80s decade utopia

[Avenger]

I dont own one single maiden or priest record

Just curious to know what you think is wrong with maiden and priest since you're not interested in owning a single record by either of them. That's two friggin' great bands no matter how you put it.

Apparently, Priest's and Maiden's "Steel is not true"...

[DaN]

I'm trying to catch up on this thread now. Very interesting reading..

The best thing about the 80's in relation to HM is also the worst thing.

Back then, a lot of very talented musicians flocked towards this sound because they thought they had a chance at success. Most grade A HM from the 80's was cut from this ambition. To make a living of it, to tour the world, to never have to have a real job ever again. Because it was a fresh, modernist movement there was a lot of experimentation. Nobody knew exactly, in 1981, how concrete and idiotically entrenched the genre definitions of Heavy Metal would become just 10 years from then. Anything went as long as you were passionate and real.

This is also the worst thing because there was an oversaturation in the sound and a lot of people that really shouldn't have bothered, put out records (especially in the thrash circuit circa 1987-90). Some of these records members here on this board love dearly and consider them true, but if a young person plays retro-thrash today, that's false for them. But in the 80's it was much more easy to be into HM for false reasons because then there still existed the chance for success in that form, it was high on the public consciousness.
/.../
As time grows by it's very easy to consider the obscure canadian '85 demo lp with the awesome opener track with the ripping scream and solo to be 'true', but... do we know? Have we met these people? They're lost in the sands of time but for all we know they were just dabblers in HM. As it's often said, anyone that picks up a guitar has at least one great riff in them, most even 3 good songs. So we consider them true because we don't have photos of them, we don't know that next year they went from playing RIPPING POWER METAL to power pop and we can't find out. That's the ultimate shelter of the 80's obscurist: that there is no way to verify the 'trueness' of all these small bands he deifies.

Obviously it's not so easy to do this with modern bands because they're right there on your myspace and on your youtube and it's so easy to tell how many of them are false and liars and ignorants... suddenly there aren't so many great new bands to be excited about... well just wait 20 years from now retro-thrash like Gamma Bomb will start sounding 'sweet' to record collectors even if their progenitors turn up their noses to them now...
/.../
I think the most beneficial state for HM is when the mainstream aspect of it is almost dead, so that musicians that play this sort of music know there is no chance of mega-stardom if they sell out. The thought that there'll be 1-2,000 people in the whole world at best that will get and love their sort of music should be enough to drive these artists...

Some excellent observations (shortened + emphasis mine) reading like something straight out of my own mind.

Me, I've adapted the rather cynical point of view that in even the bestest&cultest 80's Metal band member lived a wannabe rock star. (Christ, just read some of those lyrics..)
Not expecting more and not keeping idols/holy cows have saved me from oh so many disappointments. It was just part of the game and I really don't appreciate the actual music less for it. Heavy Metal wasn't hardly an 'underground' thing back then, at least not intentionally. Sometimes I wonder if people are confusing the the old Metal-scene w/ the punk scene..

[MassOfKthulu]

it doesnt have anything to do with bands being popular.It simply doesnt strike me as the best metal that was ever written.Maiden and Priest are major bands-i like my metal minor.im talking about scales,not popularity.Not to say i dont appreciate their influence,i know all the double leads and galloping riffs i love come from early priest and maiden.but what can i do,the US bands that emulated them sound much better to my ears than the original.and heavier too.'s this a bad thing?

[Helm]

Huge post coming but I was thinking about this a lot and figured I'd post here. Hope nobody minds terribly about the blanket below.

A realization that I've been having little by little over the last few years as an active HM listener and a person interested in the history of the form is that HM came to be what we say it is today due to a series of misunderstandings. The misunderstandings became accepted as reality and reality became entrenched with the intellectual arthritis most people call objectivity, over the following decades. Now I have to say that if pressed I can't readily provide exact material that will back up my case but longtime listeners of HM will probably instinctively 'feel' whether what I'm saying has a basis or not.

The core and enduring misunderstanding of HM is one of ethos. The 'trueness' issue, if you will. We, as modern day HM listeners make a big case of it (at least those of us not cynical). But how did this TRVTH OR DETH aspect of HM come to be? Here's a theory.

Initially (in the 70's, before NWOBHM) Heavy Metal was not a music concerned with ethos as much as it was concerned with transgressive imagery and colorful rhetoric. Black Sabbath were not really satanists. Led Zeppelin just wanted to get laid. Rush dabbled in the heavy as much as they dabbled in quirky folky ballads about inherent social tree inequality and whatever. Heavy Metal wasn't a genre, it was a sound. Various recording bands or artists dabbled in sounds trying to create their niche and seeing what would stick. This was before DIY vinyl pressings, these people were usually capable music players that were looking for something to sell to their record label so that they could sell it to a mass audience. In the 70's, HM was novelty music. This is similar to punk, which is now canonized as some sort of highly socially disruptive/situationist movement... as far as I can tell, it didn't originate like that at all. It originated as novelty music, 'shock your mum'. Heavy Metal was initially much the same.

