new thread
I am just curious how a genre which originated back in the 1960s psychedelia has evolved into pure noise with grunts and growls.
maybe it's time to get back to the basic rock and roll of the 1950s and early 1960s.
I don't know about the rest of you all , but this does not qualify as music imho.
Yes Jake F, heavy metal was much more imaginative a few decades ago imho also. Some interesting progressive metal bands out there though.
Former Animal and producer and agent Chaz Chandler talking about his client Jimi Hendrix's music is said to have described it as sounding like "heavy metal raing down out of the sky."
peace,
jonalbear
Maybe it's time to let the women take over. even the non-metal bands seem quite boring to my ears. one example of generic vanilla sounding Rock is that band Kings of leon, but they are among many other unimaginative rock bands.
I say let the women take over and see what the ladies can do!
Are there any women bands around now? Back in the 80s we
had women rock bands like Blondie, Heart, etc. I would have
thought we'd have more woman rock bands instead of less.
There are actually more female-fronted bands today, but with the exception of a handful(such as Evanescence,Paramore, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Joy Formidable)most of them are ignored by the mass-marketed mainstream industry and many have an underground following.
if you liked Blondie and The Pretenders check out Dum Dum Girls.
When I think of Heavy Metal I go back to my youth (i'm 59 now)
when our Heavy Metal music was Led Zeppelin, Cream, etc.
Now that was music.
I agree 100% with that.
now, it's not considered anything but "classic rock".
without actual songs it's not worth even two seconds of anyone's time imho. at least those groups had some excellent compositions.
don't forget about Iron Butterfly, Blue Cheer,Deep Purple and Steppenwolf, who's first big hit used the phrase "heavy metal thunder" in 1968.
correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't it originally referred to as "heavy music" before the "metal" tag was inserted?
In this context the word "heavy" is older than the word "metal", if my memory is correct. "Heavy" was commonly used by hippies to mean "intense".
Bill
Yes "heavy" was commonly used by us hippies to refer to great
or intense.
" Marty McFly: Whoa. Wait a minute, Doc. Are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Precisely.
Marty McFly: Whoa. This is heavy.
Dr. Emmett Brown: There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull? "
It was also applied to metal rock as "Heavy Metal."
Now that i'm 59 years old I'm not sure when we started using
Heavy Metal.
But I would point out alot of these names get applied in later
years. For example now you'll hear that Hip Hop has been
around for 30 years. But then back in the 80s it wasn't called
Hip Hop. That name came along many years later.
On a side note I swore for years that i'd never dislike music
that came along in later years. Sadly for me that lasted until
about 1980. Maybe it was me being used to the music I grew up with.
I could have listed them but then the list would be a mile long. So I picked two and left it at that.
I'm not sure when the phrase heavy metal started. When I worked in radio I referred to it as "hard rock."
Kids in their teens and twenties would probably call it
oldies.
Of course our parents and the older generations referred to is
junk. i swore that when I got older that i'd never refer that
way to music in later years. For me that philosophy lasted until about 1980.
You do realize that In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was supposed to be in
"in the garden of Eden" but they were so drunk/high at the time
that the song came out the way it did.
But that song was great for when I worked in radio because it
gave me 17 minutes to go to the bathroom, etc.
"Classic rock" was not a term used back then, of course. We spoke of "hard rock", "progressive rock", "psychedelic rock", and even "underground rock". These terms were used if nothing else to describe the various flavors of what guys in their twenties liked, compared to "bubblegum rock", which appealed to the junior high school set. One rock station I DJed at in 1970 had the bubblegum rock records along with slower soul records in one stack and another stack with appeal to older listeners was labeled "hard rock". We had to alternate what we played between the two stacks.
Another common tactic at stations was to break the music into categories and label them around the clock on the wall. You had to play from whatever group the big hand of the clock was pointing at.
Groups often produced diverse styles. Steppenwolf's beautiful, slow, and melodic "Snowblind Friend" sounded nothing like raucous "Born to Be Wild".
"Heavy" was a general term not just applied to music. Any experience that was intense was said to be "heavy". Music that was intensely energetic could have been described as "heavy" before anyone viewed "heavy" as a music genre. Well, to be truthful, few hippies would have used a fancy word like "genre"....
Led Zeppelin got that name because someone said their music would fly like a lead zeppelin. In other words, that it would crash to the ground. Of course they proved that wrong. They went on to record the greatest rock song of all time....
And the phrase heavy METAL was just beginning to be heard.
Same here. I was a rock jock from 1965 to 1973.
And for us, music from the 1950s was "oldies".
