interesting indeed. Basically, The Gods made heavy metal and they saw that it was good. they said to play it louder than hell, we promised that we would. When losers say it's over with you know that it's a lie. The Gods made heavy metal and it's never gonna die.

 

[razoredge]

The origins of metal are interesting indeed. Basically, The Gods made heavy metal and they saw that it was good. they said to play it louder than hell, we promised that we would. When losers say it's over with you know that it's a lie. The Gods made heavy metal and it's never gonna die.

This ^

but to go into further detail, the classical composers hit on it, white jazz and swing players hit on it, boogie started long before rock, white country artists hit on it, ancient Celtic folk hit on it, that came here and became bluegrass became country. There is one school of history that claims blues was influenced by Appalachain folk which came from Brit blood... then combined with slave field chants... so its all very complicated and comes back to those "Gods"

Still it was the likes of Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Page that took those blues ideas, reached further with them and applied distorted guitars, along with their bombastic druming buddies that started the thunder

prime example in my book... Zep took this


and did this... wait for it, imagine never hearing such a thing prior to 69 and this a-typical blues number starts playing... then all of a sudden, its there in your face.... just a pumpin'
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4gRjI-HRA&feature=related[/ame]

excluding Jimi, The Yardbirds and what ever Cream and The Who did with heavyness we never had any such in your face riffage prior to Zep that I know of.

Still though here is Beck and the Yardbirds in '66 with a classic gallop type riffage


which came from this


now I like black music but make no mistake they were a different kind of "heavy" and definantly not one ounce of "metal"... till Jimi but there was still a vast difference between Jimi's and Jimmy's take on distorted guitar riffage.

 

[Kenneth R.]

I constantly hear that the rock and roll genre was created by african americans, so does that technically mean heavy metal is an african american genre because it evolved from rock? I'm not racist I was just wondering where the metal genre came from.

There's a logical fallacy here, or at least a stretching of conclusion. We as a species evolved from primordial ooze. That does not mean we are ooze.

Yes, your premises are correct.


Zach: It's a heavy metal universe.

 

[razoredge]

Heres a song released on Friday the 13th May '66 and it dont sound like the blues to me but there is a bit of black in it... pun intended


The Crazy World of Arthur Brown... "Fire" '68, a bit of voodoo, a bit of Booker T sounding keys via Vincent Crane and a whole lot of crazy fucking whiteboy
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2g-6QGsC8g&feature=related[/ame]

Jimi Hendrix "Fire" '67, this aint the blues boys, this aint RnR, its a bit funky though, Hendrix recieved a degree of flack from blacks for being too white, not playing RnB anymore


Atomic Rooster "Death Walks Behind You" '70, the band Vincent Crane and Carl Palmer put together after leaving Arthur Brown, Palmer was not on this album he left after the first for ELP, this is quite dark but definantly not black


then of course there is Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath :roll: but yes they were very significant, just not alone, not the sole initiators of "everything metal"

Uriah Heep "Look at Yourself" recent footage, recorded in '71.... NOT black... NOT blue... just METAL before metal was cool


yes indeed the Gods of Metal

 

[Lucius Octavion]

And let us not forget people like this guy:



The good stuff starts about 2:10 in this one:

 

[razoredge]

Vivaldi sounds like an "Afro American" name to me..........

In the states liberalism, white self loathing plus blacks themselves have gone abit off the hook trying too hard to compensate for slavery me thinks and these ideas of the rootes of various music tends to sway astray.

heres a RnR groover written by a country guy, long before RnR was even a whisper on anyones lips, listen to his intro... 1945, Im not sure if the black blues players had anything this upbeat at that time

 

[Postulate]

I really dislike Atomic Rooster. Almost as much as I dislike ELP.

I'd say Deep Purple and Black Sabbath are the most important bands for innovating metal by a long shot. Almost like the two pillars of the genre, with Sabbath making doom/thrash-which then went on to become the more extreme genres of death/black/etc, and Deep Purple paving the way for NWOBHM, power, and prog metal.

As to whether it's a "black" genre? Most metal bands are made up of white guys (Just the truth, call it like you see it). Things aren't the same as their influences. The blues feel fell away pretty quickly and never really came back. Most people that talk about modern "metal" are talking about Judas Priest's Stained Class and onward, I think, plus a couple other records like Sabbath's early stuff. And a lot of it doesn't even sound like rock and roll any more, anymore than jazz sounds like the blues. The whole link to classical music is pretty much made up, though.

 

[razoredge]

another post totally full of bullshit

link to classical music is not made up, all us older people like those involved in hardrock and early metal had our ears constantly influenced by classical used in sound tracks to cartoons and movies from the time we were born

Interivew televised of Ritchie Blackmore he clearly states that when they heard Led Zeppelin with the heavy raw driven guitar sound was when they knew they wanted to persue that direction. Early 70's Deep Purple was already 2-3 years behind Zep, at which point Zep had already began to move on and expand, explore other sounds.

Judas Priest was actually around during those early years too and were nearly a decade behind the early hardrockers, ever heard rockarolla or what ever its called, primitive and tame

Iron Maiden clearly states Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash as influences

as per usual your talking out yer ass,all those band circa 69-72 had their hands in it. Sabbaths best example is that of early grunge, because they were slow and grungy sounding, we even called them grungy, a term brought to prominance by my age group, long before it became a "genre" like by 20 years. The forms of hyper and melodic metal sure as hell didnt come from Sabbath or anything ozzy ever sang.

