Michael Stephens
Metal fatigue? There’s no such thing. As it notionally celebrates half a century of headbanging and hard-edged riffing, metal shows no signs of tarnishing. It’s been a long and complex road. Black Sabbath’s seismic debut LP still owes something to blues rock: later bands were influenced more by punk and rap. There’s musical and lyrical diversity here: protest music, plenty of occult obsession, literary types who draw on fantasy themes and those who are simply here to party. Some of it is cerebral, some appears not to have a brain at all – in that context, its affinity to punk and hip-hop makes sense.
Indeed, the broader genre has gone through numerous changes. In the 1970s, ‘heavy metal’ was the simple nomenclature, even though that was a phrase first popularly heard in Steppenwolf’s not-heavy-metal boogie of 1968, Born To Be Wild. In the post-punk era, ‘metal’ became just a suffix; first there was NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal), then thrash metal, deathmetal, doom metal, black metal, nu-metal… all became common currency.