Conference Agenda

This panel challenges scholarly discourses on the emergence of heavy metal music. The first paper critiques conventional historiography of heavy metal as emergent from rock music of the 1970s , given that “metal” was used as early as 1967 to describe music, while “classic rock,” the alleged father genre, was not conceived as an independent category until at least 1980. The historiography which sees metal as emergent from rock ensures metal is always subordinated to rock music, limiting its independence. This paper suggests that that function may be ideological, ensuring a genre perceived as abrasive, offensive, and grotesque by many is enclosed and subordinated to institutionalized forms of popular music such as “classic rock.”

The second paper rebuts recent scholarship by Andrew Cope (2016), who lays the sole genesis of metal to Black Sabbath. The galloping heavy metal bass line is identified as a central stylistic feature in heavy metal’s emergence, and located in early hard rock songs by Deep Purple, Heart, Nazareth, and especially “Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin. The result is a further problematization of that time-space where metal and rock diverged, and a call for the careful tracing of heavy metal styles through its earliest iterations—when it was closely related to hard rock—and a warning against retroactively projecting essentialisms based on what the genre became after thrash metal emerged in the 1980’s.

The third paper challenges the conventional historiography of the emergence of heavy metal with references to the bands Coven and Black Widow. These two bands were already demonstrating the themes and aesthetics of what we retroactively call “Black Metal” in the mid-1960s. The works of these bands, along with some proto-metal works by Jefferson Airplane and Curved Air in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, also demonstrate the powerful role of women in the development of the heavy metal sound. The existence of these artists therefore immediately problematizes the conventional historiography of heavy metal music as emerging from rock music.

These papers each hypothesize different origin and development points in heavy metal’s history, but they all demonstrate the facile nature of conventional metal historiography.

This paper challenges the conventional historiography of heavy metal music which views it as emerging from rock music of the 1970s, and particularly the bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. It argues that this narrative functions primarily to enclose, limit, or guard against heavy metal music, a genre often perceived as overly abrasive, offensive, and grotesque. By contrast, rock music, especially the “classic rock” of the late 1960s and 1970s which includes Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, has been thoroughly sanitized of radical potential via long-standing institutions such as Rolling Stone, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and years of radio play. This historiography of emergence, which sees metal as the scion of rock, diminishes our potential understanding of heavy metal music even before the conversation has started, acting as a preconscious understanding in which that conversation is couched. The Led Zeppelin/Black Sabbath debate is particularly ideological, as it creates the ferment of profound disagreement, but only within a predetermined framework that itself goes unquestioned. That framework is the thesis that heavy metal emerged from rock music, and especially “classic rock.” Yet the Rolling Stones were described as “metal” by Sandy Pearlman in Crawdaddy! as early as 1967, and Led Zeppelin was being called the “heavy metal champions” as early as 1976 by Stephen Davis in Rolling Stone. However, the term and concept of “classic rock,” for which there is so much reverence, only emerged in the early 1980s as a radio format, and only in 1986 did Billboard Magazine recognize it as its own category. Heavy metal discourse emerged prior to classic rock discourse, yet it is the former which is assumed to emerge from the latter. Against this historiography of emergence the paper challenges us to conceive of an historiography of coëvality, and what it would mean for our understanding of heavy metal if it were conceived, not as the offspring of rock music, but as its brother.

Black Sabbath are universally recognized as godfathers of heavy metal; Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, however, provoke disputes. Musicologists such as Robert Walser and Susan Fast, sociologist Deena Weinstein, and other scholars and critics held Led Zeppelin and, to a lesser extent, Deep Purple as pioneers of metal almost as much as Black Sabbath. However, recent scholarship, reflecting metal’s strong divergence from hard rock since the 1980’s, has upheld Black Sabbath as the only progenitor of authentic heavy metal. Andrew Cope in Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music (2016) even claims that Led Zeppelin had no influence on heavy metal, and that they operated within and inspired a hard rock idiom alone. Cope retroactively applies post-thrash developments in metal to a select part of Sabbath’s discography while selectively analyzing mostly early Zeppelin tracks to label them as blues-based. This perpetuates a heavy metal/hard rock dichotomy that only became evident to musicians and critics in the late 1980s and ignores the fluidity and mutual exchange between hard rock and heavy metal in the 1970s.

Using timbre-analysis tools developed by Cornelia Fales and Ciro Scotto, in this paper I trace the “heavy metal gallop”—a fast, repeated rhythm of one eighth note followed by two sixteenth notes in rapid succession—through its first fiery iterations in Ritchie Blackmore’s Deep Purple guitar tracks on “Hard Lovin’ Man” (1970), “Fireball” (1971) and “Highway Star” (1972), in a primitive form in John Paul Jones’s thunderous bass on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969) and “Immigrant Song” (1970) to its hitherto most realized form in “Achilles Last Stand” (1976). Jones’s gallop was adopted by Nancy Wilson on the most famous galloping track of all—Heart’s “Barracuda” (1977)—and along with the enveloping bass timbre of Zeppelin’s “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” (1976), Jones’s influence is evident in the rhythm sections of countless metal albums from 1976 through early thrash, including the work of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, and Slayer. Though Zeppelin and Deep Purple were not “heavy metal bands,” a close examination of one stylistic element shows their undeniable influence on the genre.

Heavy metal music is a highly influential and enduring musical genre of the 20th century, marked by its powerful sound, intense lyrics, and rebellious themes. Typically, the origins of this genre are credited only to a few prominent bands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Judas Priest, neglecting the contributions of other lesser-known bands such as Coven and Black Widow, which played a vital role in the genre's early development. Coven, established in the late 1960s, is recognized as one of the first bands to incorporate elements of occultism and satanism into heavy metal music, which have since become major stylistic features of more “extreme” metal subgenres, such as black metal and death metal. Coven’s 1969 track "Black Sabbath," which shares its title with the iconic heavy metal band, is a groundbreaking composition that helped lay the foundation for the genre. Similarly, Black Widow, a British band formed in the early 1970s, is known for its ominous and dark sound, combining heavy metal, progressive rock, and occult themes. These bands, among others, demonstrate that the roots of heavy metal are more diverse and intricate than generally recognized. It is noteworthy that both bands initially featured a female vocalist, and Black Widow was a pioneering interracial band, setting them apart from other well-known bands credited for the development of heavy metal. Moreover, it remotivates scholarly interrogation into the ways metal and rock music are coded as particularly masculine, and the aggressive style of play that may be linked with “machismo” attitudes. This paper challenges the conventional understanding of the origins of heavy metal by examining the contributions of Coven and Black Widow, and other lesser-known bands that helped shape the genre's early days. By doing so, a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the diverse roots of heavy metal music will be provided.