"Stairway to Heaven," "Roundabout," "Bye Bye American Pie," former DJs can name all of them. They weren't just good for bathroom breaks. Breaking out the cocaine and having sex with studio visitors were also good reasons for DJs to plop one of these songs on the turntable.
Bill
Now I didn't do cocaine or any drugs when I was in radio.
I also never had sex at the radio station.
Of course a few years after was shen I met my wife and the rest, they say is history.
I was also lucky, I had complete freedom to play what I wanted
when I wanted.
Me neither. But quite a few rock jocks did. My husband worked at a rock station on Polk Street in SF in the early 1980s. There was a gay bar downstairs, and one of the jocks there would put on a long record, go down to the bar, and pick up someone with the line, "I'm the diskjockey at the radio station upstairs. Would you like to come up and see the station?"
Now that I never had. Well, not except with the pirate station I ran out of my dorm room at college. I worked at student run stations and commercial stations, and they all controlled what I played. I could pick songs, but they had to meet the format, and in some stations you could not bring in your own records even if they did. You had to play their records.
Bill
That's the way it USED to be and SHOULD BE today, but with mega corporations such as Clearchannel calling the shots and not caring about the listeners anymore nothing is going to change.
I would point out radio today is very different then when I worked in it. Today you have computers playing the music, you'll have
one DJ who plugs in a "local" voice in a bunch of stations, the listener may think he is local but he may actually be in some far away city.
I would also mention that radio and TV are dying. The under 30
folks are not listening to radio or watching Tv, they're on the internet, on their ipod/iphone/etc, out at local clubs watching
live music, etc. On the internet they're listening to sources
like Pandora. Instead of listening to existing radio stations
they are programming their own music choices on their own station
(be it on Pandora/Ipod/Iphone/etc.)
Finally i'd point out that AM radio will be dead by the next decade. And FM radio may be following in a few decades after.
What it has come down to is that music is so individualized
now that rather than have a few radio stations that appeal to the masses you now can choose your music in bits and peices and
build your own raadio station on your ipod/iphone/mp3 player.
and all Clearchannel owned or by Disney.
I don't even own a TV.
The under 30
same here and add lastfm and youtube to that.
it's already dead and FM will be toast once people can pick up internet stations INCLUDING pandora and lastfm in their autos.
probably within the next 5 to 10 years if not sooner and the sooner terrestrial radio goes out of business the better imho!
they destroyed themselves as far as I'm concerned and that was when they stopped caring about music fans and became more concerned with "market research", "demographics" and their corporate sponsors.
check out Dum Dum Girls on last fm or pandora and you'll probably hear some other bands you may like as well.
They already can.
My iphone already picks up many radio stations from all
accross the nation. (I heart Radio among others.)
I would also add corporations like Clear Channel and others
are doing a fantastic job of killing radio. (both am and fm)
And Sirrius/XM will also be gone in a few years too.
(My car has Sirrius/xm built into the car, but I haven't
activated it. Too expensive.
The thing to remember about radio is it is not in the music
business, it's in the advertising business. Also it is those
ads that pay the bills on radio.
The higher the ratings, the more they can charge for ads.
I already have both on my iphone.
; Re: check out that band I suggested yet? n/t
What band was that? I'm not even sure which thread you're
referring to.
Dum Dum Girls
...auch a bullsh*t statement.
You're entitled to your opinion.......but phucking what?
Metal (especially Death Metal, which is according to you just "pure noise with grunts and growls" with your statment) is right up there with classical music and Jazz as the genre that requires the most skills when it comes to instrument playing along with vocal range. No Classic Rock singer could ever hope to be as talented of a singer as Ronnie James Dio or Christian Älvestam (who can not only sing stunningly amazing, but has also badass growls and rather good high pitched screams).
You know, I find it ironic when Classic Rock fans declare Metal to be just noise, when this is the exact same thing modern Pop music and lots of other kind of music fans say that about your music and I'm honestly disappointed by that, because I actually expected more of you guys. This is just an ignorant and narrow-minded statement. Yes, the extremer forms of Metal need an acquired music taste (if you didn't grew up with this music, that is), but that's because the music tends to be much complexer than Hip Hop, Pop, Electronic music, Rock, etc. and it's no surprise to me that people say this because let's face it, if you are used to such simplistic music, it might be a little bit too much for you.
