First American metal band???

When it comes to debating over bands being metal or not, nothing beats being told you are ignorant for not considering Bon Jovi metal.

Yes, there are people out there who believe that you ignorant for having that belief.

Well, I'm an inclusionist. Bon Jovi are metal, pop, rock and probably a bunch of other things, as well.

Also what's often forgotten when discussing popular bands is that being "heavy metal" is not a measure of quality.

I don't care what people call metal, but if you want to call it heavy metal then it needs to be heavy. So If Bon Jovi, Def Leppard or Poison are pop metal then fine, but they are not and never will be heavy.

However you wanna classify them...Bon Jovi are, always have been, and always will be....THE ENEMY!!!!

Fat Freddy wrote:

However you wanna classify them...Bon Jovi are, always have been, and always will be....THE ENEMY!!!!

No. While they do suck these days, I really don't get why the hate for the '80s albums. Especially considering some people dig tons of '80s AOR and hair metal, including pretty lame bands such as Poison or Pretty Boy Floyd, yet they can't stand BJ, who are vastly superior to those two bands. The first two BJ albums are classics of the genre.

S.D. wrote:

S.D. wrote:

As I said before it's all just opinion anyway.  Person A) thinks Aerosmith sounds metal, Person B) thinks they sound like hard rock, Person C) thinks they are good ole fashioned Rock 'N' Roll.  

In the end does it really matter?  Not in the slightest.  If you like a band you like them, PERIOD, what someone else calls them means absolutely nothing.

We've had this discussion about once every 3 months for the past several years, we all essentially say the same thing each and every time.  

Still true a few years later.

This.

After reading through this whole thread again this morning, I have to agree with Ult and S.D. the most. Props to all who contributed as there is a lot of intelligent discussion and tons of knowledge here on this board.

I believe...

...that all the 70's bands mentioned are definitely Metal. I have never felt otherwise.
...that Blue Cheer was probably the first American Metal band
...that Metal bands don't have to be Metal all the time (every note of every song)and some move in and out of the genre.
...that labels are necessary for description but are borderline ridiculous at times.

I think a lot of people, of all ages, get hung up on the idea of a particular sound and image and/or time and place that determines whether something is Metal or not. They will say that if Band X doesn't look and sound like this, then it's not Metal. The proponents of that band for inclusion in the category always point out what they think is the bands heaviest track while saying "tell me that's not heavy?" and the detractors almost always say "well look at them now" there is no way this is Metal.
All in all, it renders down to opinion. Even when presented with facts like articles and videos and people who lived the scene giving witness, people will still shake their heads and hold their ground.

These discussions are tedious, I know, but it's also part of what I really love about our music is the passion everyone has for it and the way we will defend it to the death.  

Remember when this thread was about which band was the first American metal band?  Those were the good old days.

Witchfinder wrote:

Remember when this thread was about which band was the first American metal band?  Those were the good old days.

Most people decided that it was Blue Cheer months ago! 

Boris2008 wrote:

Witchfinder wrote:

Remember when this thread was about which band was the first American metal band?  Those were the good old days.

Most people decided that it was Blue Cheer months ago! 

Pfffttt. They were wrong.

SUBJECTIVE OPINION is a bitch, ain't it?

S.D. wrote:

SUBJECTIVE OPINION is a bitch, ain't it?  

Shouldn't you be whining about genres somewhere?

S.D. wrote:

Quote :

"I've seen where Cream is sort of held responsible for the birth of heavy metal. Well, I would definitely go for aborting. I loathe and detest heavy metal. I think it is an abortion.

"A lot of these guys come up and say, 'Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums.' They don't seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment — and painful. I suffered on stage because of that volume crap. I didn't like it then, and like it even less now."

-Ginger Baker, in a recent interview

Guess we can take Cream out of any "proto-metal" category.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

"I've seen where Cream is sort of held responsible for the birth of heavy metal. Well, I would definitely go for aborting. I loathe and detest heavy metal. I think it is an abortion.

"A lot of these guys come up and say, 'Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums.' They don't seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment — and painful. I suffered on stage because of that volume crap. I didn't like it then, and like it even less now."

-Ginger Baker, in a recent interview

Guess we can take Cream out of any "proto-metal" category.

Ginger Baker is a lunatic.

Yup. Have you seen the doc 'Beware of Mr. Baker'?

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Yup. Have you seen the doc 'Beware of Mr. Baker'?

Yes! Hahaha.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

"I've seen where Cream is sort of held responsible for the birth of heavy metal. Well, I would definitely go for aborting. I loathe and detest heavy metal. I think it is an abortion.

