Metal has undergone many upheavals since it was born, 50 years ago • The "Dead on Metal" team analyzed and disassembled them into elements, and selected the album chosen each year • From the cornerstones of the golden age, to total takeover fifty years ago the first metal album was released to the world
Since then, the genre has undergone many upheavals, and what was once considered a single genre, has today become a huge umbrella under which tens of sub-genres, tens of thousands of bands and millions of listeners around the world.
The team of the radio program "Dead on Metal" has initiated a special project that spans three full episodes of the radio program, which reviews 50 years full of music from one of the most diverse and richest genres in music today, and is presented to you in this article.
Get ready, it's going to be heavy.
1970-1984 - The cornerstones
From Birmingham comes the good news: 1970, fifty years ago - so it all started.
Black Sabbath from Birmingham, England are releasing their first album.
The album, unlike anything they have heard before in world music, is so special, so dark, that they quickly become the father and mother of an entirely new genre - "metal".
Sabath breaks the conventions, and beyond the unique album and the new style and sound they brought with them, they also release another album that year, which is even more successful than its predecessor and includes the theme song of the album "Paranoid" which will later become the band's trademark in almost every show.
Prominent members of the band who will forever be remembered in the hearts of metalheads of all generations are the genius guitarist Tony Ayumi, who claimed that based on his work on the first two albums Metal Towers will be built in the coming years, and of course Ozzy Osborne, the always controversial vocalist. Then in 1970 and not today.
After the release of Sabbath's debut album, it's for the first time a type of music that is no longer rock and roll, as Led Zeppelin and the like did in the years before Black Sabbath's breakthrough.
Sabath's darkness, the heaviness, different from anything that was acceptable, were what made many bands follow in their footsteps and dare to break through the boundaries.
Based on the various songs on Sabbath's first albums during Ozzy's lead career, dozens of sub-genres in metal will emerge in the coming decades.
Some say that every subgenre of metal was born in a song by Black Sabbath, when you can see examples of this in songs like "Sweet leaf" that will form the basis of Stoner Metal, "Children of the Grave" for thrash metal, "War Pigs" for my father / Power Metal, "Electric Funeral" for Doom Metal, etc.
Sabath has gone through many upheavals over the years and has been eulogized many times.
But after Ozzy Osborne was fired from the band, they returned for a successful second round with another vocalist, the celestial vocalist Ronnie James Dio who emerged to the vocalist position in 1980 with the album "Heaven and Hell".
Dio was a lead singer in the band Rainbow before, and this band also greatly influenced the development of the genre, as well as rock bands that went in a rougher direction over the years - the British Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest, through Alice Cooper - the father of "Rock Market" from America, And to new forces arriving towards the mid-1970s in the form of the Australian ACDC.
In 1980, the first album by the British band Iron Maiden was released, which would become one of the greatest metal bands of all time.
Despite the contributions from a variety of different scenes that began to crystallize around the world, there is no doubt that there is no more influence than the English scene that set the tone until the early 1980s, when the Americans conquered the genre.
Metallica and Slayer broke into the world air and began the American thrash metal movement in 1983 with their debut albums.
From there the road to Megadeth, Antarx, Spaltura and more was not long.
At the same time, the German thrash metal scene begins to grow with the bands Sodom, Kreator, Tankard, Destruction and the list goes on and on, with the road to names like Ramstein, System of a Down, and even Linkin Park re-conquering the metal world not very long.
The process of metal formation continues to this day, with dozens of masterpieces in the various sub-genres of metal being released to the world every year, and thousands of albums in the genre itself.
To listen to the first part of the summary of 50 years of metal, "The cornerstones":
1970-1984: Selected albums each year
:
1970 - Black Saabbth - Black Sabbath
1971 - Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV
1972 - Blue Öyster Cult - Blue Öyster Cult
1973 - Alice Cooper Billion Dollar Babies
1974 - Aerosmith Get Your Wings
1975 - Nazareth - Hair of the dog
1976 - Judas Priest - Sad Wings of Destiny
1977 - AC / DC - Let There Be Rock
1978 - Rainbow - Long Live Rock and Roll
1979 - Motörhead - Overkill
1980 - Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden
1981 - Mötley Crüe - Too Fast for Love
1982 - Manowar - Battle Hymns
1983 - Dio - Holy Diver
1984 - Metallica - Ride the Lightning
1985 - 1999 - The Golden Age
The next 15 years of metal will be considered the "Golden Age of Metal", the most important period in which the most successful metal albums were created, many of which will enter the Pantheon and become classics of all time.
The years 1985-1986 were a significant breakthrough, when huge bands released their important albums that would shape the American thrash metal movement that would become popular all over the world.
Metallica have released "Master of Puppets" which continues the wonderful path they have already begun to pave with their second album "Ride The Lightning" mentioned in the previous section.
Dave Mastein who was a Metallica guitarist before the release of their first album in 1983, was thrown out of the band, and in 1985 released the band's first full album "Megadeth", which later also became a huge band in its own right.
Magda's second album "Peace Sells But Who's Buying?"
Released in 1986 and made them a household name in the industry, later in 1990 they released the album "Rust In Peace", which to this day is considered by many to be the most complex and profound musical work in terms of playing guitar in global thrash metal, and perhaps ever metal in general.
Metallica of course continued in parallel with their masterful 1988 album "Justice And Justice For All", but their next breakthrough which really won the title of "Changed the Face of the Music World" came only in 1991 with their "black album" (simply called "Metallica" and received The nickname "the black album" only later, due to its cover), which broke all the mainstream barriers to metal culture.
The album was catchy and poppy alongside the aggressiveness and distortion, and managed to touch a very large population and bring to the masses masses who never really listened to the genre in depth until the release of this album (the writer of these lines is among them).