HM for most intents and purposes died its first death towards the end of the 70's. In that I mean its novelty became trite and most bands moved on. Think of Rainbow's Rising and what they did after that. It was over, but not before inspiring the next generation of listeners. Their inspiration was based on a great misunderstanding which is very common in how these subcultures of music evolve. Young (naive) listeners took novelty music for totally serious hardcore no-bullshit 100% true transcendental art. I mean, it's not difficult to do. I can listen to Black Sabbath (the song) and I feel a satanic presence manifest alright. That's just how great music works, in spite of the limitations of intentions of artists sometimes real magic happens. I won't apologize to you guys for who much HM rules, I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted.

But early 80's listeners thought the musicians were 100% aware and responsible for the magic and effectively deified them. Clueless hippies like Ozzy Osbourne became anti-messiahs of satanic majesty. Tongue-in-cheek ironically-leather-clad Rob Halford practically defined the whole look of metal to come. They were misunderstood (or they led people on, depends on where you place the blame). The leather and denim in the youngsters of the NWOBHM movement wasn't ironic, they meant it for real. The 80's metalhead with the Angelwitch baphomet packpatch had misunderstood a form of novelty music for being something metaphysically much more robust and based a lifestyle around it. Strength and honor. Rejection of normality. Carving of one's own solitary path. Rebirth through destruction. Morbid romantic fascinations and Nietzschean wet dreams solidified over the excuse of heavy distortion and screaming, the core ethos of HM was defined. It didn't really matter if the bands sounded alike at all, as long as they hit that (loud) chord and they had these thematics, ones never before explored in popular music so blatantly. Negativity and rejection and death and lust for dominance and power had not before been allowed subjects in popular music. Perhaps they have been alluded to (after all they're essential parts of the human condition) and perhaps earlier artists actually approached some of these themes very successfully, but HM was different. It was plethoric, it was extreme. A whole genre of music was allowed to exist because it suddenly became marketable to sell exteme, morbid music to kids. It makes sense if we consider the political situation in the 80's with the mounting tension of the cold war.

Is it wrong to improvise a whole ethos around a novelty music trend and fashion it into a movement? Of course not. If it helps give direction and enjoyment in one's life it's just fine with me. I 'invoke' meaning out of (near) meaninglessness every day, we all do, that's what human beings are built for. They make up stories. They misunderstand correlation for consequence and they write little stories through which they look at their lives and their lives become more meaningful, safer, stronger, happier (this post is exactly that on a meta level also). Heavy Metal never inspired people to kill each other (besides the Spectacle we've been force-fed due to a few unfortunate cases) nor did it inspire anyone to go in the mountains and live as a hermit god-beast. It inspires people to be happy, to have an active hobby that gives them passing joys and sadnesses, it inspires the creation of communities of people that share the same interests. Just like any other sort of music. It has an air of transcendentalism about it which is essential for its ethos to work (if you don't 'get' Heavy Metal, you would never understand why the mythology is imperative for it to function, it will only appear ridiculous and cheesy to you) but that strata for most listeners becomes closed off the moment the vinyl is put back into its sleeve and they go to their 9-5 work. Heavy Metal Thunder for most listeners was always and On/Off switch. Most that wanted to be On all the time tried to make bands and do albums. The rest went to shows, socialized with other metalheads and bought bought bought more product to justify it to themselves that they were living the true life of the metalhead. But truly, of one were to take the mythos seriously for one to be a true metalhead they'd have to go through an ingressive metamorphosis that is probably too grueling to even consider. Blood and death and other unpleasantries which us comfortable middle class people would shudder to consider. That's what this music dictates, but nobody does anything like that. We are all inspired by it, of course. Inspired to do what, you might ask? But of course, to record even more Heavy Metal records, zines, review sites, set up live shows! That's the self-propagating quality of a movement. The important thing to note is that on a literal level, we are all false in that we are propagating a type of ethos but we are not following it to the letter. This is similar say to the anarchist punks that congregate in city plazas and talk the talk about spontaneous revolt and go to punk diy shows and put their nice little mohawks up dilligently, but they don't actually do anything transgressive, outside of the expected. Have you noticed that these punks are usually the ones talking about 'true punk' more than anyone else?

So then NWOBHM happens and some of these people in these bands were just like the 70's people, dabbling in the 'heavy riff, man', while others were sincere in their misunderstanding, and the first words about crushing posers and true music as opposed to false music are uttered. Why? Because for the ethos of HM there needs to be a juxtaposition between the strong and the weak, the destroyed and the victorious, the philosopher kings and the rabble. It's an essential part of its aesthetic, this antagonism. It's also completely idle, again. How many HM people went out in the 80's to 'crush posers'. And even if they did (in more rowdy parts of the HM universe as in Latin America or Greece for a time) how many of these encounters lead to anything more than a few broken noses and laughs over beers? Not many, really. But the mythology was established.

Here it is worth noting that though outwards, social manifestations of the HM ethos did not occur to the best of my knowledge, I do not mean to discount the numberless small transformations that HM might have triggered in individuals. Quietly, inwardly, we were all shaped by the power in HM. It might be something as simple - but difficult - as being talked down to in your workplace and standing up for oneself or it might be in helping someone in need at a crucial point. A historian cannot attribute these individual actions to any one movement, but I am certain that on some level the transgressive pride inherent in Heavy Metal touches all long-time listeners, regardless of what they say. In this sense Heavy Metal is less at fault as a system of thought than Punk music was and is because Punk made no secret of its political and social concerns and suggested methods of approach (by and wide, anarchist) for changing the world. On the other hand, Heavy Metal, for all its talk about barbarian hordes raising civilization and such was more concerned with the individual, individual transformation and why not, individual salvation. While it's not reasonable to suggest then that most long-time listeners of Heavy Metal saved themselves from themselves because they listened to Judas Priest, it is also reasonable to expect that some greatly benefitted in their way to do just that due to the big dumb heavy chords and the big dump fat words that rhymed on top of them.

