Stuff You Should Know - Heavy Metal Pt I

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Some of the most talented musicians in the world play heavy metal, some of the hardest-hitting music ever made. In this episode Chuck and Josh wade into the history of the genre, and try to get to the bottom of where the name came from.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious.

In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for Black girls on the I-Heart Realt. Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. It's just the two of us. And I think we should greet all the metal heads listening by saying, shwing.

Wow. You're ready. this one, huh? I am. I'm pretty psyched. I'm not going to lie. I haven't been this nervous since maybe we did soccer. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we might as well issue the cover, the COA for the entire two-parter.

We're going to miss a lot. This is about heavy metal. And anytime you're doing a big genre like this, it's really hard to satisfy everybody. So we will not name specifically your favorite band. Most likely. I mean, yeah, there's a pretty good chance. And we are also probably going to walk by some amazing fact. Yeah.

Don't call us stupid when you email in to tell us. Just tell us. Be like, guys, get this. Yeah. That's the kind of email we like to get. That's the kind of email that gets read on the air. It's like, hey, I know you can't get to everything, but you miss this kind of really cool thing.

Let me tell you about it. Way to use a carrot rather than a stick, Chuck. So it is just really intimidating. I agree. And I want to chat just at the jump here about our metalness, because I am not a metal head. My metal experience is largely from high school as a Gen Xer in the 80s. Hair metal. So same here, buddy.

Okay, that's good. So my top five metal bands, and I've gotten since into Black Sabbath and stuff like that a little bit more. But my top five metal bands look like this. And that tells you a lot about what kind of metal fan I am. Sabbath, number one, Ozzie number two. Okay. Motley crew, then rat and then the scorpions. Oh, really? Rat, huh?

They were pretty good. Rats, awesome. The scorpions were good, too. That whole winds a change thing. Man, that's a stirring song. Yeah, that's probably my least favorite. But those are the bands that I love. I listen on, you know, I got, sometimes you get a free serious XM a couple of weeks or whatever.

Lucky. I got very addicted to the Hair Nation channel. Oh, yeah, man, that stuff still plays really well. It does. I love it. And I even like all the kind of corny stuff from then. Like put on that White Lion song and watch me go to town. That song, Wait? Yeah, I love that song.

Yeah, that is good. Yeah, I know all those songs, too. I would even take a little further and say I like Docking. Okay. I want to make a joke about liking Winger, but there are some Winger songs that I kind of liked. But, like, far and away, and I will die on this hill, the best hair metal band of all time was poison. I mean, no questions asked.

Would you say poison? Poison. Do you know why? Go ahead. What? No, you tell me why, and then I'll tell you what's funny. Okay, fair enough. So the reason why I say poison is the best hair metal band of all time is because they were highly talented, but they were also totally in on the cheesy.

of the whole thing, too. You think? They did not take themselves too seriously. Okay. You can make an argument that every rose has its thorns, it meant pretty seriously. Yeah. But I mean, like, I want action tonight.

Yeah. Nothing but a good time. Like, those dudes were not, like, trying to be serious. There was no shout at the devil or anything like that. Sure. They were just partying. Yeah, I mean. They were the perfect hair metal band to me.

You can't write a song called Unskinny Bob and claim to be like a serious. band. Right, exactly. That's a good point. Like gasoline, you want to pump me? That's right. Exactly.

Okay, so what was funny about that? What was funny is, at some point we're going to talk about, you know, how sort of white male most metal is. And Livia, who helped us with this, you know, was able to source some women in metal, including full bands. And she didn't find Vixen. I was like, wait a minute, there was Vixen. And then I typed in to Google search. female heavy metal, or hair metal bands, and instead, vixen and poison. That's hilarious.

You got that one wrong, AI. Yeah, that was pretty funny. What are your top five? Do you have a working top five and not the joke that you sent me via text? Yeah. So mine's actually changed in the last couple of days, I have to say. Oh. It used to be, time was, and I listened to most of my medal in, like, eighth-ninth grade,

probably around the same time you did. I was, like, Metallica, just unquestionably, is my number one metal band. Oh, okay. I think, and Justice for All is maybe the perfect metal album. Yeah, I like that early stuff. I liked Ride the Lightning and Master Puppets. That was good. I do, too, but I didn't like those until I was old.

Actually, within the last several years, I started listening to those two. I was like, damn, these are really good, too. It's just different. It's way less produced. Yeah. It's way more, you know, like, it's just more thrash, right? Yeah. So that kind of goes to show you my taste.

Like, I like Metallica's their most produced good album. Okay. So that's, they're unquestionable, my favorite. Black Sabbath is probably number two. Okay. Or close at their heels, nipping at their heels is poison. Okay. I really like Helmut, which is the alt metal band from the 90s.

Oh, I love Helmut. Okay, Helmut was great. Yeah, I guess I didn't really think about Alt Metal, but sure. Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, I'm having to include them. That's, I think, kind of a revelation. Like, I'm having to include alt metal here, right? Right.

And then I can't, maybe anthrax would probably be number five, right? Especially in eighth grade, I loved anthrax. So not Iron Maiden, that surprises me. Oh, God, why did I do that? Oh, no. Iron Maiden, I'm sorry. You're right, Chuck. Thank you.

