What is "Hard Rock"? Really?

detuned wrote:

I think it was Judas Priest that finally CEMENTED the direction that heavy metal would progress from during the 80's.

you'd better believe it.

detuned wrote:

rattpoison wrote:

On the contentious issue of the 70's i'm going to side with what Steve Tyler and Joe Perry said in regards to heavy metal......."Sure that's one part of what we do, but there's more to us than just that".

I think that covers not just Aerosmith but Thin Lizzy, Ted Nugent, Sweet, Queen, Led Zeppelin et al in the 70's..........those bands had heavy metal songs but weren't consistantly heavy metal throughout their albums. They had more variety and were pulling from a whole range of musical styles and roots. I think you can call individual songs heavy metal or whatever but to label and box them in as heavy metal bands is unfair to them and a reason why those bands shy away from terms like heavy metal.

I think the 80's bands that grew up listening to those 70's bands took the heavy metal songs/aspect of those bands and went further with it and narrowed it down to mainly heavy songs hence heavy metal being more of a solid term in the 80's.

Completely agree with that. If you think of a band like Thin Lizzy...sure, they had their heavy tunes (Emerald, Sha-La-la, etc)...but what about the funk tunes (Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed), the soul tunes (Showdown), the folk tunes (Whiskey In The Jar) and so many great ballads.

For groups like Lizzy, Zep, etc., Metal was an "ingredient" of what they were about, but it wasn't the entire meal, there were many courses. Even Sabbath was the same way.

I think it was Judas Priest that finally CEMENTED the direction that heavy metal would progress from during the 80's.

The thing is, the same could be said of Judas Priest. They had their heavy songs, their ballads, their bluesy numbers, etc. Same could be said of Tygers of Pan Tang, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, UFO, Diamond Head, Metal Church, Stryper, Armored Saint, Saxon, etc. Heavy metal and hard rock have always had that diversity. That's one thing I think is missing in many metal bands today. Their material all sounds similar and begins to blend together, unlike the bands of the 70's and 80's that had the diversity and weren't afraid to play a ballad, a blues song, add some funk, or some other influences.

ultmetal wrote:

[The thing is, the same could be said of Judas Priest. They had their heavy songs, their ballads, their bluesy numbers, etc. Same could be said of Tygers of Pan Tang, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, UFO, Diamond Head, Metal Church, Stryper, Armored Saint, Saxon, etc. Heavy metal and hard rock have always had that diversity. That's one thing I think is missing in many metal bands today. Their material all sounds similar and begins to blend together, unlike the bands of the 70's and 80's that had the diversity and weren't afraid to play a ballad, a blues song, add some funk, or some other influences.

This might be a result of the balkanization of metal that's been going on since the mid-80s or so? Doom metal bands are expected to play doom metal songs all the time, death metal bands are expected to be BRUTAL~ all the time, thrash metal bands are expected to thrash all the time, etc.

Rather than offer my two cents worth (again), I decided to attempt a little time traveling so as to try to remember better what my mindset was about the labels that I used back in the 70's. Luckily I still have one of the main sources I used for record shopping back then, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock (Salamander books-1976). This was mostly written by a couple of NME guys. Prototypical critic snob Metal haters. Here are some excepts...

Black Sabbath- "One of the UK's first and most successful heavy metal exports...despite critical scorn".

Blue Oyster Cult- "The foremost exponent of US heavy metal rock."

Kiss- "Representing the nadir of the long played out glam rock era...one of the most distressing symptoms of the genre's decline...A not much more than musically competant grasp of the niceties of heavy metal rock & roll"

Led Zeppelin-"The definitive diz-buster heavy metal rock combo, spawing a host of imitators. Aside from the heavy metal outing for which it is best remembered, the album (Led Zep s/t) also provided early evidence of Page's interest in folk oriented acoustical work. (the review of Zep II calls Whole Lotta Love "The definitive heavy metal anthem".

Iggy Pop- "Iggy is the Robert Johnson of heavy metal. Raw Power is a heavy metal piece de' resistance. Wheter he will ever get anything together again is anybodies guess" (1975). But the book calls Alex Harvey "at 41, the worlds oldest living punk. Veteran punk raconteur". (!)