I'm sure NWOBHM enthusiasts will agree that that movement had a really short fuse, with a lot of bands switching styles when they didn't become the next Iron Maiden or just stopping putting out DIY vinyl and whatnot. But again, the seeds were planted for the next misunderstanding.

US culture is very interesting. I am no historian but my hunch is that it's exactly because of their lack of ancient history that they tend to move, culturally, from one transience to another, always looking for the novel thing to support briefly before anyone else. 'Trends' as they say, rule their music culture. Things work in periods of about 5 years. For the first year a new trend is avant-garde, usually established on a grass-roots level and only a few people know of it nationwide. Next year more people know about it but it doesn't annoy the super-elite-one-year-earlier-people because the crowd is still small and, hey, they need friends as well. This is where a foundational consumer culture is established for the new trend, even if it is initally as humble and honest as just pressing vinyl, making t-shirts and setting up live shows. Third year it breaks on the mainstream, is quickly appropriated by the large economic players and the elitists cry and cry. Their foundational role in the nascent movement has been usurped by big money. Next couple of years the trend is milked by the industry for all its worth and then the next trend comes along and the old one before it is discarded until it's ready to be taken for the mandatory 15 or 20 year anniversary retro-necrophiliac event.

Keep in mind that most of us listeners to Heavy Metal only know of it and got into it because of the wide distribution of records by the big label bloodsuckers that popularized it to milk it. In the future methods of artistic communication will be very different due to digital distribution, so this isn't how it has to be forever, but it certainly was how it was for us. Let's not hide behind our own finger.

So NWOBHM movement reaches the US and the young longhairs there again misunderstand it. They take it pretty literally as well (though not as much as Europeans due to the lack of the language barrier) but they also do what Americans are prone to do because of their insecurity towards European art, they appropriate a warped version of it which they think is 'better'. Jag Panzer was intended to be to Judas Priest what in 1991 spinning skulls animated gifs 'welcome to my webspace!' HTML is to today's web 2.0 CSS with Flash fireworks and whatnot. Like GoodBadMusic wrote on his blog discussing the first Jag Panzer LP "back then compared to Priest and Maiden, this sounded so Sci-Fi!". For a short period of 5 years American HM people tried to 'improve' upon the HM formula and to carve their own little niches so they can sell records. Speed Metal... US Power, these things came to be and they were meant as 'Heavy Metal Killers'. More heavy. More fast. More extreme. More proclamations of trueness and crushing posers than ever before. Of course most didn't mean it (there were not a lot of posers crushed). Why did they do it? Because that's how the US thinks! Everything cranked to eleven. So if you make it louder and faster, you'll make the shouts about bad posers louder as well, it only make sense. But in this way they took something that was a bit naive and silly and made it into a stronger credo. The seeds for the next generational misunderstanding occurred there.

Here's a thing about European listeners (and to a degree listeners from any part of the world that isn't natively English speaking). They don't understand irony very well. They don't watch Saturday Night Live. They don't have cultural icons that became such simply for being funny. Especially if they're 13 years old and into extreme sorts of music like HM, these listeners take everything at face value through their broken english. "Crush Poser Must Die" they read? Then truly, Crush Poser Must Die. Enter the European/Latin American imagining of the US as a desolate post-apocalyptic Road Warrior wasteland where nomadic tribes of metalheads go on raiding parties and pillage the Poser camps and steal their women... whom of course they do not ravage but instead read romantic poetry to because Heavy Metal really isn't at all about fucking.

Also non-English speaking listeners do not see things in as narrow a trend-timespace as the Americans, so for the average European listener, Judas Priest and Jag Panzer could stand side by side, neither 'destroyed' the other, you could listen to both, in fact, most listeners did listen to all of it. All of Heavy Metal. All the nascent sub-genres. And they misunderstood the evolutionary path for just variety. A big Heavy Metal family. We like it all. As long as it's TRUE. As long as we're not the same as all the other sheep consumer posers, we must buy more records, learn more about this exciting form of music.

At the same time in the US the trend had shifted and thrash was again attempting to 'Kill Heavy Metal'. Europeans didn't understand that for a second-wave thrash band, Judas Priest weren't 'Gods' but just old-fashioned. A little later, for a death metal musician, Judas Priest were so far separated from their metal experience that they ware just a bad joke. Europeans by-and-large even in the early 90's still thought all of HM was a happy family. Those that didn't, considered thrash to be a trend and a pose and didn't want anything to do with it, entrenched in their belief that earlier US metal was fundamentally more sincere. But most of it probably wasn't, it was just an earlier attempt at 'killing Heavy Metal', usurping its power and shouting the credo even louder.

