Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The heavy metal genre has come in three sizes over half a century, and all three are still in use, often inside the same conversation, which is why two people can argue for an hour over whether a band belongs to it without once disagreeing about the band.
For its first fifteen years the phrase lay open like a village common, and every loud band in Britain and America turned its animals out onto the same grass. Then the faithful arrived with posts and wire, drove the posts into the turf, strung the wire across the old drovers' tracks and tore up the stiles behind them, one faction after another staking out a field of its own, until the common was a patchwork of hedged plots and the old name hung on the gate of just one of them. That plot is not small. It is simply marked.
The first size: anything loud enough
The New York quartet in greasepaint that sold arena tickets on fire-breathing, blood capsules and a bass player's tongue was Kiss, and through the middle of the 1970s the American rock papers filed it under heavy metal beside Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Blue Öyster Cult, a filing no Kiss record has ever quite earned.
In that first size the phrase meant volume and not much else. It described a concert more than a song, long hair and tall amplifiers and a crowd that stayed on its feet, and it covered bands with nothing in common beyond the equipment behind them. How the words got loose in the first place, and what the music was before anyone agreed to call it that, belongs to the origins chapter.
The size of the word at the start of the next decade can be measured exactly, because somebody printed it on a record sleeve.
Released alongside the animated film of August 1981, produced by Ivan Reitman for Columbia Pictures, the soundtrack album called Heavy Metal set Black Sabbath's "The Mob Rules" and Blue Öyster Cult's "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" beside Devo's "Working in the Coal Mine" and a Stevie Nicks song. The title song, "Heavy Metal", was sung by Sammy Hagar. The record also carried Journey's "Open Arms", a piano ballad sitting on that record like a lace doily laid across the breech of a howitzer. Nobody at the label thought the title needed defending.
The second size: the video years
The weekly programme that could put a band in spandex and a band in bullet belts into the same hour of television was Headbangers Ball, which MTV ran from April 1987 until January 1995, and for those eight years heavy metal meant, to most of the people watching, whatever that programme played. Its hosts, from Kevin Seal and Adam Curry in the early years to Riki Rachtman from 1990, introduced both kinds of band with the same straight face. Poison and Slayer shared a name for most of a decade. Neither was happy about it.
The charts made the stretch plain. The Bay Area band that took ...And Justice for All to number six on the Billboard 200, the American album chart, in the autumn of 1988 was Metallica, a few weeks after Def Leppard's Hysteria and Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction had each spent time at number one that summer, and the same two words were printed about all three. One phrase was dragged over Metallica's bleak, nearly ten minute title track and over Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me", like a single tarpaulin hauled across a battle tank and an ice cream van. It could not cover both for long.
That was the widest the word ever stretched, and the narrowing began from the inside. The thrash, death and black metal bands that had come up through the tape trading underground wanted no part of a word the hairspray bands had been wearing on television, and by the early 1990s they had levered the adjective off the name like a nameplate prised from the door of a firm gone into receivership, and called what they played metal, full stop. The schism was grammatical before it was musical.
Two people can argue for an hour over whether a band belongs to the genre without once disagreeing about the band.
The institutions followed the fans. When the Recording Academy gave the music a Grammy category of its own in 1990, it called it Best Metal Performance, with no adjective at all, and by common consent the bare word has been the name of the whole family ever since. The older, longer phrase was left to the older style, although the family meaning never quite died: in encyclopaedias and in the older record shops, the rack marked heavy metal can still hold a death metal album.
The heavy metal genre in its narrow sense
What remained under the old name is the style fans now call traditional heavy metal, trad metal for short, and it can be described closely enough for a record to be held against it.
- The riff carries the song, and would go on carrying it with the vocal taken off the tape.
- The vocal lives on melody and power, with a clean tone at its centre; a harsh voice turns up, if at all, as colour.
- The guitar solo belongs to the composition, and is often doubled by a second guitar in harmony.
- The tempo stays within reach of the body, a march or a charge, and never a blast beat.
- The lyric looks outward, to history, war, myth, the occult or the road, rather than to the singer's own heartbreak.
The description says nothing about clothes, sales, age or speed records. A band in a denim waistcoat with a single on the radio passes it as easily as a band with a hand-painted sleeve and a pressing of five hundred, and a band in the latest fashion fails it the moment the riff stops carrying the song.
The Barnsley band that has released a studio album in every decade since its debut in May 1979, from Wheels of Steel in 1980 to Hell, Fire and Damnation in 2024, is Saxon, and it meets every line of that description without appearing to try. So do Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, the German and American bands of the 1980s that played the style straight, and the young revival bands that have taken it up since the 2000s. Age disqualifies nobody. Failing the tests does.
The revival is the proof that the narrow style is not a museum. By the late 2000s the magazines had a name, the new wave of traditional heavy metal, for bands formed long after 1980 who played twin leads, high voices and marching riffs without a trace of irony, and German festivals such as Keep It True, founded in 2003, built whole weekends around them and around the veterans they were answering. The narrow style has heirs.
Where the arguments happen now
Almost every serious quarrel about the heavy metal genre now happens at its edges. A power metal band with keyboards and choirs, a speed metal band with a thrash drummer, a doom band that never leaves second gear: each is heavy metal in the family sense and something with its own name in the narrow one, and the map of where those territories join is drawn in the types of heavy metal music, mapped.
The other quarrel is over the bands that sell the most, and it never ends because it is really a quarrel about taste. A hard rock band with a heavy riff and a blues swing still stands outside the narrow style, however loud it plays, and a band dressed for the video but writing riffs that pass the tests stands inside it, however much its fans in 1987 were mocked for the hair. The order in which each of these names was claimed and then disputed, decade by decade, runs through the heavy metal history in full.
The word grew once and shrank once, and every one of its three sizes is still spoken somewhere tonight. The only honest first question in any argument about it is which size the other person means.