I was even going through my Apple Music folder just to look, just to refresh myself. I've got like five Iron Maiden albums. there too so i'm not sure how they got left out let's say maiden number two then okay that's great i i have been listening to iron maiden lately uh you know i was an mtv kid so i know that was my big influence so i know the iron maiden songs that had big videos but i never really dove in um and kind of the same with judas priest even though i have gotten way more into them lately and uh i think i mentioned i'm going to actually see them later this year and that was the other thing is like i was way more into other music like in the eighth and ninth and tenth grade that's when i was really

started listening to like in excess and the smiths and rm and the cure yeah same so that was my jam but like if you were an m tv kid and a radio kid like you you kind of listened to all that stuff but i wasn't the one going to see those you know i never saw ozzy live and stuff like that like those kids in my high school kind of scared me yeah well they could be kind of scary yeah i think that's one of the reasons they were into it for sure yeah um so just to update my list, though. Okay. Calac is still number one.

Yeah. Black Sabbath, or sorry, Iron Maiden is still number two. Sabbath is in there somewhere. But there's a couple new bands that I'm like, these guys are really good. Gojira, which is a French. I think they, like, they transcend a bunch of different subgenres. So let's just say they're a French metal band and they're very good. They actually played at the Summer Olympic opening ceremonies.

Oh. Remember the dudes who were like thrashing when they're standing on the building? That's Gojira. Okay. I really like Godflesh. I don't know how I missed them, because I was into industrial in high school, too. They're very heavy.

They're like industrial middle. I love them, right? Yeah. And then I'm really now into high on fire. Have you heard of them? I've heard of them, but I don't know anything about it. They're amazing. I like everything I've heard of them,

and they're playing in Baltimore in mid-August. Oh. You me and I are seriously concerned. Are you going to go? Maybe. Oh, amazing. I like them that much now. Yeah.

You're being coy because you don't want all the high-on-fire people to be like, Where's Josh? That's right. All right, let's get down to business, shall we? Yeah. Like I said, Livia helped us out with this, and so she starts off with the definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which, you know, it's kind of silly, but sometimes we do that because, like,

it's kind of hard to define metal, as we'll see. And I have a lot of nitpicks with a lot of these bands that I don't consider metal that are in this material. but oh yeah a lot of them i mean there are a few but a lot we'll see as we go okay all right maybe just keep a timer or a uh a dinger or something a clicker a clicker yeah there you go uh but britannica says it's a it's a genre that includes a group of related styles that are intense virtuastic and powerful and includes distorted electric guitar uh the virtuastic really rings to me because one thing like there's no metal band that doesn't have a great guitar player maybe two, maybe three.

You know? Yeah, no, I agree. And are you taking a shot at me with the maybe three part? No, not taking a shot. Like, Iron Maiden has three. Yeah, they have three guitarists, man, and you can hear it. Yeah. You can totally tell. Like, yeah, Maiden is pretty great. We'll talk a little more

about Maiden in depth in a second, right? But I think you just kind of laid it out there. Like, that's as tight a definition as you can really kind of corral all of metal. into, just because there's so much varied stuff, it's like a really fractured genre of music. Yeah. There's subgenres of

subgenres. And there's probably subgenres of subgenres of subgenres. Like, that's how niche some of this stuff is. Like, if the average person came along and listened to, you know, some similar subgenres or closely related subgenres, they would

not be able to tell the difference. Some of the subgenres, like, are pretty different and the average person could tell the difference, but When it gets super niche, you really have to be a fan to be able to be like, oh, no, this is, this is technical thrash. Yeah. Death core, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure. There is another little bit from the Grammys because now the Grammys has awards for this kind of thing, where they mentioned dark lyrics that may focus on social issues or fantasy and myth.

That's kind of important because I found when I was nitpicking, and these are just, this is just chuckedum opinion, but sometimes the difference was. very small as far as like, you know, all the trappings of metal, but I still don't consider it metal because maybe a very nitpicky reason. But, you know, if you're, if you're singing and it's heavy guitar and you're singing about Lord of the Rings, chances are you're heavy metal, except your Led Zeppelin to me is not heavy metal. They're hard rock as far as I'm concerned. No, and Led Zeppelin has always said, like, we're not heavy metal. We never have been. And we're like blues rock, hard rock, maybe heavy rock, I don't know. But they've always said we're not heavy metal, even though like most metal historians will point to them at least to some degree as one of the founders or progenitors of heavy metal for sure.