As for the growling and grunting:
Do you know how long it takes to growl decently without hurting your throat? How much time and dedication they put into learning this rather unusual form of singing? Even then only a few of them could keep up a high pitched scream for over 30 seconds (which I would bet you no Rock singer could do). Sure, you could just say "but that's just screaming", but keep in mind that those Rock singers wouldn't be able to "just scream" for at least 15 seconds, thus disproving that it takes no talent. And don't even get me started on the drumming part. Metal is directly influenced by Jazz when it comes to this, hence the blast beats. Your average, unoriginal Death Metal band's drummer could easily beat the vast majority of Rock drummers in this department. Keith Moon could have only dreamed of being anywhere of "Inferno"'s (The drummer of the band Behemoth) level.
Besides Metal has so many subgenres, proving it's compatibility with many other forms of music. There is Rap Metal, Industrial Metal, Crossover Thrash (which is a mix of hardcore Punk and Thrash Metal),etc. I could go on.
I would suggest you refrain from such claims, because it makes you come off as rather ignorant and narrow-minded, as I told you before. I personally don't find Rock to be all that great, but I don't go around claiming it's just boring, lame music with no complexity or depth to it.
On a side-note: Heavy Metal in particular (as well as Power, most Folk, some Thrash, some Doom and other subgenres of Metal) don't use growling or grunting. Listen to Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Electric Wizzard, Anthrax, Blind Guardian or Gamma Ray. It's mostly Viking, Death, the other part of Thrash Metal, Black Metal, etc. who use growls and grunts, but nevertheless, each one of them is unique and awesome in their own way.
I'm not doubting these guys can play.
There is only one problem though.
they don't compose actual songs with a melody line.
melody=melodic which this genre is not exactly known for and what I hear is nothing but gibberish, not singing.
without actual compositions it's not really anything, but noise.
sorry, if that offends. if you doubt me go ask some vocal teacher.
One thing to keep in mind with many of these musical acts is the
band goes into the studio wanting to record a song one way,
the producer (or studio) comes back with no, we want it done
this way instead.
Go back and watch some of the documentaries that were done about the rock band "The Monkees." Alot of rock bands broke up,
lost recording contracts, or vanished from the music scene because the band had ideas about what they wanted to do and record
producers and studios had different ideas.
There were very few rock bands that had the clout to do what they
wanted when they wnated, or had the clout to start their
own record label. That lack of clout is one constant in the music business from the 60s trough today.
Melodic Death Metal, Melodic Black Metal, Melodic Metal, Synphonic Metal, Synphonic Power Metal, Synphonic Black Metal, Melodic Power Metal, etc. just to name subgenres that are mostly known for being very melodic (A little bit too much for a lot of Metalheads, who prefer their Metal rather raw and old school). Also, Power Metal does not actually need the term "Melodic Power Metal" because it is very melodic in itself to the point were a lot of people complain that it is too cheesy. Exhibit A = Sonata Arctica.
Funny, because upon hearing the Song "Spheres of Madness" by the Technical Death Metal band Decapitated, the music teacher of the school of my friend noted that it is some of the most intriguing music he has heard and he himself was a big fan of bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Scorpions, etc. He was able to play multiple instruments along with having years of practice in different forms of singing (growling being one of that) and while not being a vocal teacher, he did indeed say it is rather hard to learn this form of singing, let alone master it.
Michail,
As the great Duke Ellington put it so eloquently about classification of music. "There are only two kinds of music; Good and Bad" This applies to all genres on all levels. Oh and please don't lump all of "us guys" into one pile. My musical tastes reach far beyond any one mere (Classic Rock) classification. Dissonance is as much a part of music as is harmony.
peace.
jonalbear
mu·sic
ˈmyo͞ozik/
noun
1.
vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.
"couples were dancing to the music"
Long Hair In Albany and some others here will probably strongly agree with me on this, but any band that is more likely to channel the Beatles, Shangr-las, Ronnie Spector, Blondie or The Pretenders is more likely to produce actual compositions than bands that prefer to engage in frivolous noise.
it's time to get back to composing songs with melodic structure, i.e, music.
I agree. To my view, rap is not music, for example, because it lacks one of the components of music, which is having a melody. If you strip out melody, you have poetry. Yes, rap is poetry, but being a "poet" is not seen as particularly macho, so rappers pretend that it is music.
What I miss most is the lack nowadays of vocal harmonies in music. The harmony in the voices of artists like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young was so beautiful it could make you cry. This now seems to almost be a lost art.
Bill
Oops..........someone forgot to tell that to Dire Straits. One could argue that their music was rap.
The thing to remember about rap is that rap was the "black" equivlant of CNN. There were a number of good rappers.
I have to wonder how much different rap would have been if
studios had stuck with artists like Will Smith and avoided the
gangter image. it also should be noted that the alot of white kids in suburbia were the ones buying alot of rap records.