The big shift right about here (early 90's) is that the self-fulfilled prophecy occurred! Finally we had real posers! It is worth noting that when the first posers were deemed worthy of crushing, they weren't faux-metalheads, they were non-metalheads. Disco, electro, soft rock, anything wimpy sounding was the domain of the posers and crushed they should be. Such a harmless, naive, boyish prank that 'poser' mythos was. But then when HM reached critical mass in mainstream music around 1990-1, The Threat Was Real. Posers were renamed, not to be people who listen to other music, but people who listen to overground, mainstream Heavy Metal. Notwithstanding that a lot of these mainstream bands were achieving the dream of 99% of HM musicians that had failed in the same road to riches and bitches. Effectively this new True/Poser distinction was much more vulgar, much less charmingly naive than the past definition. It wasn't about metalheads/others, it was about metalheads/fake metalheads. The genre effectively swallowed its own tail right about then.

In the early 90's in Scandinavia a very clear example of this misunderstanding I'm talking about manifested. Kids that listened to HM thought death metal was a trend and a pose (in their visions of the US, they thought death metal was the most mainstream music ever and people walked around everyone in sweatpants and Obituary and Deicide t-shirts amd everyone in Tampa was in a death metal band) and they created black metal, another form of very literal, non-ironic, 100% serious TRUE HEAVY METAL. Reactionary to the core, there the mythos of what HM was and what wasn't took new flesh and bones. All of us here, even if some turn up our noses to 'Norwegian black metal' as something we do not care about, we are all extremely informed about this mindset, because most of us lived through the 90's as active HM listeners at the right age to be at least marginally involved.

The problem is of course that we grew up. And each of us, privately, started to realize how fallacious the true/false dichotomy we had invented was. Some of us gave up on the mythos, became jaded and cynical and stuck to the records if only for nostalgia and because let's face it, a kick-ass riff is always a kick-ass riff (not to speak of collector mania). Others tried to maintain their positive interest in the music but tried to exorcise the ghost of Christmas past, self-demonizing any mention of 'truth and falseness' in conjunction to HM, in this way effectively clipping its wings, limiting it from ever achieving full flight again (for what use is a warrior without something to battle?). Of course those of us that did that, still in their privacy, when they spin their favorite vinyl, they feel it, they feel the true feeling and they kinda want to crush a few posers as well, but they don't admit to such publicly.

Finally a few others of us are attempting to assess the situations that lead to the truth/false metal dichotomy and perhaps separate the cancer while allowing the childhood naivety of a HM that is proud to be TRUE to survive. The lexicon for speaking this new way is not yet constructed, and as usual we reactionary metalheads fight amongst ourselves and ridicule each other, propagating our self-loathing all along the way. But things are different now than they were 5 years ago, my personal experience says. There are new bands (and old ones that never faltered) that are true on a much more essential level than that which is dictated by how many records you have sold and which are not afraid to declare that not all things are equal, and therefore meaningless, in regards to ethos, aesthetics, philosophy and meaning in music made of big dumb distorted riffs. These bands are bringing what HM needs to survive, a wonderful, life-giving contradiction: they are growing up, while at the same time remaining blissful children, free of post-modern bullshit and cynicism. They might be few, but perhaps they will in turn inspire a new generation and for the first time they won't do that through yet another misunderstanding.

(edited for clarity and extra content)

[mordred]

World record!

[omen of hate]

World record!

Yes, holy shit !!!

[GJ]

Helm, I hereby dub thee the only True Metal-Head around. (no offense! tounge in cheek - no offense to the rest of us either). But the fact that you really think about things, and then taking the time putting it to words sharing your views with this rather small Corroseum community is a very nice thing to do I think and for that I thank you.

Great reading all in all. Made me happy. Made me doubt my metalness. Am I a mere Hard Rocker? A simple "great riff man!"-man? I will have to re-read and reconsider.

Ah, and one big question was raised... Whatever was it that Manowar did to the Greeks?

[Piotr Sargnagel]

Helm I still think you should put together a book of essays. That was very interesting - it didn't make me doubt my Metal-ness, and I don't agree with everything you say but I do think that you have something of the "Prophet Of Heavy Metal" about you, that you think about political and social ramifications of a type of music that is largely ignored and ridiculed. Well done, keep doing what you do and I'll always be reading your posts!

[Helm]

Thanks for the kind words.

World record!

When I posted it I kinda broke the forum for a few minutes. It doesn't like so long posts. I feel kinda bad for burdening the Corroseum with such thoughts, I should really make a second blog and just infodump there about these things so only people that are interested have to scroll through them (and also so I don't have to suffer the inevitable irony by those that throw it around when they perceive someone as needlessly serious) but meh, I don't have time to properly set up and maintain a second blog, I'm already behind on my first one. So on occasion you'll suffer but why!!

I don't like Manowar and have never listened to them a lot so I can't answer what's with the enduring fascination with them in my country (and other HM hotbeds). They seem fake to me and I think it's a lot for them to blame that the paradigm shift from the naive and generally harmless victimizing of 'posers' (fabricated discopeople) to other metalheads they deemed liars and their metal false.

Piotr these texts are so far from a proper academic essay. There's an insurmountable gap of required numbered references that I will never cross. My text is just based on hunches and it really is directed to people with a similar long-lasting fascination with HM so that they have hunches of their own. I don't expect anyone to agree with me fully, but if it made you (or GJ) think a bit then I am happy I wrote it out.

