“It’s better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for who you are not.”
“If the metal music is work of Satan, the devil has a very good taste in music.”
Metal is often accused of being satanist. The Faustian pact is sealed since the 30s by bluesman Robert Johnson. The excessive and the decorum are part of the game: we can see pasteboard pentagrams in the band Spinal Tap, with the Stonehenge and its dwarves frolicking around. As well as the Marshall wall amps, reverse crosses in Slayer and it’s hemoglobin rain with glucose syrup. Irresistible when “Raining Blood” comes, index and little fingers are outstretched in the air.
It’s “Stairway to heaven” played backwards, which opened the witch hunt. Muffin Man was a teenager who made headlines in the 80s after an attempted suicide committed under the influence of Judas Priest.
True Heavy Metal in its purest form really conveys the medieval ideal. In it’s music sound and also in it’s appearance. The sound of Heavy Metal music can sometimes be really dramatic and cleansing. And it is able to take over authentic elements of classical music as well.
The appearance of true Heavy Metal musicians revives the medieval culture. The long hair, the specific dressing. However, due the unique nature of popular music -which is a product of the modern age and is basically ruled by money and business- , Heavy Metal could never emerge in full clarity.
Today you can choose from a lot of metal bands, but the great majority has nothing to do with the true chivalric ideals. You often see bald, obese or bulk up, scruffy rock stars.
Rough music naturalized in metal music. Different varieties of New Metal dispersed, which uglifies the pure sound of classic Heavy Metal with taking on the elements of other musical genres.
With today’s video clips, the crowd most often follows the general course of pop music in a kitschy, frivolous manner. So we can say that there isn’t and maybe never ever was a band which conveyed the real pure chivalric ideal to the public.
Not in music, not in appearance, or if in both, not in the internal content. That is to say not in the way of living like the musicians. Perhaps Iron Maiden and Stratovarius are the bands which are the closest to the real medieval ideals.
Besides art, music, painting, architecture and different monastic cultures the knightly culture, the chivalric ideal represented a real value in Christianity. This musical genre in its purest form would be suitable to revive the ideals of medieval chivalry .
Here are the top six metal bands ever:
6. Metallica
Metallica one of the most influential American heavy metal bands of the 1980’s, James Hetfield and the Danish Lars Ulrich are the founders. They are one of the most successful bands of the recent decades, they sold 90 million albums worldwide, of which 57 million was sold in the United States. They are the members “great thrash metal quartet ” besides Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax. The band featured five times at the first place of the VH1 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock list, won seven times the Grammy-award. They released their last album in 2008 (Death Magnetic).
5. Guns N’ Roses
Their first song, Sweet Child O’Mine did not reap down the expected success, despite the fact that Slash’s and Stradlin’s riffs were talking with each other during the performance of blues-based music as we heard in the heydays of Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones. The band wearing the honourable “the world’s dirtiest rock band” title turned upside down the sleepy and well-mannered American musical life at that time.
The original lineup of Axl Rose at the vocals, Slash on guitar, Duff on bass, Steven Adler on drums, and the musical brain, Izzy Stradlin on rhythm guitar jumped the gun in Los Angeles.
4. Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden was born on March 12, 1956, in London’s East End quarter with Steve Harris, even though he knew nothing about this in the first 15 years of his life. Young Steve cherished yet the plan to be a professional football player at his beloved team, West Ham United. The band has won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance with the track El Dorado from the Final Frontier album.
Every metal band worships Iron Maiden as their great predecessor. Steve Harris attributes the band’s name to a film adaptation of „The Man In The Iron Mask” from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, which he saw around that time and which had a verbal connection to the iron maiden torture device.
3. Megadeth
As one of the pioneering bands of the American thrash metal movement, Megadeth gained international reputation in the 1980s, but many member changes affected it, partly because of the notorious drug problems of the members. After the cleansing and a stable lineup Megadeth published a series of platinum and gold discs, including the Grammy-nominated double-platinum Countdown to Extinction album in 1992.
The Megadeth disbanded in 2002, after Mustaine suffered a serious nerve damage on his left arm, but thanks to the comprehensive physical therapy in 2004 Mustaine reformed the band and released The System Has Failed album, which debuted on the 18. place of the Billboard 200 album list. The Megadeth is known for it’s distinctive guitar style, they often use complex, musical guitar solos full of jumpers and shifts. Mustaine is also knownfor his special “snarling” vocal style, as well as his recurring song topics as politics, war, addiction and human relations.
2. Black Sabbath
The band originally started with the name “Earth” , then after the early rebranding they started to write occult and horror inspired lyrics to their songs with uniquely deep tuned guitar sounds, but they also wrote of social and political issues, wars, drugs and narcotics. Black Sabbath has became one of the earliest and most influential heavy metal band, with their albums appeared in the early 1970’s.
They helped the heavy metal genre with albums such as the fourfold-platinum Paranoid, which appeared in 1970.The MTV 2008 chose the team as the “Biggest metal band “, on VH1’s “100 greatest hard rock bands”poll the band finished at the second place behind Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stone called them as “heavy metal kings of the 1970’s”. In the US alone they have 15 million records, and more than 100 million worldwide.
1. Motörhead
The band’s music is a key figure in the NWOBHM movement, even though their music is more or less characterized by the less bound style significantly faster and more aggressive notes based on classic rock and roll instead of conventional metal components. Motorhead’s success is due to it’s Top 40 songs and albums such as Overkill, Bomber, Ace of Spades and No Sleep’til Hammersmith.
With these successes they have grown into one of the largest rock bands in the United Kingdom until the beginning of the 1980s. The band released discs and toured non-stop for almost 40 years. At the end of 2015 the history of Motörhead ended with Lemmy‘s death.
Metal is fearless. Metal shows you both sides of the coin, and leaves you to judge things for yourself. It shows you how wrong the world is. Yes, it is hated, criticized and judged (sometimes wrongly) for there same. Let me give you an example. Tipper Gore (Al Gore’s wife) on behalf of the PMRC (Parents music resource centre) claimed that Twisted Sister’s song ”Under the Blade” had lyrical content pertaining to sadomasochism and torturing bullshit and drugs and unicorns and ball sacks and what not.
Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister) said this in court: ” The lyrics she quoted have absolutely nothing to do with these topics. On the contrary, the words in question are about surgery and the fear that it instills in people. Furthermore, the reader of this article is led to believe that the three lines she quotes go together in the song when, as you can see, from reading the lyrics, the first two lines she cites are an edited phrase from the second verse and the third line is a misquote of a line from the chorus. ”
Once you’ve been initiated, metal is immensely catchy. It is proof that beat contributes more to the addictiveness of a song than melody.
It also helps that it has a well-documented and organized history that is only 30 years old. It has its commercial heroes like Metallica and Iron Maiden that serve as a good starting point for people who are new to the music.
And most importantly, it keeps evolving and never stagnates. Every decade has seen the rise of new forms of metal which take its technique to the next level, adding even more nuances to the sound. You can never really get bored of it.
Thank you for reading our article. We hope that you will read the next one also, which will be about the best jazz musicians.