Yeah. And I also want to point out the Grammys missed something. They said that when they were focusing on the lyrics, dark lyrics that may focus on social issues or fantasy and myth, they forgot or girls, girls, girls. Right, for sure. Because hair metal, not a lot of social issues, not a lot of fantasy, not a lot of. a myth. That was a specific period in the 80s where they were mostly singing about girls and sometimes in a very gross way. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's definitely, the world's definitely evolved past the hair metal view of the world. Yeah. For sure. Still fun. Poison still just wants

nothing but a good time, everybody. Yeah. So we did talk about Led Zeppelin. There's actually what's known as the unholy Trinity of Hard Rock. And Led Zeppelin is considered one of them. Yeah, agreed. And, yes, no one's going to say, like, I don't know, they're not hard rock. It's just are they heavy metal, or were they just helpful in laying the groundwork for heavy metal? And like you said, one of the things that Led Zeppelin did, they were singing about Lord of the Rings before, you know, before Orlando Bloom was even born. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a guy that Libby found named Jack Manon of the Medal

Hall of Fame who said that, you know, they have lyrics related to the occult, high fantasy. like Lord of the Rings, of War, distorted guitar, a loud, long-haired, you know, great lead singer. And, like, again, all those things are fairly metal, but I just, I don't know,

there's something about it. They're just more hard blues rock to me. For sure. And a lot of other groups from the 60s you would kind of lump Led Zeppelin in with because they were all starting to experiment with really distortion-heavy guitar. Yeah.

But they were blues rock for sure, like cream, Which actually gave birth to Led Zeppelin, it turns out. Yeah. Jimmy Hendricks was another one. Yeah. He has a metal tie-in, though. Lemmy, Kilmeister, was a roadie for Jimmy Hendricks before he went on to found the band Motorhead.

I was today years old. Did not know that. Isn't that a great little fact? Yeah, that's really great. Man, can you imagine those two together on acid? Yes. Yeah, actually, I can do. Deep Purple is the second of the unholy tradition.

of rock. They were formed in 1968. But again, a little more like prog rock to me. I think by their fourth album, which was Deep Purple in Rock, is when they replaced their singer with a guy named Ian Gillen and their bassist with a guy named Roger Glover. They got a little heavier then, but, you know, they might be classified as a proto-metal because of their guitar player, Richie Blackmore, who was a legend, who went on to be, to form the band Rainbow, which was definitely metal. Is it? I've seen people say, no, it's definitely hard rock, because I was like, no, this sounds a

lot like metal to me. I like them. I thought Rainbow was metal. But again, these are just our nitpicking definitions. But that's a good, I mean, that's a good point. That's a good demonstration. Like, you can really get metal fans arguing by just saying confidently, like, no, Rainbow's metal people will start arguing with you for sure yeah and then sabbath comes along and to me they're

very much sort of the birth of metal and i think a lot of that has to do like the difference between them and led zeppelin to me even though there are a lot of similarities is azi's voice was just he had a very sinister kind of creepy sounding voice and their music just sounded more sinister than led zeppelin and that just sounded like they were like the stuff they sang about yeah especially today you're like yeah, that's metal. But when you look back at what the time they were coming out of, we're talking like the free love, hippie 60s. They came right out of that. And so a lot of people point to Black Sabbath, not just as like the birth of heavy metal, but the end of the 60s. Like the thing that said, like, hey, we're going in a much different direction. And it's not

nearly as pleasant and colorful as you guys have been taking things. Yeah, for sure. Of course, we're talking about the dearly departed, recently departed, Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah, RIP, Ozzy. RIP, Tony Iommi, guitar player, Gieser Butler was a bassist and Bill Ward on drums. And they were originally a blues band

called Earth Blues Company. Eventually you become Earth, only Earth. They're from Birmingham, England, as you'll see, that'll be a recurring motif here. Yeah. And the name Black Sabbath

came from the fact that it sounds like Gieser Butler, again, their bass player, had a sleeper out. Yeah, it does sound like that, doesn't it? Yeah, what happened? He dreamt that there was a dark figure standing at the foot of his bed, and so he wrote a song. They named it, he wrote a song about that, and they named it Black Sabbath.

And Black Sabbath is taken from a Boris Karloff movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans. Because Karloff does the voice of the boat. And they ended up having to change their name because some other band was like, man, we're earth. And then I'm sure another band was like, no, we're earth. And then it just kept going on from there. Either way, Sabbath saw the writing on the wall.

So they were like, well, our favorite song and the song that everybody likes the most is Black Sabbath. Let's just call ourselves that. So their debut album was Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath featuring the song Black Sabbath. They were one of those. That's right. And they, you know, I'm going to sort of pepper in some,

you know, Rolling Stone ticket for what it's worth. But they have a list of their top 100 metal band. And fun fact, either Ozzy or Sab, or I'm sorry, metal albums, either Ozzy or Sabbath have four of the top 15. Not bad. Not bad at all. No, Ozzy is definitely a metal god, which is interesting because Black Sabbath as a band, just like Led Zeppelin, it said, we're not heavy metal or we weren't heavy metal. Right. It's not what we were.

And again, most people are like, you are. Sorry to inform you, you were definitely metal. Yeah. But apparently Rob Halford, the lead singer Judas Priest, I guess he was on WTF with Mark Marin at some point. And he said, hey, Sabbath has always said like we weren't the first metal band. Well, Judas Priest was founded the same year. So we'll gladly take that title as the first metal band. And you can make a pretty good case. If Sabbath says no, give it to Judas Priest. Yeah, I don't think I realize they formed at the same time. That's interesting. And I also think, Ozzie's post-Sabith career as Ozzy Osbourne was as metal as metal get, so there may be a little bit of like kind of joining those two things together.

That's possible. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Had he gone like the way of George Benson or Chuck Mangione, people might leave, might leave, oh yeah, that's right. Wow.