About doubting your own metal-ness... I can see how talking about these things might set such feelings of doubt off... I really can't tell you what you are though and it doesn't have to be that my metalheadom is your metalheadom. What's more important is to travel a little in somebody else's shoes than it is to compare these shoes to your shoes and feel judged by them. I am not judging anyone, hard rockers and cynics and academics and whatever else, I am just trying to put pieces of the puzzle together so the story makes more sense to me. I need some semblance of historical consequence (even if invented) to not feel... anchorless, yes, that's the word. We were born in a world that quickly became post-modern and 'history died' and 'everything became everything' and often I think we all feel discontent with... floating around in our lives without any lineage, anchor and point, a continuation, a clan, a family of values. I do not think it's wrong to invent this story if it will help me have an anchor. Other people might have less need for such a convoluted story, they might be happy with SEXUAL HOLOCAUST WILL DIE POSER GAY! and that's that. I kinda am jealous of that simplicity sometimes. Anyway it's not a competition. Some of you are given to collect vinyl compulsively. I am given to theorize compulsively about Heavy Metal, let's leave it at that.

Also you should definitely read 'Scum' and 'Impure Metal' and 'False Metal' by the Lamentations of the Flame Princess people, for variable but complementary (I think) takes on these subjects. See, I'm not the only one mulling over these things. Also the essays by Burns really are academically robust, he provides sources and dates and names and quotes to support his thesis. I have major disagreements with the Scum article nowadays, but it did set me straight on a few things when I read it in the past.

edit: above post edited so it might warrant a re-read if you want to talk about it. I changed a few things here and there and actually introduced a SHOCKER mid-way

[Avenger]

Perhaps tomorrow I'll get around to reading Helm's essay.

I don't know though, I'm kind of hesitant due to possible redundancy and what I believe to be an over-analytical thought process.

I guess I'll find out...

[musician]

Huge post coming but I was thinking about this a lot and figured I'd post here. Hope nobody minds terribly about the blanket below.

A realization that I've been having little by little over the last few years as an active HM listener and a person interested in the history of the form is that HM came to be what we say it is today due to a series of misunderstandings. The misunderstandings became accepted as reality and reality became entrenched with the intellectual arthritis most people call objectivity, over the following decades. Now I have to say that if pressed I can't readily provide exact material that will back up my case but longtime listeners of HM will probably instinctively 'feel' whether what I'm saying has a basis or not.

The core and enduring misunderstanding of HM is one of ethos. The 'trueness' issue, if you will. We, as modern day HM listeners make a big case of it (at least those of us not cynical). But how did this TRVTH OR DETH aspect of HM come to be? Here's a theory.

Initially (in the 70's, before NWOBHM) Heavy Metal was not a music concerned with ethos as much as it was concerned with transgressive imagery and colorful rhetoric. Black Sabbath were not really satanists. Led Zeppelin just wanted to get laid. Rush dabbled in the heavy as much as they dabbled in quirky folky ballads about inherent social tree inequality and whatever. Heavy Metal wasn't a genre, it was a sound. Various recording bands or artists dabbled in sounds trying to create their niche and seeing what would stick. This was before DIY vinyl pressings, these people were usually capable music players that were looking for something to sell to their record label so that they could sell it to a mass audience. In the 70's, HM was novelty music. This is similar to punk, which is now canonized as some sort of highly socially disruptive/situationist movement... as far as I can tell, it didn't originate like that at all. It originated as novelty music, 'shock your mum'. Heavy Metal was initially much the same.

HM for most intents and purposes died its first death towards the end of the 70's. In that I mean its novelty became trite and most bands moved on. Think of Rainbow's Rising and what they did after that. It was over, but not before inspiring the next generation of listeners. Their inspiration was based on a great misunderstanding which is very common in how these subcultures of music evolve. Young (naive) listeners took novelty music for totally serious hardcore no-bullshit 100% true transcendental art. I mean, it's not difficult to do. I can listen to Black Sabbath (the song) and I feel a satanic presence manifest alright. That's just how great music works, in spite of the limitations of intentions of artists sometimes real magic happens. I won't apologize to you guys for who much HM rules, I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted.

But early 80's listeners thought the musicians were 100% aware and responsible for the magic and effectively deified them. Clueless hippies like Ozzy Osbourne became anti-messiahs of satanic majesty. Tongue-in-cheek ironically-leather-clad Rob Halford practically defined the whole look of metal to come. They were misunderstood (or they led people on, depends on where you place the blame). The leather and denim in the youngsters of the NWOBHM movement wasn't ironic, they meant it for real. The 80's metalhead with the Angelwitch baphomet packpatch had misunderstood a form of novelty music for being something metaphysically much more robust and based a lifestyle around it. Strength and honor. Rejection of normality. Carving of one's own solitary path. Rebirth through destruction. Morbid romantic fascinations and Nietzschean wet dreams solidified over the excuse of heavy distortion and screaming, the core ethos of HM was defined. It didn't really matter if the bands sounded alike at all, as long as they hit that (loud) chord and they had these thematics, ones never before explored in popular music so blatantly. Negativity and rejection and death and lust for dominance and power had not before been allowed subjects in popular music. Perhaps they have been alluded to (after all they're essential parts of the human condition) and perhaps earlier artists actually approached some of these themes very successfully, but HM was different. It was plethoric, it was extreme. A whole genre of music was allowed to exist because it suddenly became marketable to sell exteme, morbid music to kids. It makes sense if we consider the political situation in the 80's with the mounting tension of the cold war.

