A technical question

First off, this is not about being all douchy about grouping genres into pigeon holes, It's just something I've been wondering for years.

Ult (and others), is (or should I write "are"?) much older than me and he frequently expresses how bands like Kiss are always called hard rock and not really metal, but how in his days, people called it "metal" - my question, is "metal" always based on heaviness? I'm a drummer, but I know jack-sh#t about musical theory, but can something labelled "hard rock" be musically "heavier" than "metal"? I mean, can a structure of a song be more indicative of a genre than audio?

I just think that genres used to be a lot broader than they are now......metal covered everything from Aerosmith to Slayer back in the day.

Now everything is divided into these little sub-genres and people get insulted if you don't identify their music by exactly the correct term.

Oy....I stopped giving a f*ck about such nonsense ages ago. Life's too short to worry about what box a certain band goes in.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Oy....I stopped giving a f*ck about such nonsense ages ago. Life's too short to worry about what box a certain band goes in.

Exactly. Aerosmith could be labeled neo-hippie-djent-western-shoegaze-banjo-deathcore and it wouldn't affect their ability to kick my booty.

If people really wanna get anal about genre and stuff.  Give them one of these.
 

MetallicSeminarian wrote:

Exactly. Aerosmith could be labeled neo-hippie-djent-western-shoegaze-banjo-deathcore and it wouldn't affect their ability to kick my booty.

You know, That is the correct genre to place them in.   

Fat Freddy wrote:

Oy....I stopped giving a f*ck about such nonsense ages ago. Life's too short to worry about what box a certain band goes in.

Totally share your sentiments.

Two genres for me. They are:

Stuff I like

and stuff that sucks.

Really simple.

^^ I use the exact same criteria! What are the odds?

Personally I think genre-labeling is pointless.

What I find far more useful is band comparisons. Forget genres; IMO it's more helpful to say "this band sounds like classic AC/DC" or "this band reminds me of early Kiss".

tohostudios wrote:

Personally I think genre-labeling is pointless.  

What I find far more useful is band comparisons.  Forget genres; IMO it's more helpful to say "this band sounds like classic AC/DC" or "this band reminds me of early Kiss".  

I agree with this. Unfortunately, internet trolls and elitists will accuse bands of ripping off other artists, when all they did was try to pay tribute to them.

Mglaffas81 wrote:

First off, this is not about being all douchy about grouping genres into pigeon holes, It's just something I've been wondering for years.

Ult (and others), is (or should I write "are"?) much older than me and he frequently expresses how bands like Kiss are always called hard rock and not really metal, but how in his days, people called it "metal" - my question, is "metal" always based on heaviness? I'm a drummer, but I know jack-sh#t about musical theory, but can something labelled "hard rock" be musically "heavier" than "metal"? I mean, can a structure of a song be more indicative of a genre than audio?

I think there are many different kinds of "heavy". It doesn't always mean brutal or extreme or whatever. It can be based on pure emotion, it can be atmosphere, it can be production, it can be tuning, it can be speed, it can be riffs... lots of things can make a band sound heavy. Makes no difference what genre the fall into.

I've heard people say Rammstein sound heavier than most black metal. This is true in some ways but not in others. I think if you have set a solid definition as to what makes something heavy to you, then you are going to have a stronger opinion of what is heavier than whatever. If you don't, then you can appreciate many different kinds of heavy, with no need to compare them. If that makes any sense.

So no, IMO metal is not always heavy & heavy is not always metal.

mc666 wrote:

So no, IMO metal is not always heavy & heavy is not always metal.

  

Quote :

What I find far more useful is band comparisons. Forget genres; IMO it's more helpful to say "this band sounds like classic AC/DC" or "this band reminds me of early Kiss".

I agree...however that only works when the comparison is done by someone who actually knows the bands. How many times have you read or heard something like "for fans of Kiss, poison and slayer" which is mind boggling in itself ...then you check out the band and they sound more like Duran Duran   

If you wanted to get "technical" about this, the real difference between "hard rock" and "metal" seems to be a production style. I mean, listen to old Judas Priest (say Rocka Rolla) vs. the new album.

