Heavy Metal

A very misunderstood form of music that actually takes lots of talent! It originated as a mix between the blues and hard rock. While not all agree, Black Sabbath is often credited as being the 1st heavy metal band. However they were some bands before them who had songs that could be considered early examples as Blue Cheer, Cream, etc. The darker sound of metal came by accident actually. Black Sabbath's guitarist Tony Iommi had worked at a sheet metal factory and on his last day of the job he had a freak accident, severing 2 fingertips on his right hand. Feeling like his music career was over, he was inspired by a fellow jazz musician to keep going. He then went on to find different ways to make artificial fingertips and used lighter strings to ease the pain on his 2 fingers while playing the guitar. He also down tuned the guitar. With a down tuned guitar and lyric themes inspired by horror movies the music had a heavier and darker sound. Since then bands such as Judas Priest just ditched the bluesy sound and it has evolved to many sub-genres, each with a different sound.

All you people who say that it's for emos, goth vampires, satan worshippers and think it's all grunts and screams and guys dressed like women are ignorant! Do some damn research before you judge it. I used to love rap and and hated metal for those stereotypes. I was an ignorant prick like all of you. Then rap just got stupid with lyrics about meaningless crap so I decided to listen to rock which eventually lead me to metal then I realized there's more to it than grunts and screams and satanism. Those 3 stereotypes only make up a small portion of metal. Grunts and screams are mainly found in the thrash, death, and black metal sub-genres. Then again not all thrash is made up of screams either. Not all death metal bands have lyrics about murder, rape, satan, etc either. Some of them actually have meaningful lyrics like Death and Opeth (Progressive Death Metal). Even still just because a band has screams or grunts for vocals doesn't mean the band doesn't have talent, if you can simply get passed those vocals and just focus on the music itself you'd find out that they could still are very talented. Good examples would be Children of Bodom, Necrophagist, 80's Metallica (anything after '91 flat out sucks), Wintersun, etc. Even if you can't get passed those vocals you could still like metal but just ignore those extreme sub-genres! Like I said they only make a small portion. Under examples I'll list bands with clean vocals.

And the part about metal bands dressing like women, you guys are referring to 80's glam metal, which I'm glad to say is dead because I hate it to! And remember, lyrics that deal with satan, murder, gore, etc are only in good fun, they're just bands who like to have fun because let's face it. Music about GOD is boring!

Also just to show you how huge metal is here are some of the sub-genres, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing some

Heavy Metal
New Wave of British Heavy Metal
Power Metal
Thrash Metal
Death Metal
Black Metal
Blackened Death Metal
Blackened Thrash Metal
Symphonic Black Metal
Melodic Black Metal
Neo Classical Metal
Symphonic Metal
Melodic Death Metal
Metalcore (false metal)
Nu Metal (false metal)
Progressive Metal
Progressive Death Metal
Technical Death Metal
Folk Metal
Viking Metal (though it's more of a theme really)
Alternative Metal
Glam Metal (gay and dead)
Groove Metal
Grindcore

I know there's more but i'm missing them! Seriously metal is so huge and diverse, open up your minds! All those sub-genres sound different from each other!

Heavy Metal Bands with clean vocals: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Helloween, Gamma Ray, Edguy, Nightwish, Blind Guardian, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Epica, Hammerfall, DragonForce, Dio, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Opeth (a mix of both grunts and singing, a very talented band), the Scorpions, Deff Leppard, Van Halen

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