Additional forces contributed to the development of metal and the sub-genres that would join it later, including the American band Pantera, the German Accept, the Canadian Annihilator, the Brazilian Sepultura, the Swedish Candlemass, and the English Paradise Lost.
After the release of Speltura's Roots album, metal fans around the world first learned to listen extensively to bands that sang in non-English languages, so much so that one of the most successful songs worldwide in the 1990s was in German (Rammstein - "Du Hast").
During this period bands added various motifs to their music, such as lyrics drawn from fairy tales and mythologies and a collection of various musical elements such as choirs in the background of singing, changing perception in terms of writing and releasing concept albums.
Towards the end of the period a new movement arose, the "Nu-Metal".
Bands belonging to this sub-genre brought with them a new style that was much more catchy than its predecessors, more commercial, less complex, one that teens all over the world were swept up with at once.
On the other hand, these bands were considered by the hard and older core of metal listeners to be shallow.
Therefore, some would say that at this point the metal is dead.
is that so?
To listen to the second part of the summary of 50 years of metal - "The Golden Age of Metal":
1985-1999: The selected albums each year:
Accept - Metal Heart - 1985
1986 - Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus
1987 - Anthrax - Among the Living
1988 - Slayer - South of Heaven
1989 - Annihilator - Alice in Hell
1990 - Megadeth - Rust In Peace
1991 - Metallica - Metallica (Black Album)
1992 - Panther - Vulgar Display of Power
1993 - Carcass - Heartwork
1994 - Machine Head - Burn My Eyes
1995 - Paradise Lost - Draconian Times
Sepultura - Roots - 1996
Rammstein - Shensucht - 1997
Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle Earth - 1998
Children of Bodom - Hatebreeder -1999
2000 - 2019 - Global takeover
Despite the attempts of many to eulogize metal with the beginning of the 2000s, it is precisely the last two decades that have shown a huge growth in numbers in metal: both in terms of the number of bands and in terms of the number of listeners in the world.
Some would argue that what was harmed during this period was the quality, compared to the quantity that grew, that bands became much more "soft", in order to gain publicity and success at the expense of "heaviness" and professionalism.
But it was during this time that we saw very interesting trends in metal around the world: Black Metal (considered the most extreme and heavy genre under the broad metal umbrella) is the one that reached number one in album sales and charts in Norway in 2007. Another example is Finland, which won in 2006 instead The first in the Eurovision Song Contest with a metal song when all the band members are disguised as monsters.
"Softer" metal bands like Distraught, System of a Down and Linkin Park have conquered MTV and festivals around the world, when they are the de-liners, and these are not just net metal festivals, but some of the biggest music festivals there are.
Metal Festival - The German Waken attracts tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of metal fans every year, with in recent years all tickets sold out as soon as the festival is announced, which will take place the following year.
Metal is becoming a huge global culture at this point.
New names join the list of bands that are changing the rules of the game, along with some of those seniors from the founding generation who manage to return with particularly successful and surprising comeback albums.
Soloists with unique vocal qualities join, some with abilities from the world of opera singing, some women leading giant bands for the first time in the field, the "Graul" (a rough form of singing, some would say "monstrous") becomes a hallmark of most sub-genres alongside clean singing, Ethnic elements enter modern music, a variety of sub-genres dealing with certain themes (e.g. Vikings or pirates) join the global metal movement, many bands invest in polished sound at a level that sounds almost futuristic, full orchestras are added to a variety of live albums and santas Big time with bands bringing the renewed renaissance of everything that happened 50 years ago.
Even Israel made its mark on world metal during the 2000s, when the Israeli band Orphaned Land released their album Flood in 2004, capturing the hearts of many metal fans in Arab countries, as the band members were able to perfectly incorporate oriental and oriental elements into music. Their metal absorption.
The bands The Fading and Hammercult are Israeli bands that won first place in the big world metal competition in "Waken" in Germany, to which bands from all over the world are sent every year.
The Israeli band Betzefer signed to the metal label that was then the largest in the world "Roadrunner Records", and their clips were played on MTV, and more and more.
So is the metal dead?
Definately not.
He's alive and kicking than ever.
To listen to the third part of the summary of 50 years of metal - "Global takeover":
2000-2019: The Selected Albums
Every year:
2000 - Nevermore - Dead Heart in A Dead World
2001 - Arch Enemy Wages of Sin
2002 - Bloothbath - Resurrection through Carnage
2003 - Swallow The Sun - The Morning Never Came
2004 - Lamb of God - Ashes of the Wake
2005 - Gojira - From The Sky - From Mars to Sirius
2006 - Melechesh - Emissaries
2007 - Dimmu Borgir - In Sorte Diaboli
2008 - Scar Symmetry - Holographic Universe
2009 - Powerwolf - Bible of the Beast
2010 - Ghost - Opus Eponymous
2011 - Septic Flesh - The Great Mass
2012 - Testament - Dark Roots of Earth
2013 - Black Sabbath - 13
2014 - Behemoth - The Satanist
2015 - Tribulation - The Children of the Night
2016 - Metallica - Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct
2017 - Beast In Black - Berserker
2018 - Parkway Drive - Reverence
2019 - Shadow of Intent - Melancholy
The radio program and podcast "Dead on Metal" has been broadcast for 14 years, now also on the two radio stations: "Edge Radio" and "Interdisciplinary Radio 106.2FM".
At the end of the "50 Years of Metal" project, the program will go on a two-month break, until the planned return with the big year-end program "Dead Award Ceremony on Metal" which is expected to be broadcast at the end of December 2020.
You can listen to all 550 programs recorded so far on the Dead website on Metal, Edge Radio, Interdisciplinary Radio, and a variety of the largest streaming and podcasting apps in the world.