IF you want a massively popular musical genre that is either ignored or ridiculed by the music media, look no further than metal.
When I were a lad and it was all fields around here, metal was a heavily amplified rock form, stripped of all black influences, which featured simple and repetitive guitar riffs. Metal bands were always all male four pieces, and they always specialised in macho, aggressive on stage poses (hence the term "cock rock").
The phrase "heavy metal" was first used by William Burroughs and first featured in a" set of lyrics when the US band Steppenwolf threw it into one of their verses back in 1969.
In those early days, metal, bands fossilised the more basic aspects of "prog rock" and early stars were Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. A whole sub culture grew up around," metal fans would wear the, uniform of leather, denim and long hair and indulge in idiot, dancing, head banging and playing air guitar. Metal fans are invariably adolescent white males and have a Millwall FCC attitude ("everyone hates use and we don't care") to their unconverted brethren.
Despite the fact that many perceive metal to be one dimensional and musically limited, with lyrics that are either pathetically sexist or just plain stupid, metal has thrown up a number of potentially interesting sub genres. Such as Death Metal Also known as death core. Practitioners display an interest in mutilation, cannibalism, blasphemy and general, gore. Described as the audio equivalent of a video nasty, death metal lyrics rarely stray far from the graveyard. Bands of note include Napalm Death Morbid Angel, Cannibal" Corpse and Decomposed. For some odd reason, most death metal bands come from either Florida or Scandinavia (it's an X File thing, I suspect) and in recent years bands have been, competing with each other to produce the most repellent record covers and shock horror lyrics. Some, but by no means all, death metal bands are just" neo Nazi thugs with badly," tuned guitars.
Thrash Metal A crude, speeded up version of heavy metal which deep down has some punk rock influences. Thrash originated in the US in or around 1988 and in many ways it is barely distinguishable from Speedmetal, Leading, thrash bands include Metallica, Extreme Noise Terror and Slayer. In Britain, thrash was championed by DJ John Peel and for a time rivalled acid house in popularity. Without thrash metal, there probably wouldn't have been any such thing as grunge.
The whole grunge explosion wiped the metal slate clean and threw up a dynamic new hybrid, of punk/metal that combined in a lethal measure to bring us bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.
In a strange way, grunge did to metal what punk did to prog rock, although the former worked from the inside while the latter attacked from the outside.
These days, metal means something a lot different than it did in the days of Black Sabbath and the term is a lot more flexible than most people give it credit for. Look at a current metal chart and you'll find that the biggest names on it are those of bands like Offspring, Smashing Pumpkins, Therapy? and Green Day
In the same way that dance/hip hop recordings are differentiated from guitar based recordings, there is a strong argument to be made for a separate "metal" category. The music media (Q, Select, Vox etc) is usually sniffy and snobby about metal because (a) the nature of the music doesn't allow them to use their flashy university educated phrases, like they do when they write about bands like REM and (b) they regard metal fans as no more than white trash.