Just look at some of the songs covered by early metal bands clearly in the genre

Hocus Pocus/Focus - Helloween
Cross Eyed Mary/Tull - Iron Maiden
I Dont Need No Doctor/Humble Pie - Wasp

LZ '69.... its easy to understand that someone that wasnt around would not know or understand when the heads started banging but its hard to tolerate when they talk as if their experts.... because you "dont like it" dont mean it didnt happen

 

[Postulate]

all us older people like those involved in hardrock and early metal had our ears constantly influenced by classical used in sound tracks to cartoons and movies from the time we were born

Soundtracks and cartoon backgrounds for the most part aren't classical music...and if the ears were influenced by it, I don't hear a whiff of it in the music. If you want my honest opinion, I think it's something metalheads invented to give an artistic pretension to the genre.

I left Zeppelin out because they deny being a metal band. Just because metal bands are influenced by them doesn't mean they're metal themselves. I don't think anyone in their right minds would call Focus or Jethro Tull metal. Uriah Heep, though, I would agree with to some extent.

 

[Kenneth R.]

Dude, I don't know what cartoons you grew up with, but you're deprived of some great stuff if you haven't seen all the classics. Most of the old cartoons had recognizable movements from famous classical and baroque music.

 

[razoredge]

Hocus Pocus and many Tull early songs hit clearly in the realms of metal, metal is a vast expance of styles, metal terminology was first applied to one of these bands by some music critic, I forget which band but it wasnt Sabbath. It doesnt matter what anyone or someone individually thinks is metal, Im talking about the rootes of metal and where the thrashing and throbbing and headbanging started, there was a bunch of bands involved.... thus why the NWOBHM was called "new wave" because obviously there was a earlier wave and it wasnt just two bands large.

 

[razoredge]

Dude, I don't know what cartoons you grew up with, but you're deprived of some great stuff if you haven't seen all the classics. Most of the old cartoons had recognizable movements from famous classical and baroque music.

thank you, and I wouldnt know where they came from or what kind of classical they were, many sound track may have been contemporary classical, what ever that is, just classic sounding pieces created by sound track people to fit what ever mood was happening,movies or cartoons

so its surf guitar and horns if one thinks deeper.... then what?
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCnvH2E-6A&feature=related[/ame]

influence from this might be heard in Vincent Cranes keyboard work


what do I hear in the background here, a little thrash trumpet ?

 

[Postulate]

Dude, I don't know what cartoons you grew up with, but you're deprived of some great stuff if you haven't seen all the classics. Most of the old cartoons had recognizable movements from famous classical and baroque music.

I'm younger, but I heard all the Merry Melodies stuff as a kid as well. A lot of it is not classical, and what was were just well-recognized movements/melodies...you'd hear maybe something from The Nutcracker once in a while, things like that. It's not a significant presence enough to be considered an influence on hard rock and heavy metal, especially since you don't hear any of it in the music. I know people want to believe metal is influenced by classical music (because being tied to the classical tradition = instant intellectual cred), but it's not. Even when a band like SX plays motifs from Verdi's Requiem or Mars...that's not genuine influence, it's just lifting a couple melodies, and so few bands even do that. You want to talk about ROOTS, fine - they sure as hell aren't there, I can tell you that much.

To put it another way, I would tear anyone to pieces who suggested that Kanye West is "influenced" by progressive rock for sampling the chorus of 21st Century Schizoid Man. Same thing.

I never argued that bands like Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep and Led Zeppelin weren't influential to metal. But would I look at them, and say "yes, this is a metal band, first and foremost?" Not really. Black Sabbath, I would. And I never said it was just two bands in the 70's - I said they were the two most important.

 

[razoredge]

but your wrong, your young, you dont know, your farting through the keyboard. People that grew up during that period, picked up guitar, drum sticks, bass, keyboards, tried their hand at singing and next thing you know all kinds of music started coming out of them as if from nowhere. But it was all these tonal influences, subliminal influence is well known as a powerful force

 

[Frosties]

You're old, you can't spell.

See what I did there? I did exactly what you did - I took a fact (your age) and from that, deduced a ridculous conclusion while relying on said fact, even though it has no logical grounds whatsoever for basing my conclusion on it.

 

[CantoX]

Frosties, razor didn't misspell anything in his post. Maybe you mean he's not being grammatically correct by using your instead of you're? Is that what you meant?

Anyways, What about Blue Oyster Cult? They profess themselves to be a heavy metal band and I saw an interview on youtube that was in the mid 70s where they say that they are heavy metal. There's no denying how many metal bands cover their songs!

 

[DoomsdayZach]

This argument is silly because the whole genre evolved and there is NO absolute as to when metal started, where it started, who started it, any of that. yes, people were influenced by other music and took it to another level. Yes, at some point the term was coined and you can put any label on it that you want, and everyone's definition of "metal" is completely different.

To me, Led Zeppelin is metal as fuck despite what ANY of their members say (there are an equal number of pretentious fucks in the metal community who say "i don't want to be labeled as metal blah blah" and fuck that, you fit the genre), and in the same breath I'll say metalcore isn't metal and no one can convince me otherwise. It's not open to debate, it's my outlook on things and that's that.

Anyway, have fun having your roundabout flame war where you all pretend to be superior to the next guy because you happen to have an opinion on something, I'm going to listen to some goddamn manowar.

And finally, to OP up there, metal obviously has its roots in many genres. Music itself is as close to a living, breathing entity as one can get. It has bits of everything you could imagine at this point including jazz and blues. It would be a great disservice to say it all came from one place though, as is apparent from the hulk smash of intelligence that has been going on 'round here.

 

[Frosties]

Frosties, razor didn't misspell anything in his post. Maybe you mean he's not being grammatically correct by using your instead of you're? Is that what you meant?

He spelled you're wrong = misspelling.

The point was that just because that other guy is younger than him, doesn't mean his opinion (which is valid and he completely backed up) is void just because of his age.