Heavy Metal Culture

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48Cd, 80Hg and 82Pb

"I like smoke and lightnin', heavy metal thunder."
Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf (1968)

Heavy metal, often dubbed as the Devil's music, is no stranger to controversy and criticism. Baptist minister Jeff R. Steele, famous for his sermons warning about the dangers of rock and roll music, expressed his disdain and attached adjectives such as 'sick', 'repulsive', 'horrible' and 'dangerous' to the genre (Weinstein p. 1). Dr. Deena Weinstein, professor of sociology at DePaul University and heavy metal aficionado called the genre a 'bricolage of culture' in her book entitled "Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture" (p. 5). Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a reaction against the flower power, peace and love hippie …show more content…
Rob Halford, the vocalist of British heavy metal band Judas Priest, once remarked in an interview, "America might have invented rock and roll. But Britain invented heavy metal." The three pioneering English heavy metal bands, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, attracted cult audiences, built sizable fan bases but were derided by music critics and the press. Hailing from the industrial town of Aston in Birmingham, England, Black Sabbath released their self-titled album featuring their self-titled track in 1970. Widely regarded as a masterpiece by the heavy metal community and music historians, the song employed the tritone - a music interval associated with the Devil during the Medieval period and was thus forbidden. The Roman Catholic Church was the undisputed established authority during the Medieval period and the tritone was branded as "diabolus in musica" in Latin, which is translated as "the Devil in music". Analysing the early, unholy alliance between Black Sabbath and the tritone, music historians and common observers alike are able to acquire valuable insights - the emergence of an identity unique to the …show more content…
Led by Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and future Vice President, the committee compiled and published the "Filthy Fifteen", a list of 15 songs they classified as 'dangerous'. Sex was made the Aunt Sally in the agenda of the PMRC. Songs by popular artists of that era such as "Darling Nikki" by Prince and "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper took the first and fifteenth positions on the list respectively. Heavy metal tracks such as "Eat Me Alive" by Judas Priest (oral sex), "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)" by W.A.S.P. (explicit language) and "High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)" by Def Leppard (alcohol and drug use) were examples of songs that the committee regarded as offensive and undesirable. Once more, the discourse between the PMRC and the heavy metal community was another by-product of social comparison. The PMRC believed that the sexual themes in music are detrimental and will lead to moral and social problems such as promiscuity, unplanned pregnancies and HIV (the disease emerged in the early 1980s and American policymakers feared an impending epidemic). Leaning towards the practice of Free Love, a social movement of the hippie subculture in the 1960s, was the stance of the heavy metal community. They viewed sexual liberation, the invention of the bill control pill and the legalisation of abortion as hallmarks of an advanced

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