Is it wrong to improvise a whole ethos around a novelty music trend and fashion it into a movement? Of course not. If it helps give direction and enjoyment in one's life it's just fine with me. I 'invoke' meaning out of (near) meaninglessness every day, we all do, that's what human beings are built for. They make up stories. They misunderstand correlation for consequence and they write little stories through which they look at their lives and their lives become more meaningful, safer, stronger, happier (this post is exactly that on a meta level also). Heavy Metal never inspired people to kill each other (besides the Spectacle we've been force-fed due to a few unfortunate cases) nor did it inspire anyone to go in the mountains and live as a hermit god-beast. It inspires people to be happy, to have an active hobby that gives them passing joys and sadnesses, it inspires the creation of communities of people that share the same interests. Just like any other sort of music. It has an air of transcendentalism about it which is essential for its ethos to work (if you don't 'get' Heavy Metal, you would never understand why the mythology is imperative for it to function, it will only appear ridiculous and cheesy to you) but that strata for most listeners becomes closed off the moment the vinyl is put back into its sleeve and they go to their 9-5 work. Heavy Metal Thunder for most listeners was always and On/Off switch. Most that wanted to be On all the time tried to make bands and do albums. The rest went to shows, socialized with other metalheads and bought bought bought more product to justify it to themselves that they were living the true life of the metalhead. But truly, of one were to take the mythos seriously for one to be a true metalhead they'd have to go through an ingressive metamorphosis that is probably too grueling to even consider. Blood and death and other unpleasantries which us comfortable middle class people would shudder to consider. That's what this music dictates, but nobody does anything like that. We are all inspired by it, of course. Inspired to do what, you might ask? But of course, to record even more Heavy Metal records, zines, review sites, set up live shows! That's the self-propagating quality of a movement. The important thing to note is that on a literal level, we are all false in that we are propagating a type of ethos but we are not following it to the letter. This is similar say to the anarchist punks that congregate in city plazas and talk the talk about spontaneous revolt and go to punk diy shows and put their nice little mohawks up dilligently, but they don't actually do anything transgressive, outside of the expected. Have you noticed that these punks are usually the ones talking about 'true punk' more than anyone else?

So then NWOBHM happens and some of these people in these bands were just like the 70's people, dabbling in the 'heavy riff, man', while others were sincere in their misunderstanding, and the first words about crushing posers and true music as opposed to false music are uttered. Why? Because for the ethos of HM there needs to be a juxtaposition between the strong and the weak, the destroyed and the victorious, the philosopher kings and the rabble. It's an essential part of its aesthetic, this antagonism. It's also completely idle, again. How many HM people went out in the 80's to 'crush posers'. And even if they did (in more rowdy parts of the HM universe as in Latin America or Greece for a time) how many of these encounters lead to anything more than a few broken noses and laughs over beers? Not many, really. But the mythology was established.

Here it is worth noting that though outwards, social manifestations of the HM ethos did not occur to the best of my knowledge, I do not mean to discount the numberless small transformations that HM might have triggered in individuals. Quietly, inwardly, we were all shaped by the power in HM. It might be something as simple - but difficult - as being talked down to in your workplace and standing up for oneself or it might be in helping someone in need at a crucial point. A historian cannot attribute these individual actions to any one movement, but I am certain that on some level the transgressive pride inherent in Heavy Metal touches all long-time listeners, regardless of what they say. In this sense Heavy Metal is less at fault as a system of thought than Punk music was and is because Punk made no secret of its political and social concerns and suggested methods of approach (by and wide, anarchist) for changing the world. On the other hand, Heavy Metal, for all its talk about barbarian hordes raising civilization and such was more concerned with the individual, individual transformation and why not, individual salvation. While it's not reasonable to suggest then that most long-time listeners of Heavy Metal saved themselves from themselves because they listened to Judas Priest, it is also reasonable to expect that some greatly benefitted in their way to do just that due to the big dumb heavy chords and the big dump fat words that rhymed on top of them.

I'm sure NWOBHM enthusiasts will agree that that movement had a really short fuse, with a lot of bands switching styles when they didn't become the next Iron Maiden or just stopping putting out DIY vinyl and whatnot. But again, the seeds were planted for the next misunderstanding.

US culture is very interesting. I am no historian but my hunch is that it's exactly because of their lack of ancient history that they tend to move, culturally, from one transience to another, always looking for the novel thing to support briefly before anyone else. 'Trends' as they say, rule their music culture. Things work in periods of about 5 years. For the first year a new trend is avant-garde, usually established on a grass-roots level and only a few people know of it nationwide. Next year more people know about it but it doesn't annoy the super-elite-one-year-earlier-people because the crowd is still small and, hey, they need friends as well. This is where a foundational consumer culture is established for the new trend, even if it is initally as humble and honest as just pressing vinyl, making t-shirts and setting up live shows. Third year it breaks on the mainstream, is quickly appropriated by the large economic players and the elitists cry and cry. Their foundational role in the nascent movement has been usurped by big money. Next couple of years the trend is milked by the industry for all its worth and then the next trend comes along and the old one before it is discarded until it's ready to be taken for the mandatory 15 or 20 year anniversary retro-necrophiliac event.

Keep in mind that most of us listeners to Heavy Metal only know of it and got into it because of the wide distribution of records by the big label bloodsuckers that popularized it to milk it. In the future methods of artistic communication will be very different due to digital distribution, so this isn't how it has to be forever, but it certainly was how it was for us. Let's not hide behind our own finger.