They're just popping up all over place or doing the opposite of that, I guess. Yeah, they're popping there, yeah, laying down. Right. So most people, though, say They'll give Black Sabbath a pass on their first debut, their debut album. They're like, okay, that was kind of bluesy. And it is, but it's still pretty medley.

But they're like, your second album, Paranoid, sorry, that is definitely metal war pigs, is about as metal as metal gets still to this day. Yeah, I mean, Paranoid is ranked as the number one metal album of all time by Rolling Stone, so there you go. Well, then there's no arguing with that. I agree. And I think we should take a break and maybe come back and talk about a very, unfortunate kind of legendary incident that happened to Black Sabbath early in their career right after this.

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And that is when Tony Iommi, they're brilliant, left-handed, guitar player was a teenager. He worked at a steel mill in Birmingham, England. He was on his last shift. Apparently, he was heading out on tour with the band, and he came home on a lunch break and almost didn't even go back. And his mom said, get your butt back there. You got to finish your job, boy. And he went, okay, mom. And he went back and proceeded to lose the ends of his middle finger and ring finger on his right hand but remember he's a left-handed guitar player so if it was the other way around he could still hold the pick and probably be okay but this is the hand that is on the neck so he was missing a large large portions of his digits that make that pretty vital yeah i also

read that this was the first time he used a metal press because the guy who normally did it was out and so they had tony iommi cover his shift for the first time ever like last shift ever before he goes out on tour like that's just crazy that that happened but that was actually a gift to metal in a lot of ways because he had to basically adapt apparently jango reinhart lost like some fingers or a hand or something crazy like that it was a fire that basically he only had use of two fingers on his fretting hand okay well somebody told that story to tony iommi and it inspired him to just get back in there He made prosthetics himself for his fingers. Apparently, they worked so-so. So instead he had to adapt by, he loosened the strings by down-tuning. So everything had a deeper, like heavier sound to it, the same notes that standard tuning would produce.

They had a deeper sound. He wasn't necessarily doing it for the deeper sound. He was doing it because the looser strings were easier for him to bend with what he had left of his fingers. That was a huge development that came out of the loss of those fingers. tips yeah for sure uh also we switched to lighter strings uh he couldn't play as fast so that's why black sabbath has that terrific just sort of grungy slog and it's not like that kind of fast metal it's because tony i mean you know he like you said he made these things out of wax and leather

and if he played fast enough they would fly off his finger and uh so he had to kind of slow it down and that's why they had that sort of deep sludgy grind yeah one of the other things i love about Sabbath, too, is they, like, their studio albums contain like mess-ups, like blatant mess-ups. Like, they'll just, like, miss the beat on drums or something like that once in a while, and they just kept going and released it on the album. I love that about them. I listen. Right before we recorded, I have the 180-gram versions of their debut, which has the most terrifying

album cover of all time to me. Oh, yeah? Oh, I think so. and master of or I think master of reality or is it masters I can't remember and then I ordered I realized I didn't even have paranoid so I ordered that stat nice work Chuck yeah yeah that's something we'll talk a little more about album art later but that's definitely something that's missing in the day and age of like listening to stuff digitally yeah you don't have that record album to like look at

while you're listening. And that's like part of the experience, right? Yeah. But I will say that I noticed recently, I was listening to somewhere in time, Iron Maiden album, and the album art on my iPhone moves now. So Eddie, like, they show him, like, shooting the guy who's, like, just out of frame. You just see his hand. Wow. His eyes light up. Like, it's really cool. It's worth downloading the album just to see that alone, let alone for the music. So I'm glad that that developed, but it's still not quite the same as holding like a record album like cover and looking at it. Yeah, for sure. The 70s also included, of course, Judas Priest, as you mentioned.

Iron Maiden started in 1975 with a different lead singer. That's if you're not super into Iron Maiden and you just kind of remember the 80s music videos with the great Bruce Dickinson up front. Their first two records, killers and just, I think it was self-titled, right? Yeah, Iron Maiden and then Killers. and they were both, it was Paul, Paul Deano was their first lead singer. I like those records. Let's talk a little bit about Maiden right now.

You want to you? Yeah, you want to get into it? Yeah, because it's really pretty much impossible to overstate the influence that Iron Maiden had on you. You. Metal. You know? Yeah, no, I agree. Like, if you ask some of the people who make up the big four of thrash bands, Metallica, Megadeth Slayer, and Anthra,

they're basically like we wouldn't we wouldn't exist if it weren't for iron maiden like we love maiden so much we decided to form our own band we were inspired to form our own band and it just keeps going down the line band after band after band started out loving iron maiden such a great entree into heavy metal music because it's so listenable yeah totally melodic the lyrics are really interesting like the themes of the songs are really um varied and i was evidence of this the poster art alone can get you into Iron Maiden. Like, I had my room covered in Iron Maiden posters before I listened to them at all. Yeah, I mean, we should talk about that for a second.