Queen- "Queen is a good example of the Vacuum effect in rock: when a proven attraction such as Led Zeppelin or David Bowie is un-available to British audiences, the void will be filled by lesser substitutes such as Queen. Yet Queen weren't the first band to plunder the Zeppelin repertoire...after all, heavy metal had never been fully exploited as a commercial force in the UK."

Status Quo- "The worst band in the world, or the true progenitors of working class punk heavy metal?"

Uriah Heep- One of the many bands who shamelessly plagerised the heavy metal trail blazed by Led Zeppelin. One American critic was driven to write 'If this band makes it, I'll have to commit suicide'. They remain critically unfashionable to this day" (1976)

Grand Funk- (this is the oddest one, the album most cited is On Time, which wasn't heavy at all and barely hard rock they call it "heavy metal thrash" !?! at one point!).

"The all-time loud white noise as Rod Stewart called them. Tuneless heavy metal at it's most crass. It recieved a unanamous thumbs down from rock critics, achieved little or no radio airplay, yet went to the top of the US album charts" (On Time). America's most luctrative ever heavy metal cake. It looked as if the bands metallic thrashings were ready to conquer the globe. It could be argued that the UK's own marginally better heavy metal exports such as Black Sabbath and Status Quo the UK has little need for imported heavyweight noise.


It does bring back memories. If I had to describe them I'd say that the term heavy metal (sorry I forgot to note how often it was capitalized, I should have. I'll check that tomorrow) was used as often as a descriptor more than as a label per se. Almost always derogatory- as in a loud discordant noise- (except in Zep's case I guess). I can't speak for what went on in other people's minds, or in the mass media; but I do kind of remember that I noticed that most of my favorite bands at that time tended to attract these sort of insults (Hawkwind: ham fisted chord bashers, etc.) and that "heavy metal" was the one most often used. The metal fans adopted it as an ironic title and used it with a perverse pride. We liked being insulted by critics. Still do I think.

Quote :

I was listening to Ensiferum's debut

Hard Rock = heavier than rock and lighter than Heavy Metal. Clearly.

Now that I think about it somethiong odd about the NME writers whose book I quoted above. They use the term Heavy Metal actually more than they use the term Hard Rock. I think this might have been ideosyncratic on their part, as they pretty much hated Hard Rock and thought they were insulting it by calling it "Heavy Metal". Here's an excerpt on Nazareth:
"A no frills hard rock attraction...Nazareth's achievments at home and abroad are quite remarkable for what many critics scornfully regard as a lower division outfit"

here they correctly (by current standards) identified Nazareth as hard rock, but I get the idea if they had hated it just a bit more they might have called it heavy metal.

My belief is this..... If you were not alive and listening to music in the 70's. Your opinion is still yours but it has no validity in the aspect of there wasn't nothing of present day music to compare it to. To shed light on what I am trying to elaborate apon, imagine this... In 1976, you didn't have Slayer "Hell Awaits" to compare to Sabbath's "Sabotage", Priest's "Sad Wings Of Destiny" or KISS' "Rock and Roll Over". The exampes are endless. I am not trying to be an elitest just stating a fact. It was called something then and like others have mentioned, it was only part of what a band did. I find the lack of diversity in most of todays releases to be quite boring. I remember being at concerts that most folks nowadys wouldn't even consider to be metal by today's standard and hearing thousands of fans screaming "heavy f'n metal" ! Guess it proves my point, you had to be there to get it.

My .02¢

I've read quite a lot of old Finnish music Magazines and I've noticed this funny thing happening from time to time; sometimes they called every heavier rock band hard rock. Metallica was hard rock. Slayer was hard rock.

That could've been because of some Finnish music reporters just weren't updated their vocabulary.


Anyhow, the thing with the terms rock'n'roll, hard rock and heavy metal is that they just aren't enough genre defining terms. They used to be when it was clearly heard how the sounds became heavier and faster. But nowadays you could say that all the metal bands are, at core, rock'n'roll. Or hard rock. Or heavy metal.

Back then, there just weren't that much of different rock styles. I guess progressive rock was one that people really could use to define what kind of rock that music was. Back then it clearly was for a while something that really was progressive and different. Nowadays music seems to be progressive rock or metal whenever the songs are long and have plenty of odd time signatures. It doesn't really progress to any direction anymore.

