The Progression of Heavy Metal essays

The Progression of Heavy Metal essays As in most generations, the youth engages in some type of new and rebellious activity against the mores of their parent's previous generation. One type of rebellion that turned up in the music of the youth and becoming widely popular in the 1980s, however having origins from years before, is heavy metal. This type of music underscores morbidity, ancient civilizations, heroic conflicts, and gothic attitudes. Heavy metal had many influences on future evolutions of music and branched into other types of music. The presence of this type of music in itself, though, had such an impact that many people still listen and are influenced by it today. Although metal music became widely popular and flaunted by MTV in the 1980s, it actually began about fifteen years beforehand. Some say that metal began way back with the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" and the Who's "My Generation" in 1964. However, in 1965, Alice Cooper created the band The Spiders, which really began the first roads to developing heavy metal. Metal music began to gain popularity after Woodstock of 1967, after which people began looking for a new revolution. That is when bands like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and most influential, Black Sabbath, came between 1966 and 1970. The term "heavy metal" was coined by Steppenwolf, where, in the song "Born to Be Wild," the term "heavy metal thunder" is first used. On the other hand, the first of the influential bands included the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, commanding the followings of Rush and Van Halen. After that, by 1973, "the kings of heavy metal" (www.hard...) came to be Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. With those latter two bands also came the Satanic imagery, part trademark, of heavy metal. Jimmy Page, first from The Yardbirds, then the guitarist in Led Zeppelin, influenced much of the distortion of "heavy" guitar playing that came to classify heavy metal musi...