And then their mascot is Eddie. If you've ever seen an Iron Maiden album cover or poster or live video where they have big, you know, giant Eddie walking around and stuff, like a puppet, I guess. He's their mascot. And he was drawn by a guy named Derek Riggs. And he was, originally he was called Eddie. the head and then just the head, but in their British accent, the Ed, they like dropped their H's. Oh, is that right? It just became Ed, then Eddie is how they eventually wound up with Eddie. Very nice. And he's been on every single of the 17 albums that they've released, most of the

singles, apparently not all, I don't know why, but he's usually kind of like altered to represent whatever that particular album is about, right? Yeah, for sure. Like he was, as an inmate and a mental institution for peace of mind. I do love the cover of Power Slave when he's a Pharaoh in the desert. Pretty cool. Apparently, when they toured that album, they had like a 30-foot, like, actual build of that as the backdrop for their stage show. Of course they did.

Why would you not? Exactly. But yeah, Eddie was boss. Just Eddie alone. And he's a good example of why the loss of like an album covers. really like a big deal because, man, it doesn't get any better than Iron Maiden album covers. No, agreed. They came out in 1975 and believe it or not, Def Leppard was also debuting along with Motorhead and they were grouped together as what's called the New Wave of British Heavy

Metal. And that was sort of happening concurrently with the punk scene, which is interesting because punk and metal to me are very different, but there are some sort of tendrils that work through both of those kinds of music. Yeah, and that's where those first two albums definitely, they were definitely influenced. Paul Deano was definitely influenced by punk. So it was a lot more, it was a lot closer to hardcore than the albums that Bruce Dickinson helmed, starting with their third album, Number of the Beast, which is when the band just broke through and became metal gods.

That was back in 1982. Yeah, Dickinson brought that sort of operatic flourish, the theatrical, like some of us, I was listening today and sometimes he literally goes like from and that kind of thing which is like you gotta love it he really leaned into it for sure and like i don't know how i like i'm not such a fan that i know who actually writes the songs i've always presumed bruce dickinson did but usually it turns out to be like the the guitarist or something like that but their songs are really really interesting and they're really varied like they cover history a lot like there's a song about war war war two pilot. It's called Aces High. There's a song about Alexander the Great, about

white Europeans and Americans overrunning Native Americans in North America, run to the hills. That's on Number of the Beast, too. Great song. They have some really like uplifting, encouraging messages in their songs, like, Can I Play With Madness and Wasted Years? They even have a song about the loneliness of a long-distance runner, and that's what it's about. Yeah. And it's really, it's a great song. They follow the pace and, like, the slowdown and then the speed up again once he gets his second wind. Like, it's a really well-done song. But it's about a long-distance runner running a marathon by himself.

Yeah, one of the things I haven't gotten around to yet in my recent documentary binge is I know there's a really good Iron Maiden documentary that came out, I think, last year or semi-recently. And I haven't checked that out yet, but that's on the list, like, even higher now. Sure. And if you're like, well, okay, how big is Iron Maiden? And we've got a few stats for you. One, Chuck, back in 2012, the Queen's 60-year Jubilee, the UK held some polls to figure out what the best of the best was of the last 60 years. The best British record album of the last 60 years voted by citizens of the UK was number of the beast, Iron Maiden. So just best record?

The best record. The Beatles were from Britain, don't forget. All of those guys who were the progenitors of heavy metal were from Britain. Iron Maiden's number of the beast was voted the number one record in the last 60 years in Great Britain. All right. Here's my statement on that. Okay. I don't doubt you.

I just want to know a little bit more about the robustness of this poll. And like who was pulled. It's shocking to me that that would be number one over like the stone. or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin are just bands that were just way, way, way more popular. I totally get you. And I triple check that to make sure that that was not just like some misinformed fan. Hey, I just want to see the, I want to see where they took this poll, like how it was done. That's what I don't want to know.

But they got almost 10% of the vote. So it was pretty good. You're like, it was in the parking lot of an Iron Maiden show. Right. So they've also sold 130 million copies of their story. 17 albums. Amazing. Even Lady Gaga is a fan, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think she was knocked out by their fandom or standum because she was like, what I see in an Iron Maiden's fan base is what I want for myself. Like, they are so wholly dedicated. And that's something, I think that's true for a lot of metal bands, but they seem to be even more so than a lot of metal bands. Yeah. And I mean, like, world wide, if you go to South America, they can fill a stadium every night for a month.

Like, people around the world love Iron Maiden. I just think it's great because they're a great band. There's not a bunch of controversy. They're not, like, preoccupied with, like, bringing the full power of Satan to bear on his nonbelievers. Right. They're just, actually, a lot of their stuff is pretty encouraging, at the very least, super interesting. So they're, they're, like, they're just a good band to be beloved worldwide, I think. Totally agree.

I still think I'm Judas Priest more. I was listening to British Steel today, and they're both great. They're kind of side-by-side for me, actually. Okay, I have to, like, add to my original top five, maybe even current top five. I really like Motorhead a lot. Yeah. I don't own a Motorhead T-shirt. I really haven't heard much beyond their Ace of Spades album, but I love what I hear of Motorhead.

I like their whole jam. They're another band that said, like, we're not heavy metal. Yeah, that's true. But they were kind of the progenitors of speech. bead metal, I think, in a lot of ways. You know, the scorpions came out in 65 in Hanover. I know I've recommended the sales of Sharon as a very amazing YouTube thing to go watch if you want to see some pre-80s scorpions.