Which is what epic bands like Iced Earth, Iron Maiden, Manilla Road and such do and in my opinion in a much more interesting way.
Just what is "real" music anyway? The whole history of music from the beginning grunts of the earliest Human Being until today has always been a very debated topic. Even some of the composers had their thoughts and to quote one of more modern times, Maurice Ravel. (1875-1937) He relended that: "I have composed yet one masterpiece, and unfortunately it contained no Music!" He was refering to his composition "Bolero" which the masses loved right away.
Rap to my ears relies on a strict rhythmic pattern to work which in fact IS Music and does work. (Many pieces rely simply on rhythm and indeed some astonishing compositions exist, and composed for Percussion only.) To the "ear" that listens and understands, then this indeed is music. I find Rap of interest myself, but in short order it wears me down.........but this is only myself. Time willt tell if this "style" will indeed last or vanish as have countless others at this art form so diverse now in the year 2013.
When I was quite young, age 14 (as I talk about in this video) I was snubbed by all of my Music Teachers and acused of the fact that indeed what I was composing was "not Music!" My own parents were enraged and so I was careful that they not hear what I "thought(?)" were my own musical compositions. How delighted that of the one example I play composed when I was 14 in this video, that all 9 of these early Organ pieces have indeed been unearthed by the professor of music at Harvard University and are slated to be published as have quite a few others over the past 1-1/2 years. (He has been playing many of my works and indeed is going to be making a CD at some point.) Imagine, Penfields stupid non-musical earliest Organ Music music being published 50 years after it was composed and making it into print! But, it took a Harvard Professor to do it. LOL
Sorry this was so long of a posting. Hope you all had a nice wwekend. :-)
Justin
ps: I have been accused in the past several years of not composing "the right way." Suddenly people inform me I am doing everything wrong and should be composing using a computor. Reason? It is much better and "easier" this way. (This despite over 300 works published within my lifetime so far.) I finally pinned one of them to the wall and said "ok, please show me how it's done and I'll try it." But for the really funny part came the answer. "I can't do that!" (I asked why?) "Because I am not a Composer!" LOL :-)
may I ask if you ever played in any bands?
Organ Music by a 14 Year Old Composer.
Only the kind of Bands that would be found in School. (Grades 3-12.) Clarinet. LOL :-)
As for "talent," all that was was myself not giving up no matter what anyone said or didn't say.
Justin~
Yes. I listen to both old school heavy metal and extreme, modern metal. I also listen to classic rock, blues, jazz, folk, classical, avante garde, noir-pop, electronica, soul, funk, rap, vaudevillian, All pop along the past century, spoken word, acapella, and many things that defy and intermingle all of these.
I typically can understand growls and screams. Maybe not on the first listen, but then again there are plenty of songs with oft misheard lyrics throughout all music. But if we're to use whether or not one person can understand the lyrics as the criteria as what is and isn't music: I would not understand a song sang in Spanish. By your standards, songs sung by Spanish speaking people isn't music.
Just becuase you don't like it or don't understand it doesn't mean that it's "not music." The term "music" doesn't mean sounds that JakeF likes, or sounds that Bill likes, or sounds that Hairball or Dave in Argentina or or Ted or Jarvis likes.It's all music, regardless of whether or not you understand what the singer is saying.
I think the definition of music may vary according to culture and social context.
Take a look at the following picture (I took it at the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC):
Is this art to you?
Well, for some people this is just a simple stairway. For others this is really art. Others may not understand the purpose or what the artist was thinking about when creating that.
To me, music is art. Since it's art, its very hard to define what music is because that is going to depend on the social context you grew up in, how you were educated, it depends on what you expect from music, it depends on what the standards are in a specific social context... etc.
Music is dynamic, not static. Music evolves as well as societies evolve. Music also depends on the social needs in a determined historical context.
So, comparing music from the 1960's to nowaday's music is a huge mistake. Because the society , the needs and the standards in the 1960's was different.
No, but it's music! Stairway to Heaven!
Bill
Jake,
We've noticed that you have posted about off-topic matters such as music. Are you currently growing your hair out? I don't believe you've posted a photo of it. Generally we like to know more about a poster before having them go into off-topic discussions so much.
Jason
I remember heavy metal being used in a pejorative sense, but it never was 'just noise'. Mostly it was just highly technical music with lots of arpeggios and drum solos but a bit short on melody. You don't have to like it, but if you don't realise it takes far greater musicianship than ordinary pop, then there is a lot that you are failing to understand.
I have always said I am more into hard rock and less into heavy metal, but I'm not sure you would understand that either. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple are probably the foundations of either one, and amongst my favourite bands.