Non-metal bands that actually claimed to be metal?

I think Led Zep is heavy metal. They were one of the original big three. Led Zep, just like Deep Purple, however were not limited to being heavy metal. They went beyond the genre. They were a good heavy metal band, but there were always bands doing the "metal" thing better. However, as a rock band, not many can touch them.

And some of those other bands mentioned kind of fall in the same category.

Slayer can be considered a rock band too. They're just kind of noisy and a little too marginal to be considered a great rock band. As a metal band however....

I'd say Lita's first album could be considered metal, same with her second one. Maybe a more commercial form of metal, but songs like this are pretty heavy:

Dark Horseman wrote:

It's funny to say it's just evolution of sound. So the early phones aren't really phones because they've changed?  

Yeah, there's no  in this reply. Haha.

Lurideath wrote:

I would not label Korn as metal but rather as rock. Just because it has distorted guitars and dbl bass drumming and being heavy does not make a band metal. If that;s the case that you define as metal, then so is Journey and so is Travis Tritt.

I wasn't aware Journey and Travis Tritt were heavy.

All that is accomplished by discussing this…..

I can't think of one band that claimed the metal tag and everyone simply said no. Usually it is the other way around.

im bored

[quote="S.D."]All that is accomplished by discussing this…..


[/quote

That's way more entertaining than this thread!!

I could watch that little guy for hours!  

If this thread is so boring, someone address this. =)

Eyesore wrote:

Yeah, but Def Leppard never called themselves metal; the fans did. Getting lumped into the NWOBHM scene is not something any band would protest. It would have been stupid; but I don't recall them ever calling themselves a heavy metal band.

In fact, check out this interview from 1981. Listen to the whole thing or jump to 3:35.

Eyesore wrote:

If this thread is so boring, someone address this. =)

Eyesore wrote:

Yeah, but Def Leppard never called themselves metal; the fans did. Getting lumped into the NWOBHM scene is not something any band would protest. It would have been stupid; but I don't recall them ever calling themselves a heavy metal band.

In fact, check out this interview from 1981. Listen to the whole thing or jump to 3:35.

Going to eat some crow here. You can't argue with a band and how they feel about their music. I always considered the first couple of albums metal. I will say that the line between hard rock and metal is blurry and the terms could be used interchangeably. Saying Def Leppard was hard rock is accurate. You could also say they were metal back then and still be fairly accurate, but to use metal, you'd need to add descriptors to frame it accurately. A bit of back pedaling, I admit. They were part of the NWOBHM, and shared quite a bit of those qualities with the other bands in the movement and yet still remained different enough to forge their own path. The metal term is an umbrella, like rock, jazz, blues, and country. The examples of artists not squarely fitting into a term are far too numerous to name. Metal seemed to be a term of my generation and it stood apart from rock in a way that was new and fresh. As time marched on, so has the metal term changed to accommodate the music it represents. I now prefer using hard rock to describe bands I used to proclaim were metal, simply because I think they are now. Yes, time does change things. Is it history revised, no. The music didn't change at all, but the pool for which to compare has increased ten fold.

It's no secret that I fall into the Def Lep defenders in that I believe they were never "Heavy Metal" as we define it. And there you have it, in 1981, arguably the height of NWOBHM, they say "we're not Heavy Metal". The fact is that they, the band members, never thought of themselves as a Heavy Metal band, and they never tried to be one.

That they seemingly ceased the protest for a few years when Metal was commercially viable is comparable to Frank Zappa telling Alice Cooper "Don't tell anyone!" in the "chicken incident".

I never said that this thread was boring, I just said that S.D's gif was more entertaining! (have you seen the part where the dog is so into what he's doing that he goes spinning head first into the wall?!!  )

I'll just go back to my original point that certainly in the early days of metal the line between hard rock and metal was a fine one, and in all honesty a pretty irrelevant one, you either dig what a band does or you don't, so many genres so many arguments.

Hard Rock




Metal



Same flippin album!!!!

I have no problem with people calling the older bands hard rock. 1970's bands like Black Sabbath, Budgie, Ted Nugent, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, UFO, Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest, Gillan, Uriah Heep, etc. are hard rock bands. Compared to what they call metal these days, those bands seem tame in comparison. So in comparison, perhaps hard rock is a better description.

What I have a problem with is denying that they were ever called heavy metal, or denying that heavy metal existed in the 1970's. People claiming that us denim and leather clad metalheads from the late 70's and early 80's were "co-opting a softer form of music and calling it heavy metal", when there wasn't much heavier than those bands in 1976, 77, 78, 79', etc. Those were the heavy metal bands of that era. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a fact that can be backed up with print media, testimony, history books, etc. Call 'em what you want now, but don't change the past or deny their part int he history of the music.

Oh, all my friends and I called Def Leppard heavy metal in the early 80's when those first couple albums came out. They didn't get any regular radio airplay on the local stations (WMMR, WYSP) but they did get played on heavy metal specialty programs. (Anyone remember listening to METAL SHOP?)

And "Strange World" is a ballad. Most metal band did ballads in the 70's and 80's.