Okay. Def Leppard came out in 77. See, this is where Olivia has a couple listed, like Van Halen and Blue Oyster Cult and Erasmith and ACDC that I don't think any of those bands are metal. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. you don't think Van Halen is metal? Not at all. Oh, I disagree with you.

Yeah, I think they're not metal at all. All right. I'm going to say that I think that they qualify as metal. Interesting. Have you ever heard David Lee Roth? I have. I have. You ever heard ice cream man?

Yes, I know that they have other stuff, but I'm saying, like, I think they're, like, the stuff that sounds like metal is metal. I don't think it sounds like metal at all. I just think they're a rock band. Have you heard Panama? Yeah, that didn't sound metal to me at all. I know, I'm just kidding. Okay. I can't think of a single metal song of theirs.

I think it's mostly just Eddie Van Halen's playing that I'm like, that's metal, man. Oh, see, not to me. That's just virtuistic rock guitar lead to me. I mean, and also just, you know, they didn't sing about those things. There was no darkness. know, you know, the way they dress like Eddie Van Halen wore overalls on stage. Hey, Randy Rhodes wore a polka dot, like Chippendale's vest. Right.

So let's not get into that. All right. So anyway, just my opinion. I knew this is going to be fun. But let's talk about just the, I mean, I guess this is a nice segue into the words heavy metal because, like I said, people can nitpick this stuff to death, what heavy rock was or when. it transitioned into metal. There's a sociologist named Dina Weinstein that Livia found that tried to kind of root out the origins of the literal phrase heavy metal. It was born to be wild by Steppenwolf, you know, heavy metal thunder.

But that wasn't talking about music. That was talking about cars and stuff. Right. I don't know. It could have influenced it to some degree or whatever, but it doesn't seem like the direct answer. If you ask me, William S. Burroughs apparently puts up a pretty good argument for the guy who coined heavy metal, or at least put it out there and that it was adopted to eventually describe that genre of music. It's not at all what he was doing. He had a character from his Nova trilogy called Uranium Willie, the heavy metal kid. Okay. I don't know enough about William S. Burroughs writing to know if, like, Uranium Willie was like metal in like the metal sense. Yeah. But he also had a drug called Heavy Metal that appeared in some of his other works,

not Naked Lunch, but in other works, that to me makes a, that you could make a pretty good argument that I would buy, that that ultimately maybe led to the use of heavy metal to describe heavy metal. Yeah, I think both of those things had put it out into this public consciousness as two words that can be said together. Mm-hmm. But for my money, you've got to go with less. Lester Bangs, this was in 1970, and I think he was writing for Rolling Stone at the time,

but the legendary rock critic and writer in one of his reviews in 1970 said he was complaining. It was a negative thing. He said all the heavy metal robots of years past, of the year past, when he was talking about the albums of 1970, he was talking about 1969, and he proceeded by a few months, a guy named Mike Saunders, eventually known as Metal Mike, who described. humble pie is a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-laden, uh, poop rock band. Thank you for changing S to poop. Yeah, but.

Deserve the moral purity of our podcast. They, they both use the words heavy metal to describe music, I think, for the first time in 1970. Yeah, but they were, yeah, they were negative reviews. Um, that's, that's possible. I think Dina Weinstein says, like, that's a real possibility, but she put something out that I thought was pretty interesting, too. She pointed out that a lot of these bands came from Birmingham, England, and Detroit, Michigan,

which apparently were very similar at the time. They're very polluted, dirty, industrial, working-class cities, and that the fans of heavy metal also hailed from those areas, too, were areas like them, and that they would be familiar with, like, the feel of heavy metal. Like, not the feel, what's the word I'm looking for? the sensibility no more like the um just the like what the term can kind of bring to mind you know I'm saying and associating that with music like somebody from you know super nice town USA who's experienced with metal is the nails holding their white picket fence together they might

not be able to be like yeah heavy metal really describes this music but the kids in Detroit and Birmingham probably could. And I thought that was an interesting point. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Oh, geez, look at where we are. Why don't we take another break? Okay. And we'll come back and talk about how the genres started to grow

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Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so the early 70s or the mid-70s. to early 80s gave us the British wave, the new British wave of heavy metal, right? Layed the foundation, you would call most of that just heavy metal. Like, it's just so classic, they don't even fit into sub-genres.

They just gave the world heavy metal. From that point, it just started to split. And one of the ways that it started to split was by spreading, and it didn't spread through radio. Radio was afraid of heavy metal almost from the outset. So bands were forced to basically say, let's just get out on the road.

Let's go to our fans rather than relying on other people to help boost our popularity. And so touring and massive tours became just a part of being a heavy metal band, especially in the early 80s throughout the 80s. And they would make stage shows that people would talk about for years afterwards. Like we talked about the Iron Maiden 1983 Power Slaver, 84 or 5 Power Slave Tour, and what their stage show looked like. Like that's the kind of stuff they were doing. Yeah, for sure. The 80s, of course, that's when hair metal comes onto the scene, and that's when I, in MTV, that's when I started getting into it a little bit, despite my, you know, early alternative music leanings and also loving like Billy Joel at the time and stuff like that.

