There is an enormous amount of contemporary writing about what thrash metal was supposed to be doing to teenagers, and remarkably little about what the bands were actually playing. That imbalance is the reason so much of the genre's own history had to be reconstructed decades later out of photocopied fanzines, and it is worth understanding how it happened.
Three tiers, and they barely spoke
The press that covered this music divided into three layers that had almost nothing to do with one another.
At the bottom, and doing all the useful work, were the fanzines: photocopied, stapled, run by people with day jobs, print runs in the hundreds. Metal Mania in San Francisco, produced by Ron Quintana. Kick Ass Monthly out of New Jersey. Dozens more across Europe and South America. They reviewed demos, printed addresses and gig listings, and functioned as the index to a distribution network that had no other index.
In the middle sat the specialist magazines. Kerrang! began in Britain in 1981 as a spin off from a weekly music paper and became the genre's paper of record. Metal Forces, founded by Bernard Doe in 1983, mattered more than its circulation suggests, because it took demo tapes seriously and reviewed them alongside albums. Metal Hammer and Rock Hard in Germany did the same for a scene that had its own bands.
At the top was the general press, which arrived late, understood nothing, and wrote about the audience rather than the music.
What the newspapers were actually writing about
Search a general newspaper archive of the late 1980s for these bands and the results are almost entirely social. A court case. A sticker. A worried feature about what teenagers are listening to, illustrated with the most alarming photograph available. A follow up to a television special about satanism.
Almost none of it is about the records. Where a review exists it is usually a paragraph, frequently by a writer who covers pop, and its function is to establish that the reviewer finds the whole thing ridiculous. The word noise does a great deal of work.
The result is an archive with a hole in the middle. A researcher in 2026 can find out precisely what a newspaper columnist in Ohio thought about heavy metal in 1988 and will struggle to find a serious contemporary account of how Among The Living was made. That is not an accident of preservation. It is what was written.
You can find out exactly what a columnist in Ohio thought in 1988, and struggle to find a serious account of how the record was made.
The fanzines were doing journalism
The inversion is complete and it is worth stating plainly: the photocopied publications were more accurate, more informed and more useful than the newspapers, and they were run by teenagers.
A fanzine writer had heard the demo, knew the drummer, had been at the show and could tell one band from another. A national newspaper writer had a press release and a deadline. When historians of this music go back to the primary sources now, they go to the fanzines, because that is where the facts are, and the great difficulty is that fanzines were printed on cheap paper in tiny numbers and thrown away.
The specialist magazines sit between the two and their record is mixed. Kerrang! covered thrash seriously and early and also covered a great deal of hairspray, and its writers were frequently rude about bands they had misunderstood. Metal Forces is the one that holds up best, because reviewing demos meant reviewing music nobody could have heard, which required actually listening.
| Tier | Examples | Reach | Accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fanzines | Metal Mania, Kick Ass Monthly | Hundreds | High. The writers were in the room |
| Specialist press | Kerrang!, Metal Forces, Metal Hammer | Tens of thousands | Good, with blind spots |
| Music weeklies | The British inkies | Large | Hostile, and largely uninterested |
| General newspapers | Dailies, on both sides of the Atlantic | Enormous | Poor. The subject was the audience |
| Television | News specials, daytime talk | Enormous | Actively misleading |
The television that changed it
Two broadcasts did more for the genre's visibility than a decade of print. MTV launched Headbangers Ball in April 1987, a weekend show that played metal videos to an audience that had no other way of seeing them, and for the next eight years it was the single most important promotional channel the music had.
Then, in 1989, Metallica made a video for One, their first, using footage from the 1971 adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's novel, and it got into general rotation. A seven minute song about a soldier who has lost his limbs, his face and his senses became the way millions of people first encountered thrash metal, and it did more to establish that the genre had something to say than any amount of writing had managed.
The interviews the bands refused to give
Some of the blame sits with the musicians and it is worth apportioning honestly. Thrash bands in the 1980s were frequently terrible interviewees: suspicious, monosyllabic with anybody they suspected of not knowing the records, and unwilling to perform the small courtesies that get a band written about well.
That was partly principle and partly youth. A nineteen year old who has been asked whether he worships the devil for the fourth time in a week stops trying, and the resulting transcript makes the band look sullen rather than the questions look stupid. Two decades of coverage read as a series of standoffs in which neither party was interested in the other.
The exceptions prove how much it mattered. Anthrax talked to anybody, made jokes, wore shorts, and were consistently covered better than bands who played the same music with more hostility. Being good at the interview is not the same as being good, and the archive does not distinguish.
Why the coverage was so bad
Three reasons, and none of them is conspiracy. The first is that the general press covers youth culture as a story about risk, because that is the angle an editor recognises, and a music with skulls on it walks straight into the template.
The second is expertise. A newspaper in 1988 had a rock critic who had grown up on the 1960s and a features desk that had not heard the records, and neither of them could tell a thrash band from a glam band from a distance. A great deal of the writing from that period gets the basic taxonomy wrong.
The third is that the genre gave them very little help. Thrash bands did not do television, dressed like the audience, refused the interviews they found stupid, and made records that were physically difficult for an unprepared listener to get through. A scene that defines itself by not explaining itself should not be surprised when it is explained badly.
What it cost, and what it did not
The cost was archival. Two decades of primary material about how this music was made was simply not written down by anybody with a filing system, and what did get written was mostly about a moral panic that turned out to have nothing behind it.
What it did not cost was the audience. The genre grew continuously through exactly the years it was covered worst, because the actual distribution system was tape trading, fanzines and word of mouth, and none of that required a newspaper's approval. By the time the general press worked out what it was looking at, in about 1991, the thing had already peaked and was on its way down for reasons the coverage never touched.
That gap between what was reported and what was happening runs through the wider story. Where the culture at large did eventually let this music in, and on what terms, is Thrash Metal in Film and Television.
