inclusive stance of the magazine itself. But fans also contribute their perspectives directly through the letters columns that begin each issue. For example, one fan wrote to offer his canon of the best metal bands; his letter is emphatic about the importance of genre, and he sees “heavy metal” as a distinction of great value, something that can be attained and then lost:
Some other good groups are Accept, from Germany, and Exciter, Heaven, Twisted Sister, Girls School, Wild Dogs and so many others. Van Halen was once Heavy Metal but they got stuck on themselves. Van Halen is now what we refer to as “Bubblegum” hard rock. Loverboy, ZZ Top and Zebra are all hard rock. There is a difference between hard rock and Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal is actually a “New Wave” music for the 80s.13
Another fan addressed the controversial split between glam and speed metal, rebutting the many hostile letters that disparage one side or the other. She takes a liberal stance that retains the label “heavy metal” for her favorite band but acknowledges the merit of its incompatible cousins: “Poison and Metallica shouldn’t even be compared really. Poison is heavy metal. Metallica is speed metal. Poison is good at what they do, and Metallica is good at what they do.”14 The letters columns of magazines like RIP or Hit Parader also serve as forums for other kinds of debates, including discussions of sexism, homophobia, and racism. Fans often write in to critique the representations of gender and race they find in heavy metal lyrics, interviews with musicians, and journalism.15
Musicians who are considered heavy metal by their fans may vary greatly in their allegiance to the genre. Judas Priest’s goal has been “to achieve the definition of heavy metal,” while members of AC/DC and Def Leppard claim to hate the term, even though all three bands are mainstay subjects of heavy metal fandom.16 Many writers and fans consider Led Zeppelin the fount of heavy metal: “Quite simply, Led Zeppelin is, was, and will always be the ultimate heavy metal masters.”17 But Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, rejects that characterization, saying, for example, of the band’s first album, “That was not heavy metal. There was nothing heavy about that at all…. It was ethereal.”18
There are many reasons for bands to position themselves carefully with respect to a genre label. Their account of their relationship to heavy metal can imply or deny historical and discursive connections to other music. But more important, it situates them with respect to audiences, interpretative norms, and institutional channels. Guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen denies any connection with metal out of contempt for a genre that he views as technically and aesthetically inferior to his own music. Malmsteen hopes to gain greater prestige as an artist than is normally granted to metal musicians, but he is also bidding for the radio play that is often denied them.19 Iron Maiden has ahvays depended on selling tickets and albums to hard-core metal fans; they have no other audience. Yet the group’s singer, Bruce Dickinson, affects nonchalance when discussing the genre and their place in it: “What is your viewpoint? I wouldn’t call UFO a heavy metal band, but if you happen to be a fan of Human League, they probably are. And if you’re a fan of Motörhead, UFO aren’t heavy metal. If we said we are heavy metal, it wouldn’t matter much in the way we sound. It’s a category.”20 Many artists bridle at genre categories because they see them as restrictive stereotypes, implying formulaic composition. Dickinson resists being pigeonholed by pointing to the relative, rather than absolute, nature of genre distinctions. But he must feign indifference to the meaningfulness of genre to fans and institutions in order to claim this appearance of artistic freedom.
The music of Rush meets the criteria of the definition of heavy metal held by most outsiders but fails the standards of most metal fans. Geddy Lee, the band’s singer and bass player, muses on the problematic status of his band: “It’s funny. When you talk to metal people about Rush, eight out of ten will tell you that we’re not a metal band. But if you talk to anyone outside of metal, eight out of ten will tell you we are a metal band. Metal is a very broad term.”21 There is, of course, a great deal of coherence in the genre of heavy metal; there are many bands that would be considered metal by virtually all fans. But genres are defined not only through internal features of the artists or the texts but also through commercial strategies and the conflicting valorizations of audiences. These debates over heavy metal are grounded in historical formations of meaning and prestige. To understand the priorities and values of heavy metal musicians and fans, we will need to examine their history.
Casting Heavy Metal
The term “heavy metal” has been applied to popular music since the late 1960s, when it began to appear in the rock press as an adjective; in the early 1970s it became a noun and thus a genre. The spectacular increase in the popularity of heavy metal during the 1980s prompted many critics and scholars of popular music to begin to write metal’s history. In histories of rock and of American music, in encyclopedias of popular music, in books and periodicals aimed at the dedicated metal fan or the quizzical outsider, writers began to construct a history of the genre. These historians have all understood their task similarly: they have attempted to define the boundaries of a musical genre and to produce a narrative of the formation and development of that genre, usually in the context of the history of rock music. The best of these histories, such as Philip Bashe’s Heavy Metal Thunder or Wolf Marshall’s articles in Guitar for the Practicing Musician, are insightful and lucid, written by journalists with intimate knowledge of the bands and their fans.22
Histories typically begin with a problem most writers regard as essential: the question of the origin of the term “heavy metal.” The first appearance of “heavy metal” in a song lyric is generally agreed to be in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” a hit motorcycle anthem of 1968, celebrating the “heavy metal thunder” of life in the fast lane. But the term “heavy metal,” we are usually told, had burst into popular consciousness in 1962, with the U.S. publication of William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, a beat junkie’s fantasies and confessions of drugs, sleaze, and violent sex. Burroughs is often credited with inventing the term and sometimes even with inspiring the genre. Some sources claim that Steppenwolf lifted the phrase directly from Burroughs’s book, although no one has provided any evidence for that link.
This story of the origin of “heavy metal” appears in nearly every recounting of metal’s history.23 It is, however, not only simplistic but wrong, since the phrase “heavy metal” does not actually appear anywhere in Naked Lunch (although a later novel by Burroughs, Nova Express (1964), introduces as characters “The Heavy Metal Kid” and the “Heavy Metal People of Uranus”). At some point this notion of origin got planted in rock journalism, and the appeal of a clear point of origin led others to perpetuate the error.24 But as we are reminded by The Oxford English Dictionary, “heavy metal” enjoyed centuries of relevant usage as a term for ordnance and poisonous compounds. The long-standing use of the phrase as a technical term in chemistry, metallurgy, and discussions of pollution suggests that the term did not spring full-blown into public awareness from an avant-garde source. “Heavy metal poisoning” is a diagnosis that has long had greater cultural currency than Burroughs’s book has had, and the scientific and medical uses of the term “heavy metal” are even cognate, since they infuse the music with values of danger and weight, desirable characteristics in the eyes of late 1960s rock musicians. The evidence suggests that the term circulated long before Steppenwolf or even Burroughs and that its meaning is rich and associative rather than an arbitrary label invented at some moment. Eventually, “heavy metal” began to be used to refer specifically to popular music in the early 1970s, in the writings of Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh at Creem.
A heavy metal genealogy ought to trace the music back to African-American blues, but this is seldom done. Just as histories of North America begin with the European invasion, the histories of musical genres such as rock and heavy metal commonly begin at the point of white dominance. But to emphasize Black Sabbath’s contribution of occult concerns to rock is to forget Robert Johnson’s struggles with the Devil and Howlin’ Wolf’s meditations on the problem of evil. To trace