The old album has a very "small" sound to it in comparison. The drums are very tight and dry sounding on the record where now they're HUGE BOOMING REVERB-LADENED DOOM CANNONS! Same basic idea for guitars. They're a lot bigger, louder and a lot more compressed sonically.

If there are any closet audio engineers with ins on the board, I'd love to hear someone remix a modern metal album as if it was a 70s "hard rock" album. That would amuse me to no end to hear any number of records completely washed down until it sounded like they recorded next door to Journey (nothing against Journey, mind you, but tossing any modern metal band in there would be funny to hear).   

S.D. wrote:

mc666 wrote:

So no, IMO metal is not always heavy & heavy is not always metal.

  

  

A lot of technical changes happened in the late 70s/early 80s that impacted the sound of both guitars and recording technology. Active-electronic guitar pickups, solid state amplifiers, digital effects boxes really changed the sound of guitars. Digital signal processing in recordings studios also changed the sound of effects used to manipulate recordings including things like reverb, noise gates, etc. Then a little later the "mid-scoop" EQ on guitars became commonplace as did using a compressor pedal.

The "modern metal sound" is really just a continuation of that and it's the reason I think younger people sometimes seem "confused" by the sound of 1970s heavy metal albums.

If you really get down to the "metal or not" debate's brass tacks, it seems to have less to do with the music itself and a lot more to do with how the music is presented sonically.

I mean, you listen to Minstrel in the Gallery by Jethro Tull, there are friggin' blast beats in the drumming (no, seriously!), but the sound is so dry that you have to really listen for it. Nobody would seriously consider calling Tull metal (much to the chagrin of Metallica fans), but there are musical commonalities there that you just don't hear because of the way it's mixed and recorded.

It's funny, but until this thread, I'd never really thought of how much the recording tech impacted what we thought of in terms of genre.

Put another way, think of how different 80s rap sounded from what we have now (jokes about quality aside). That was literally a record being manually spun to create a loop with what was (then) a cheap, crappy drum machine to hold the whole thing together. Now, it's big production, big noise, etc.

bassman wrote:

I just think that genres used to be a lot broader than they are now......metal covered everything from Aerosmith to Slayer back in the day.

Now everything is divided into these little sub-genres and people get insulted if you don't identify their music by exactly the correct term.

This morning I watched The Decline of Western Civilization, part II.
Steve Tyler answered when Aerosmith was called heavy metal, that it was 'such a small part of what they were', and there was "so much more" to them (spreads hands far away from each other), which is true.
Aerosmith is now know more for pop and ballads, than the early years when it was bluesy hard rock.
They pulled away from speed like "Toys In The Attic" and heavy riffing,  sort of comparable to some Led Zeppelin ("Presence" LP especially)

Shawn Of Fire wrote:

S.D. wrote:

mc666 wrote:

So no, IMO metal is not always heavy & heavy is not always metal.

Runicen wrote:

I mean, you listen to Minstrel in the Gallery by Jethro Tull, there are friggin' blast beats in the drumming (no, seriously!), but the sound is so dry that you have to really listen for it.  Nobody would seriously consider calling Tull metal (much to the chagrin of Metallica fans), but there are musical commonalities there that you just don't hear because of the way it's mixed and recorded.  

I just checked the album out on YouTube and can't hear it myself.
Some of the drumming is intense in the first few songs, but like you said, the production is a factor.

A few PMs sent my way telling me I need to jump in here. I've been following along, but not getting into the discussion. For the record, I have never said that Aerosmith are heavy metal by today's standards. I have only said that they were commonly known and commonly thought of as heavy metal in the 1970's, as was bands like Deep Purple, Ted Nugent, UFO, Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Scorpions, Van Halen, Judas Priest, etc. etc. etc. These were the first wave of heavy metal, then came the second wave in the 1980's. It is a fact that "hard rock" and "heavy metal" were synonymous terms in the 1970's and the big distinction between the two didn't start coming until the mid-to-late 80's. All those 70's bands were diverse and what we think of as metal now is only part of their sound.