"A lot of these guys come up and say, 'Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums.' They don't seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment — and painful. I suffered on stage because of that volume crap. I didn't like it then, and like it even less now."

-Ginger Baker, in a recent interview

Guess we can take Cream out of any "proto-metal" category.

I've seen that documentary about Ginger Baker. Dude "loathes and detests" everything.

It's a fact that the first Black Sabbath record was heavily influenced by Cream, no matter what the intention or retrospective feelings of Baker & co they were an extremely important band.

When it comes to questions of genre, here's the real question to ask: what is useful?

A number of years back, I started getting clever in my iTunes library in genre tags. Damn near every band had it's own amusing version of a "standard" rock/metal tag. After I'd spent all this time and energy laughing at my own cleverness, I came to realize that it made the genre tag pointless.

The real use of a genre tag is in creating this big, generalized "bucket" in which a lot of different - specific - types of material can go. The word "tree" is pretty generalized and we can establish basic criteria for what a "tree" might be, but there's a LOT of room for variance within that one term.

Should metal be that much different? I am with S.D. (trolling on my part aside) with regard to terms like "proto-metal" and the like. It's pandering pseudo-intellectual language that tells you nothing about a band like Deep Purple or Black Sabbath that you wouldn't learn by using a term like "early metal" if you really needed to establish a timeline.

The real fun with music is that pretty much all genres have a lot of really cool stuff in them - stuff that doesn't always sound remotely related. You mix and match those different sounds and textures and you get NEW stuff (which is really where all musical innovation comes from - cross-pollination).

Personally, I've never understood why musicians are so precious about what genre tag their band gets stuck with. So Iommi doesn't see BS as metal... Ok, so?

Many jazz musicians hate the term "jazz", a term coined in the 1920s that many musicians 40 years later thought was a hopelessly outdated name.  Because of that you ended up with a proliferation of sub-genre tags to differentiate what was in a reality an extremely large amount of different music all being shoved under one name.  Bebop, Hard Bop, Post Bop, Soul Jazz, Third Stream, Modal, New Thing, Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz, Free Jazz, Latin Jazz, Jazz Rock, Fusion, etc.  But really...that just makes it more confusing and the more subgenres you create, the less meaning any of them have.  So basically the same thing that happened to metal with all the crazy sub-classification had already occurred in jazz 30 years before.

The interesting thing is that now, another 50 years after the fact most of the old jazz subgenre designations have fallen out of use and we're basically back to just using the term "jazz" to describe all of it again.

...and to steer this back on topic again. ARMORED SAINT!

S.D. wrote:

Which is why when someone like Tony Iommi says that the term heavy metal wasn't applied to their music until later I take his word for it from a historical perspective.  If Tony Iommi says that Sabbath played "heavy rock" then that to me carries more weight than what someone else described it as 5 or 10 or 45 years later.  Musical movements happen...and then labels are applied after the fact.  In the 1940s when bebop emerged the musicians didn't call it "bebop", it wasn't until later that writers coined that term to apply to the style.

...and of course we're still creating terms.  I never heard the term "proto-metal" until the last 10 years or so.  Nobody was using that term in the 1980s.  Back then Black Sabbath was "heavy metal".  Now all of a sudden it's proto-metal or doom metal or 70s metal or however many other descriptors that have come along in the years since.

But if you read Tony's autobiography he now says he understands and agrees with them being the fathers of heavy metal, even if that was not their intention at the start. They were just playing music and the way it came out was 'heavy'. He also explains the difference between Sabbath's heaviness, which he believes was in the guitars, while Zeppelin's heaviness came from the rhythm section. It's funny reading his book how many parallels there were between those two bands, coming from the same neck of the woods, hanging with the same circles, etc., yet the two bands sound so completely different. (Sorry, rabbit trails...)

I remember hearing the term proto-metal in the 1990's to describe bands like Hendrix, Cream, Iron Butterfly, etc. I'm pretty sure I even read the term in books. Doesn't really matter, it's just a term to describe bands whose influence was big on heavy metal even though the bands weren't heavy metal themselves.

Totally agree that in the 80's Sabbath was just "heavy metal". There wasn't even a question about it. Sabbath was metal. Priest was metal. Maiden was metal. It was never even a debate. It's so bizarre to me that it's become a debate in the last 20 years.

Funny enough, Martin Popoff is releasing a book about this very topic. (Well, almost this topic. Not American metal specifically.)

ultmetal wrote:

Funny enough, Martin Popoff is releasing a book about this very topic. (Well, almost this topic. Not American metal specifically.)

It's on my list of books to get. I need to get this one, his new Whitesnake book, his Ozzy book and his big hair metal book.