At the Grammy ceremony of March 1995 the award for Best Metal Performance went to a song with a man playing spoons on it.
The Seattle four who carried a metal trophy home for a record every rack in America had filed under grunge were Soundgarden, and the committee that handed it over was not making a joke: it was applying the industry's own working definition, which weighed distortion, tuning and volume and weighed nothing else at all. Five years before that, the same category had put the same band on its shortlist.
A barn's tie beam will give a date to anybody who looks at it, and the date is usually wrong. The tool marks, the pegs, the colour of the timber and the shape of the joint get a confident answer out of most people standing underneath. Then a hollow borer is wound in through the sapwood, chews a core the width of a pencil out of the timber and drops it into a paper tube, and the fat and lean years counted off that core are laid against a master sequence for the county until the two patterns lock. Only then does the beam say when its tree came down. Heavy metal vs grunge is settled the same way, from the inside, and almost never from the surface.
The surface evidence is genuinely shared, which is why the quarrel lasted a decade. The lineage runs back to Black Sabbath on both sides, the tunings overlap, the cabinets were the same cabinets, and the same five companies sold both to the same teenagers in the same quarter. Where this genre's wider borders lie, against hard rock, punk, glam and its own extreme cousins, is set out in the chapter that covers it. The Seattle border is the one that cannot be settled by looking.
Heavy metal vs grunge is not settled by weight
Weight is the first thing people reach for and the first thing that fails. Records came out of Seattle between 1989 and 1994 that were slower, lower and more punishing than most of what the metal labels shipped in the same years, and the bands who made them were not pretending. The band from Montesano whose tapes taught half a generation in Washington State that a riff could be dragged until it hurt was the Melvins, and their descent runs straight back through Master of Reality without a single stop in between. Tuning tells the same story and settles nothing with it. Drop D and a flattened E turn up on both sides of the line through the whole period, and a listener handed two unlabelled tapes, one from a Seattle band and one from a metal band of the same year, will guess wrong about as often as right.
Where the two do separate, beyond dispute and on paper, is in what it cost to make the record. The engineer who put most of the early Sub Pop catalogue onto tape in a small Seattle room, working in single days for sums a metal band spent on drum heads, was Jack Endino, and "Touch Me I'm Sick" was cut, mixed and pressed in less time than a metal act spent choosing a snare sound, the whole of Bleach billed at six hundred and six dollars for thirty hours of tape. The metal records of the same period were made in month-long blocks with a named producer at the desk. One tradition went into the studio to catch something. The other went in to build it, by the month, with a named producer holding the clock.
One tradition went into the studio to catch something. The other went in to build it.
Take the amplifier away
Here is the test that actually works, and it costs nothing to run. Unplug the guitars. A heavy metal song loses its subject when the distortion goes, because the riff was the subject, a line of pitches doing structural work that no acoustic instrument in the room can take over; play "Symptom of the Universe" or "The Trooper" on a nylon-string guitar and what survives is an exercise. Run the same test on the Seattle catalogue and almost nothing falls down.
The Seattle band that recorded an acoustic set of seven songs in seven days, put it out as an extended play rather than an album and then watched it become the first EP in the format's history to enter the American chart at number one, was Alice in Chains, and Jar of Flies is the plainest evidence in the whole argument, because the songs are not reduced versions of anything. They are the same songs with the amplifiers switched off. Two years later the band did it again in front of a television camera. The heavy metal catalogue has very little of that kind, and what it has is usually a band playing its own songs in a smaller room rather than songs that were built that way to begin with.
The solo was never abolished
The story that Seattle killed the guitar solo is repeated everywhere and is not true, and the records say so within thirty seconds. The guitarist who put a lead break in the middle of nearly every single his band released, all the way through the years when a solo was supposed to be anathema, was Jerry Cantrell. Kim Thayil took them too, over riffs in metres that very few bands on the metal side of the fence were attempting.
"Spoonman" is counted in seven, and so is "Outshined" before it, which is attested on both records and audible to anyone who tries to clap along. So the competence story collapses, and with it the idea that one music was the trained one and the other the amateur one. What is left is a difference of purpose. A heavy metal solo answers the riff, continuing an argument the riff started, which is why it sits over the same chords and why the band drops back to let it through. A grunge solo colours the voice that has just stopped singing, and when it has done that it gets out of the way.
The load in heavy metal sits in the riff. In grunge it sits in the voice. Nearly everything else, the two of them share.
Declan Rourke, KaosMetal
Where the load actually sits
The last body of evidence is the one nobody set out to create, and it took thirty years to arrive: what happened when a singer left. Black Sabbath replaced Ozzy Osbourne with Ronnie James Dio and sold more records than before, Judas Priest spent most of a decade with Tim Owens, Iron Maiden made two albums with Blaze Bayley, and AC/DC buried Bon Scott and put out the best-selling record of its life the same year. The songs were still recognisable at fifty yards. Nobody had to be told which band was playing.
That is what it means for the riff to carry the load. A voice can be replaced because it was never the load-bearing part, and the audience keeps buying because the thing it came for is still on the record. Grunge had no such margin, and the one Seattle band that has carried on with a different singer is Alice in Chains, whose guitarist wrote the riffs, sang the harmonies over them and was therefore holding up half the roof already. That is not an exception to the rule. It is the rule making an appearance on the other side of the fence, and it is the reason that band is the one still filling halls.
So the test is not loudness, not tuning, not clothing and not the year of manufacture. Strip a record back and look at what will not come out without the song collapsing. If it is the guitar figure, the record is heavy metal, whatever the singer is wearing. If it is the tune in the voice, it is something else, and the something else in this case made four or five of the best rock records of its decade. A different border, drawn against a music that agreed with metal about volume and disagreed about everything else, is worked out in heavy metal vs hardcore.