So NWOBHM movement reaches the US and the young longhairs there again misunderstand it. They take it pretty literally as well (though not as much as Europeans due to the lack of the language barrier) but they also do what Americans are prone to do because of their insecurity towards European art, they appropriate a warped version of it which they think is 'better'. Jag Panzer was intended to be to Judas Priest what in 1991 spinning skulls animated gifs 'welcome to my webspace!' HTML is to today's web 2.0 CSS with Flash fireworks and whatnot. Like GoodBadMusic wrote on his blog discussing the first Jag Panzer LP "back then compared to Priest and Maiden, this sounded so Sci-Fi!". For a short period of 5 years American HM people tried to 'improve' upon the HM formula and to carve their own little niches so they can sell records. Speed Metal... US Power, these things came to be and they were meant as 'Heavy Metal Killers'. More heavy. More fast. More extreme. More proclamations of trueness and crushing posers than ever before. Of course most didn't mean it (there were not a lot of posers crushed). Why did they do it? Because that's how the US thinks! Everything cranked to eleven. So if you make it louder and faster, you'll make the shouts about bad posers louder as well, it only make sense. But in this way they took something that was a bit naive and silly and made it into a stronger credo. The seeds for the next generational misunderstanding occurred there.

Here's a thing about European listeners (and to a degree listeners from any part of the world that isn't natively English speaking). They don't understand irony very well. They don't watch Saturday Night Live. They don't have cultural icons that became such simply for being funny. Especially if they're 13 years old and into extreme sorts of music like HM, these listeners take everything at face value through their broken english. "Crush Poser Must Die" they read? Then truly, Crush Poser Must Die. Enter the European/Latin American imagining of the US as a desolate post-apocalyptic Road Warrior wasteland where nomadic tribes of metalheads go on raiding parties and pillage the Poser camps and steal their women... whom of course they do not ravage but instead read romantic poetry to because Heavy Metal really isn't at all about fucking.

Also non-English speaking listeners do not see things in as narrow a trend-timespace as the Americans, so for the average European listener, Judas Priest and Jag Panzer could stand side by side, neither 'destroyed' the other, you could listen to both, in fact, most listeners did listen to all of it. All of Heavy Metal. All the nascent sub-genres. And they misunderstood the evolutionary path for just variety. A big Heavy Metal family. We like it all. As long as it's TRUE. As long as we're not the same as all the other sheep consumer posers, we must buy more records, learn more about this exciting form of music.

At the same time in the US the trend had shifted and thrash was again attempting to 'Kill Heavy Metal'. Europeans didn't understand that for a second-wave thrash band, Judas Priest weren't 'Gods' but just old-fashioned. A little later, for a death metal musician, Judas Priest were so far separated from their metal experience that they ware just a bad joke. Europeans by-and-large even in the early 90's still thought all of HM was a happy family. Those that didn't, considered thrash to be a trend and a pose and didn't want anything to do with it, entrenched in their belief that earlier US metal was fundamentally more sincere. But most of it probably wasn't, it was just an earlier attempt at 'killing Heavy Metal', usurping its power and shouting the credo even louder.

The big shift right about here (early 90's) is that the self-fulfilled prophecy occurred! Finally we had real posers! It is worth noting that when the first posers were deemed worthy of crushing, they weren't faux-metalheads, they were non-metalheads. Disco, electro, soft rock, anything wimpy sounding was the domain of the posers and crushed they should be. Such a harmless, naive, boyish prank that 'poser' mythos was. But then when HM reached critical mass in mainstream music around 1990-1, The Threat Was Real. Posers were renamed, not to be people who listen to other music, but people who listen to overground, mainstream Heavy Metal. Notwithstanding that a lot of these mainstream bands were achieving the dream of 99% of HM musicians that had failed in the same road to riches and bitches. Effectively this new True/Poser distinction was much more vulgar, much less charmingly naive than the past definition. It wasn't about metalheads/others, it was about metalheads/fake metalheads. The genre effectively swallowed its own tail right about then.

In the early 90's in Scandinavia a very clear example of this misunderstanding I'm talking about manifested. Kids that listened to HM thought death metal was a trend and a pose (in their visions of the US, they thought death metal was the most mainstream music ever and people walked around everyone in sweatpants and Obituary and Deicide t-shirts amd everyone in Tampa was in a death metal band) and they created black metal, another form of very literal, non-ironic, 100% serious TRUE HEAVY METAL. Reactionary to the core, there the mythos of what HM was and what wasn't took new flesh and bones. All of us here, even if some turn up our noses to 'Norwegian black metal' as something we do not care about, we are all extremely informed about this mindset, because most of us lived through the 90's as active HM listeners at the right age to be at least marginally involved.

The problem is of course that we grew up. And each of us, privately, started to realize how fallacious the true/false dichotomy we had invented was. Some of us gave up on the mythos, became jaded and cynical and stuck to the records if only for nostalgia and because let's face it, a kick-ass riff is always a kick-ass riff (not to speak of collector mania). Others tried to maintain their positive interest in the music but tried to exorcise the ghost of Christmas past, self-demonizing any mention of 'truth and falseness' in conjunction to HM, in this way effectively clipping its wings, limiting it from ever achieving full flight again (for what use is a warrior without something to battle?). Of course those of us that did that, still in their privacy, when they spin their favorite vinyl, they feel it, they feel the true feeling and they kinda want to crush a few posers as well, but they don't admit to such publicly.