At some point in the 80's people wanted to label different types of rock music as there really started to be a big diversion between the music styles. It was easier for people to know if another band was something like their favourite band so that they could hear more of that type of music. And nowadays the diversity is so huge that it's almost redicilous. People even have some sort of need to label music by the lyrics too. If one wants to hear black metal but wants it with certain lyrics he could just google different black metal genres to see if there is available music that is the same style but has different types of lyrics. One wants to hear about how great Satan is, one wants to hear how awful Satan is, one wants to hear only things about forests and gnomes and one wants to hear only things about the vikings. And he can have what he wants by just searching the genre.

It really looks quite ridicilous but I guess it really is fulfilling some needs people have and who am I to demand things to be different.

I think I'm starying from the subject a bit but oh well, what's done is done.

This is hard rock

In reality, there is no actual way to 'prove' something is as (hard rock/ metal) as it is, simply b/c the categorization is based upon opinion based label which requires no authentication aside from relative comparison and mere opinions.

I agree with Ult and others about the history of heavy metal. It cannot be denied; it's there, it happened, and no one can change it. At the same time, I've struggled with the labels that I personally would put on a few bands, like AC/DC, early KISS, or Led Zeppelin. To me, I tended to put them in the 'hard rock' category, but after being educated a little bit, now I call them what they are: heavy metal bands.

Heavy metal music is simply becoming more and more diverse, is all. As time goes on and more and more bands form and play heavier styles and all, the term 'heavy metal' expands to include them. Original heavy metal bands' albums are still heavy metal today. Bands who still play that style are still heavy metal unless they change their style to something else entirely. Just because 30 years has passed doesn't mean the definition changes to exclude them.

All of this said, I consider hard rock bands to be bands like Styx, Foreigner, Nickelback, or Creed.

My definition goes by lyrical content. If it's about love or rock and roll; it's probably rock. If it's about thunder, or feeling the noise; it's hard rock. And, if it's about killing dragons or misanthropy, you've got metal.

holydiver97595 wrote:

My definition goes by lyrical content. If it's about love or rock and roll; it's probably rock. If it's about thunder, or feeling the noise; it's hard rock. And, if it's about killing dragons or misanthropy, you've got metal.

So if I wrote a song about petting rabbits in the woods and catching butterflys in a meadow and the music was like Slayer, it wouldn't be a metal song ?

interesting view my friend

James B. wrote:

So if I wrote a song about petting rabbits in the woods and catching butterflys in a meadow and the music was like Slayer, it wouldn't be a metal song ?

I would love to hear Slayer do a song about butterflies, bunnies and rainbows.

Metal today is like the horror movies of today. Every horror movie has to be bloody as hell and have people being ripped to shreds, yet no one is going to deny the fact that "The Exorcist" is a horror movie. "The Exorcist" will never change genres and become a drama movie or science fiction; it will always be a horror movie (I would include the old Alfred Hitchcock movies as well). The same goes for metal. If a band doesn't play at 200 mph and doesn't talk about death, carnage, and everything that's wrong with the world, then kids (mostly) will not label the band as heavy metal. The old stuff never becomes another genre; it will always be heavy metal.

By the way, "hard rock" and "heavy metal" are interchangeable (in my opinion).

xyz wrote:

By the way, "hard rock" and "heavy metal" are interchangeable (in my opinion).

Only people that are complete metal/hard rock junkies (like pretty much everyone here on the board) will argue about which is which. It's fun to argue and the great thing about metalheads is that we are always right!



Go ask someone on the street if they think metal & hard rock are the same thing and I bet most of them say yes.

I don't think Death Metal can be classified as hard rock but most standard metal of the 70's and 80's is up for interpretation.

I tend to find that the people who are argue the most about certain bands being "just hard rock and not heavy metal" are those in their mid-to-early 20's or teenagers. Just about every board I've been on where someone has made a comment like, "Judas Priest are just hard rock, not heavy metal" or something similar are of that age group. Either way, it's a silly argument, yet I get wrapped up in it all the time. LOL! I guess I am just passionate about music.

I've always been torn on this subject and never seem to find a difinitve answer (even on my own thread I made a while back). However, I'm starting to lean to hard rock and metal being interchangable mainly because I'm tired of the arguments as to whether a band I listen to is metal or not. It just seems that people's opinions are always different and you can't find more than five people who agree on anything (particularly this board). I say just leave it up to the individual (within reason) and let's get on with our lives.