Yeah the point of posting Strange World wasn't to get into yet another argument about what sub, sub genre it belongs in (I think it's a melodic hard rock song with flourishes of Floyd, you think it's a ballad) I'm just saying that Priest, Sabbath, UFO and Maiden had a musical scope that made their music quite difficult to categorize into a neat box marked metal, they were simply too good for that and their fans (who were metalheads) just went with them, it didn't matter, the music was what mattered. It's only these days when metal has gotten so damned tribal that everyone wants their band to conform to the strict guidelines of 'metal' You should read the hissy fits that people are having on YouTube over the fact that Metal Blade have signed Purson or Earache with The Temperance Movement. It's just music!

You always say that these bands being Heavy Metal is backed by testimony and facts? Who's? Because I can remember Black Sabbath, Uriah Heap, Deep Purple, Motorhead ALL saying that their music was not Heavy Metal. Are you saying that the creators of the music's opinions don't count because you think that other people's 'testimony' holds more weight?

Personally I don't care if someone regards Winger as Depressive Black Metal, but if we could all take a step back from thinking that how to label things is the most important thing in the world. The current music scene might just take a few more risks.

Boris2008 wrote:

You always say that these bands being Heavy Metal is backed by testimony and facts? Who's? Because I can remember Black Sabbath, Uriah Heap, Deep Purple, Motorhead ALL saying that their music was not Heavy Metal. Are you saying that the creators of the music's opinions don't count because you think that other people's 'testimony' holds more weight?  

But you have to remember that in the 70's heavy metal was almost a derogatory phrase and reviewers in many rags would call band's heavy metal almost as a way of putting them down, especially in the mid-1970's. Few bands really adopted the term and they certainly didn't want to be locked into a mold, unlike many heavy metal bands today. (As your Iron Maiden illustration so perfectly pointed out.) It was the fans that adopted the term "heavy metal" and linked it to bands like Zeppelin, AC/DC, UFO, Judas Priest, Kiss etc. Judas Priest were one of the first bands to really grab hold of the term and embrace it. By the late 70's, the term was becoming popular, especially in magazines even though the style itself was losing momentum to punk and new wave. Magazines were asking the question, "will heavy metal survive the 80's?" Many of those bands were lost as the 80's rolled in, dabbling in disco, new wave and other styles and consequently losing their fan bass. (Kiss' popularity plummeted in the early 80's in the U.S. until the returned to their heavy metal roots with Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up. Queen on the other hand managed to remain popular despite their forays into disco and pop.) As we all know, heavy metal not only survived but increased in popularity in the 80's and thus we got the "new wave of heavy metal" in the 1980's.

I can remember in the early 80's people would ask, "so what type of music are you into?" and my reply would be "Heavy Metal". The reply back was almost always, "Oh, so you like Ozzy Osbourne?" It almost seemed like Ozzy was the archetypical heavy metal band in the early 80's.

At least now guys like Tony Iommi admit that in the history of things they played a bit part in the genre even if they never called themselves heavy metal.

ultmetal wrote:

As we all know, heavy metal not only survived but increased in popularity in the 80's and thus we got the "new wave of heavy metal" in the 1980's.

There does have to be an original wave of metal for the next one to called the new wave! Can't have one without the other.

Bah. You are all pozers. There was no tr00 mettle prior to, or after, this ultra arkayne New York steele.... ehehehehehehehehe

Lari wrote:

I think Led Zep is heavy metal.

Don't tell Jimmy Page that...

I saw DL on the Hysteria tour and Joe said they were their to take back the metal crown they'd lost so that proves they were metal.  

Fat Freddy wrote:

Bah. You are all pozers. There was no tr00 mettle prior to, or after, this ultra arkayne New York steele.... ehehehehehehehehe

I'm surprised it took you 3 pages to post Killen......

 

Def Leppard was definitely metal. No matter what they say. If we let every band decide their own genre, we'd either have a genre for every band that exists, or none at all. And that defeats the whole purpose. They sound metal, they toured with metal bands, metal fans listened to them -> they are metal.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Bah. You are all pozers. There was no tr00 mettle prior to, or after, this ultra arkayne New York steele.... ehehehehehehehehe

Freddy, are you aware that some TROO Metulz fans consider this a classic? I am not kidding. I like a lot of obscure 80's cult metal bands and I run in to Killen fans all the time on some boards. Hehehe.

Uploaded some pages from a hardcover  tabloid size book
HEAVY METAL by Mick St. Michael, 1982.

http://mlotek-metalforbreakfast.blogspot.ca/2013/11/heavy-metal-by-mick-st-michael-1982.html

Shows 1970s bands that people now call hard rock BUT WERE labelled heavy metal as Ult said, and I still consider metal.

mlotek wrote:

Uploaded some pages from a hardcover  tabloid size book
HEAVY METAL by Mick St. Michael, 1982.

http://mlotek-metalforbreakfast.blogspot.ca/2013/11/heavy-metal-by-mick-st-michael-1982.html

Shows 1970s bands that people now call hard rock BUT WERE labelled heavy metal as Ult said, and I still consider metal.

There is no way that book is from 1982. It has pics of Axl Rose in it and Motley in it from the late 80s early 90s. Was it actually published in 1992?