I promise, I’m not trolling!
So, I’m house sitting for a friend, and the pets can’t talk, so I’ve been listening to stuff and thinking.
I’ve had a “hair metal” playlist going today. It’s called that because that’s the term that amazon uses for it. But, most of tracks on it aren’t metal at all. Like, “more than words” by extreme. Great song, but not a metal song. “Signs” by Tesla. Same thing; awesome fucking song, but not a metal song.
So I started running through things in my head. Once metal started becoming newcomer heavier, and more extreme, it feels like the goalposts shifted.
It got me thinking about what people think is and isn’t metal, vs what people would call hard rock.
An example is AC/DC a long time favorite of metal heads everywhere. But are they really metal, or just the best hard rock band ever? Okay, ignore the “best” part of that, that’s my bias.
But! Another band that writes similar songs, isn’t any softer, and is often *heavier- than AC/DC is often reviled by metal heads. Yes, I’m talking about nickelback. No, I’m not trolling (though I used to troll with that on reddit lol. I respect the people on this C/ too much to do that here).
So, what’s the line? What makes a band metal vs hard rock. I’m not talking sub genres here, like death vs sludge or whatever, just the general heading of “metal”. What is it that makes a band metal instead of just hard rock?
I don’t have a firm line. Metal is like porn for me, “I know it when I hear it”.
Here’s some bands I’ve heard called metal that I think are either hard rock, or even just plain rock. Aerosmith, Def Leppard, some of KISS, Led Zeppelin, Extreme, AC/DC. I’ve heard all of those called metal bands, but they don’t “feel” metal to me.
There’s some bands that definitely aren’t metal, but are heavier than some of those bands. Fucking Nirvana could be heavy as hell, despite not being metal, and most of their albums were way heavier than most of Aerosmith’s.
Then, back to “hair” metal bands. You’ve got stuff like Poison that are really just glam rock on maybe their first album and go into hard rock for the rest, but still get tagged as hair metal because so much of hair metal was glam rock dialed up.
Then you’ve got Ratt, who made some fucking great blues metal and blues rock. Those two bands are miles apart from each other, other than being from the same era and doing the whole hair&makeup thing. Cinderella, another perfect example because, like Ratt, they are definitely metal (imo), but not heavy metal. They’re not really glam either, other than the way they dressed in the eighties.
So, what’s y’alls line? Do you even have a hard line where things just aren’t metal at all? If so, what is it? Anyone out there that holds the “anything that isn’t death or black isn’t real metal” view?
I’m curious as hell how this C/ views it because most of the posts here are fucking excellent, and there’s rarely any trolling or fuckery :)
I’ve never heard a “metal head” call AC/DC metal. They are part of that group of hard rock musicians like KISS and Alice Cooper that got lumped in to metal in the 70s and 80s primarily because of their style.
I feel like some people take the stance that any heavy music they like is metal and any heavy music they don’t like is not. I’m not someone who gets up in arms about people calling Slipknot metal and consider myself to be fairly flexible on my definition of metal but every band you listed is hard rock.
Metal is like porn, I know it when I see it. But there are some tricky ones like djent. Meshuggah “sounds like” metal to me while some of the instrumental bands like Arch Echo and Scale the Summit are some of my favorites but don’t really have any metal riffs or song structure. I don’t really know what to call them.
Well, in fairness, I haven’t heard many younger metal heads call ACDC metal either. It has been, in my experience, something that got phased out toward the end of the 90s. Now, I do hear non metal heads call ACDC metal, but that’s a tangent, and it still isn’t common. However, I think maybe that tangent where metal heads aren’t always the ones deciding what is and isn’t metal is a contributing factor to the blurred lines.
I grew up with a damn wide range of music played by my parents, and even more across the family. My grandmother never drew a distinction between country, country-western, and bluegrass. But they’re pretty distinctive, and most of my generation in the family refers to them all as separate genres (or sub genres). So that generational thing may be a factor as well.
I’m with you on the instrumental bands avoiding the usual structures of metal. A lot of them are more fast jazz with a bit of distortion, or updated classical pieces.
I grew up on Zeppelin, some AC/DC, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, etc… and my parents just called it all “hard rock.”