Sure. So I was all over the place. But, you know, Rat comes along, Motley Crew comes along. Your band Poison, Cinderella, another band that I love. I mean, we could go through them. LA Guns, White Snake, Hanoy Rocks, Slaughter, Skid Row, Dockon, Wasp. Warrant. warrant quiet riot twisted sister uh and we have to mention this band because um it was kind of the beginnings of some some really dark metal and that is a band called merciful fate yeah uh from lead singer king diamond who would later after merciful fate uh i think merciful fate was uh 1980 to 84 and then after that uh king diamond which is obviously stage name went on to form the band king diamond and they were very dark, sort of darker metal and used what's known as corpse paint, like the black and white

makeup paint on a space. Yes. And very influential early, I guess, dark metal. Yeah, for sure. The other band that typically gets pointed to is the basis of death, or of death metal in particular, is possessed. They were from San Francisco. Okay. They released an album called Seven Churches in 1985. That was another one that I was like, where was I? What was I doing? Yeah. This was right in my wheelhouse, like, how did I not hear of possessed? How did I not hear of venom? Like, I did not, this stuff did not cross my path. And this, it's like actual legit death metal, but it's from 1985. Death metal wouldn't really start to take off until the later 80s, early 90s. Yeah. And we should just say death metal is like that, like, you know, the growling,

like lyrics that you just can't understand. You have to read the lyrics while you're listening. Yeah. That is death metal. That's, like, the key characteristic of death metal that anybody could come along and be like, oh, that's different than the other stuff I'm listening to because of this. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the why you didn't know about it is because you had to know the person who knew about it because it wasn't on the radio. Stuff like that wasn't even on MTV. I mean, maybe you might see something like that as a deep cut on Headbanger's Ball later on, hosted by the great Ricky Rockman. Yeah.

But otherwise, you just had to know the dude who was like, hey, man, have you heard this? Yeah. And so they gave birth to morbid angel autopsy. Cannibal Corpse is a very, very famous death metal band from the late 80s. And it just keeps going on and on and on. Our longtime listener, I think she still listens. I haven't talked to her in a while, Elisa White Gloves from the band Arch Enemy. She listens or she used to, but Arch Enemy is a melodic, Swedish death metal band. Yeah. It's just a bunch of subgenres put into one. But if you listen to Elisa Singh, she's doing that death metal like guttural singing too. It's just part of death metal no matter what that genres carved into. Yeah, for sure.

Not fully my thing. I was into a little bit of industrial metal. That came around in the mid-80s. Ministry, of course, is the band that comes to mine from Chicago, who were a little more of a synth-pop. They were not what they became, for sure. Sure, early on, but they kind of led the way for the industrial music scene in the mid-80s when their 86 album Twitch came out.

Yeah, and that's, I went in that direction toward industrial, in addition to new wave stuff. Like, I really like Knits Areb and Meat Beat Manifesto, Skinny Puppy. None of those would qualify as metal, but I guess ministry kind of bridged that, or was the bridge between metal and just straight up industrial. Godflesh, they were another one that was no question industrial metal and again, go listen to Godflesh's I guess first album.

I can't remember what it's called but it's like a black background with a white minimalist kind of face all up in your face and you'll be like, wait, this is metal and if you listen to it, you'll say yes, this is metal.

They use a drum machine and you're like, okay, well that seems like cheating. No, they use a drum machine because no human being could play drums at this slow a pace and not like fall asleep or die from boredom, right? So they have a really slow tempo, but with traditional, like, distortion and guitars and singing that you would associate with metal. And you put it all together, and it is really good.

Yeah, I saw a cool interview with the great Mike Patton of Faith No More in Mr. Bungle, one of the greatest singers ever in any genre, and he was singing the praises of God, and I went and listened to a little bit of it and I was like, man, this is like very, very heavy stuff. It is. Oh, it's super, super dark. But they were from Birmingham too. So this is like, so Birmingham is to metal what Manchester was to Brit Pop.

Yeah, yeah. Like it just was this center. And what's crazy is it was a center for a really long time. I think there's still bands coming out of Birmingham that are noteworthy. Yeah. Yeah, the Grammys got on board in 1989 and all the wrong ways.

they introduced best hard rock slash metal performance. And Metallica's Injustice for All very famously lost out to Jeth Rottal. They had a comeback album called Crest of a Knave. And everybody immediately was like, Grammys, you've never seen more out of touch with what's going on in the world. And so pretty quickly they were like, oh, maybe we'll split the categories. And the next year it was a hard rock award and a metal award. But they even mess that up.