Finally a few others of us are attempting to assess the situations that lead to the truth/false metal dichotomy and perhaps separate the cancer while allowing the childhood naivety of a HM that is proud to be TRUE to survive. The lexicon for speaking this new way is not yet constructed, and as usual we reactionary metalheads fight amongst ourselves and ridicule each other, propagating our self-loathing all along the way. But things are different now than they were 5 years ago, my personal experience says. There are new bands (and old ones that never faltered) that are true on a much more essential level than that which is dictated by how many records you have sold and which are not afraid to declare that not all things are equal, and therefore meaningless, in regards to ethos, aesthetics, philosophy and meaning in music made of big dumb distorted riffs. These bands are bringing what HM needs to survive, a wonderful, life-giving contradiction: they are growing up, while at the same time remaining blissful children, free of post-modern bullshit and cynicism. They might be few, but perhaps they will in turn inspire a new generation and for the first time they won't do that through yet another misunderstanding.

(edited for clarity and extra content)

I can only respond to this behemoth of a essay, with a simple yet sufficient response.

Music in general, was founded on a simple purpose. Music, is art.

Accusation of bands, untrue sounds, meaning of music... Do you even know the meaning of music? Or are you just replacing the real meaning of music, with your modern day views of the past?

Just like the masters of sheet music in the past, classical musicians, and trained scholar musicians. There is always one thing that stands out from earliest music, to recent music. A title to the style of music.

I am here to make you realize, your opinions are all failures. The meaning behind metal is far more simplistic, and realistically bound, than what you make it. Your perceptions, are just one of thousands of different ways, to look at things in a more complicated way.

Opinions from you, mean nothing to any of the musicians, that wrote this music you speak of. What are you doing here, talking about works of the past? Do you honestly believe all this you said? They simply left their mark... you will fade to nothing. Their fans did, what their fans did. You are just a failure.

Accept the fact that you are in year 2009, and stop trying to identify what you think the past was. Music will always be music.

Music is creativity, with a paintbrush and a canvas. Either you are too blind to see the art, or too deaf to hear it. I doubt you know how to create it.

Go play some fucking guitar hero.

[Helm]

From your confusing response I gather a variation of the "those that can, do. Those that can't, bitch about it" point of view. Correct?

Then I don't know if it would make you feel better or worse to know that I am a musician and a visual artist, though I might not parade it by naming myself "MusicianMcComicArtist" or something, heh. Not only do I think that point of view is a gross and elitist simplification meant to shield deified "artistes" from critique and worthy dialogue about what they do, it's also most specifically disappointing for me that you felt compelled after reading this to sign up to dismiss my points and me personally as a reject failure. My text was not meant as an insult to anyone, so this response is puzzling. I'm eager to understand your point of view, but I also have my limits. Some introspection might be in order to find out why you felt so insulted by one guy's online overview of Heavy Metal to the point where you just had to sign up to post your bitterness.

Writing and thinking are creative and valuable things to do as well. You might not be interested in the same things I am but should you tell different people to you off? If you want to engage in dialogue for real, try to understand the other person, not just write them off with such shallow generalizations as those you posted above. If you've got no respect for me or my ideas then don't talk to me, you certainly don't have to. There's enough ugliness in human interaction everywhere, we don't have to add to it.

[Shiremen]

Well, I simply enjoyed reading Helm's post and the reaction it sturred. Well written as well.

Some minor points.
For me, who has listened to Heavy Metal since 1983, it has always been about three things:
1) Rebel against something. Punk always had something specific to rebel against, government for example. The rebelliousness of HM is way moore blurry and diffuse. Heavy Metal has a strange characteristic, and that is that it's trying to be open-minded (express lyrics & images that popular culture doesn't) and conservative (true metal bla bla, saxophones isn't Heavy etc.) AT THE SAME TIME! That's what makes HM interesting to me.

2) To find oneself's identity. For me, who come from a small no-place-town in Sweden, I could easily distinguish people who had the same hobby/interest/music taste as me. A patch with Iron Maiden was all that needed to convince me that another person could be trusted . I think 98% of all the people on this forum enjoy their metal the best with friends and beers. And who says no to friendship and fun?

But Helm, you forgot something. Metal is music played by white males for an audience of white males, and still we are not racists! In 26 years of listening to HM, I can't remember a single HM fan I've met who has had rasistic views.

3) The love of music. I just love that crunchy sound of heavy guitars, thundering drums and controlled/untrolled aggression. And what makes me happy is the knowledge that I can search for new and old music for the rest of my life, and the amount of music left to be discovered by me is by faaaaar exceeding the time I have to listen to it. And therefore, I won't be bored ever again

[Black Axe]

A patch with Iron Maiden was all that needed to convince me that another person could be trusted .

Well, twenty years ago perhaps. No longer though.

I think 98% of all the people on this forum enjoy their metal the best with friends and beers.

Who are the other nine?

And heavy metal is played by musicians for fans, not by and for races or genders. There are quite a few racist heavy metal fans. But you can usually notice, and thus ignore these people.

[GJ]

Music is creativity, with a paintbrush and a canvas.

I'm pretty sure you've got something wrong here - but I just can't figure it out.

Anyway, welcome Yngwie! We've been waiting for your arrival.