Societys Views

A lot of people out there have a tendencey to say that heavy music is a huge influence on violence and suicide in todays society. Marilyn Manson has become a target, and alomst sort of poster boy for parents, news media, and Christains to bash on the subject of heavy metal. For the record, Manson is considered by people that actully listen to metal, to be in the genre of music called nu-metal. This is considered by myself and many other people to be a sort of false metal, personally I think that Mansons music for example could be considered alterative/industrial rock. Not only Manson but ”true” metal bands have also been victim to a lot of bashing from the media. If any of it has any relevence to violence, I would say that the only place where this is happening is Europe, impaticularly Norway. Over the past few years a lot of church burnings have happened in Norway and a lot of it gets blamed on black metal bands led by Pagans and Satanists such as Enslaved, Dimmu-Borgir, Burzum among others. Most of the members of these bands have have said that they do not promote it, but while at the same time they do not condem the acts due to the crusades throughout the middle ages and Pagan church burnings thourghout Norway at the time. Varg Vikernes of the one man band Burzum, remains the only person to my knowledge that has actully promoted and commited these acts.

Sep

8

Roots of Heavy Metal

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The roots of metal are deep in other forms of music. The main ones in my opinion are blues and classical. I’ll start with the blues, I think the best roots of metal come from the blues in my opinion for two reasons. The first one being the sound of the guitars in blues they followed scales that sounded more down. One of the only other major forms of music to use the tritone (or as its more commonly called today The Devil’s Scale). The tritone is basically a C major with an F#. This helps create with distortion a doom like sound. I also would credit the blues because in my opinion the lyrics have just as much soul poured into them as some metal does today. The second genre that I would consider a major influence would be classical music. It has influenced genre’s like Power Metal and Neo-Classical Metal with guitar players such as Herman Li and Yngwie Malmsteen featuring due to the speed and timing involved in the genre. It also influenced some melodic death metal guitarists like Alexi Laiho In fact a recent study has found that people that listen to classical music and people that listen to metal are very similar in their personality traits.

These roots influenced what became the first sound of the genre which is subject to opinion, but most agree that Black Sabbath was the first band of the genre and Tony Iommi combined these sounds with heavy distortion to make the genre that we now know as heavy metal. They were not the only band of the time period to come out with a sound such as this but are credited by many to be the original spark so to say.

It is needless to say that metal is the roots of many major genres including everything from Hard Rock to Punk, Death metal and beyond. All of these genres were influenced by the original sound and you can still hear that today in music.