Metal Reviews

Help me out, guys. I need to include a definition for my paper on Metal. Basically I'm attempting to highlight the ideologies to be found within the culture and how they're manifested through clothing, rituals, artwork, etc. However, I need to say where my analysis stops and one of, say, Hardcore or Rock begins.

So, I ask you: What defines Metal?

I don't think there is any definite line between metal and rock or hardcore because there's tons of bands that sound somewhere in between the two sounds. The general stuff I'd use to describe metal is like:

-aggressive
-guitars
-dramatic/over the top/big/etc
-in contrast with rock, moving away from blues based riffs
-in contrast with punk, tighter musicianship. Or maybe not musicianship, but metal has a tendency towards sleakness that hardcore doesn't have.
-that dark/evil/ominous sound that the church bells and rain and first riff of "Black Sabbath" has. (This is also kinda a contrast with punk.)
-mythology/fantasy/violence based lyrics.

Well, I for one don't know any Metal that doesn't have electric guitars.

Opeth - "Damnation"? Green Carnation - "The Acoustic Verses"?

not metal albums.

Palehorse?

Fair enough. So anything that doesn't have electric guitars isn't Metal?

Apocalyptica

Their fags

It's possible I guess, but I'd have a hard time calling something metal if it didn't have distorted guitars.

They are = they're.

Sorry, but having a shitty day at work and I need to be pedantic about the language of my fatherland to stop myself from swearing at idiot lawyers. All women, not that that's proof of anything.

but... but.... but... it's the internet.

Metal as a genre doesn't exist anymore. It's simply a term in which other genres dangle from (i.e. thrash, power metal, nu-metal, melodic metal, rap metal, etc.).

The same goes for the long-gone genre of rock. Music is simply too dynamic these days. Everything has been broken down into sub-genres. As long as people refuse to call Slipknot and Korn and Limp Bizkit "metal" bands, there will be no "metal" genre. It's too ambiguous.

You may not be able to define "metal" as it stands just as one word, but metal is made up of a family of key subdivisions that CAN be defined both culturally and in terms of musical elements. In the grand scheme of things, you have very little difference between the most diverse power metal bands, or black metal bands, for example.

These all hang together in a self-defining family tree. Black metal is a part of metal because when it emerged it defined itself as part of the metal tradition: thus, it added a strictly defined new branch to metal as a whole.

The sense of cultural identity and cultural recognition in metal's various genres is so strong that it becomes very obvious to participants in metal (both musicians and audiences) which musical idioms can be recognised as a part of that tree. So, diverse but rigidly defined musical subdivisions are linked together by a sense of common recognition. Frigid, I think if you want to actually define metal you have to look at it that way.

Definition: Metal is metal. Rest of music is shit for posers. So metal is metal music that isn't shit for posers.

And if you're not into metal, you're not my friend.

Can I directly quote Jeff, Ken and Charles? I needed some first-hand sources anyway, this would be great.

Sho thing

Fine with me.

If you come with an answer, I'd like to know. The entire debate has been hurting my head for well over a decade.

Well, shit, I think rio's explanation hits the nail on the head. My essay isn't so much about what defines "metal" as such, it's about the manifestation of ideologies through aesthetics and rituals within the scene.

agreed.