Like, you know, bands like Soundgarden won, the metal category and stuff like that. And like, they're not metal either. Well, the Grammys aren't really known for being super in touch with underground stuff. And it's interesting because the reason why groups like Soundgarden won the metal Grammy at the time is because Grunge just took over. And it actually pushed metal right out of the limelight that are like basically starting January 1st, 1990. just took over. And it stayed that way for years. And the metal started to kind of come back. In a way, new metal came along in the mid to late 90s. So like you had slip knot and corn. Lincoln Park, I guess, qualifies. I'm not either, but I know a lot of people are. Like a lot of

people got back into metal thanks to these guys. They basically started, they were like, hey, you like grunge, you like alternative. We're going to help transition you back to metal. And then there was something called the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, starting in the early 2000s, that took back over from new metal and brought it back to, like, legit, serious metal. Like, as I lay dying, Lamb of God, and, of course, high on fire, and a bunch of other bands that are still coming out in America and around the world. So metal came back. Whether you like new metal or not, you can thank them for bringing metal back from obscurity in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Thank you, Korn. Yeah, thanks a lot, Korn. Alt metal was a thing, too. In the late 90s and kind of early 2000s, I think people consider Tool, kind of an alt metal band, a band called System of a Down. I listen to some tool,

but they're another band then that has a very, very, very hardcore, loyal following. Yeah, for sure. And then Progressive Metal, that had kind of been around in the 80s, like a band like Queens-Rike, who I never really liked that much, could probably be considered Prague Metal,

as well as a band called Dream Theater who are also very popular and very have fans that are like super loyal. I remember listening to Queenswreck Operation Mind Crime as like a 12-year-old and being like, I don't get it. Yeah. This is way too grown up for me.

Right, exactly. I don't know what you're talking about. You know what the crime is. These lyrics. Yeah. Pantera was another one that actually kept metal alive during the grunge years.

They, I did not. I know this, Pantara started out, the Cowboys from Hell, started out as a glam rock band, spandex, big hair, and everything. And eventually they shifted into more of a metal sound. And they were one of the pioneers of what's called groove metal, which is essentially what it sounds like. It's catchier metal. I think there's more refrains to it. And I'm just speaking musically, it's not, it has nothing to do with, like, jam bands or anything like that. It's just as far as metal goes, it's probably the grueviest version of metal.

you could do. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. A couple other things, Chuck. Did we talk about the big four? Yeah, we talked about the big four earlier of thrash bands, which is, of Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer. Were you into Slayer or Megadeth or Metallica or Anthrax? No, I got into Metallica at one point when I lived in New Jersey

because a friend of mine listened to them, and so I listened to Master Puppets and Ride the Lightning and Injustice for All. Like, those are great records. A little bit of anthrax here and there, but those generally weren't my thing. Definitely never really listened to Megadeth. I know Dave Mustaine has a reputation in the industry. He was let go of, from Metallica. Yeah.

And hasn't stopped complaining about it for 43 years. I saw an interview with him that he's, where he said, like, I own that. Like, I was, like, I had to quit drinking because I was so just agro and violent whenever I did. But yeah, he was not happy about it, but metal fans are happy because he went on to found Megadeth, basically to spite Metallica, and they became huge in their own right. But I was never into them. I really want to be into Slayer. Like, I have rain and blood on my phone, which is not a super metal thing to say, but it's the truth. And I just, like, I can listen to it, but I'm not like, damn, this is good.

Like, I just can't get into Slayer. And I've never really been in Megadeth despite trying to. When he left, he said, I'll show you guys. I'll go on to found a band that will never be as good or as popular as you will be. I know. Seriously, I hope it doesn't stick in his crawl because that would be hard to get over. I think he's kind of well known in the industry. There's a couple of metal people that a lot of metal people don't like.

Dave Mustaine is one. And then Lars Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica is another. Even Metallica fans, there's a lot of them that are like, oh, God, Lars, just shut up. what do you think about yeah he does yeah because some of them are so like um vocal about their opinions and how awesome they are and how terrible other bands are yeah sure yeah i'm sure how about this let's say we wrap it up talking a little bit about black metal and then we'll move on to part two what do you think that sounds good okay so we can't wrap before we talk about black metal which was something that also emerged out of thrash or actually i think it emerged out of death metal to tell you the truth But where death metal is like guttural, black metal is screaming, essentially. It's just a higher pitch of not understandable lyrics. You have to read the lyrics along with it. But it is, so death metal is like gory and, like, just go look at cannibal corpses

butchered at birth album cover and you'll get an idea of what death metal is about. Yeah. Black metal is legit the kind of satanic metal that the censors of the 1980s and the pastors of the satanic panic were actually scared of that didn't exist yet. Black metal is that. So does like, is merciful fate in King Diamond, do they, are they thrown into that group? I think the progenitors of black metal were venom all the way back in 1981. They were actually part of the new wave of British heavy metal. They had a picture of baffamette in an upside-down star on the cover, right?

So I could see suburban parents being actually scared of venom. Bathory from Sweden, they were another one from 1984. And the mayhem is the one that, like, took black metal into, like, the actual, like, this is kind of scary realm. because they actually did stuff in real life that involved, like, death and suicide and murder and church arson and stuff like that. It was like the Norwegian black metal in particular, their scene, at least it was, kind of dangerous. It's really just you can't say that that's not true. Well, yeah, like you said, there was a literal murder in the Van Mayhem, and I will issue a huge trigger warning. and encourage you not to go look this up.

But you can't talk about mayhem without talking about the worst album cover of all time. Dawn of the Black Hearts is a photograph. It was a bootleg album, but became very famous because it showed a photograph that the band took of an image of their lead singer right after he had died by suicide by shotgun, and it's awful. Yeah. No other way to describe it, but just her. It's essentially a close-up, and it's exactly what you would think it looked like.

But that was their album cover, a bootleg album, like you said, true. But the picture was taken by one of Mayhem's band members, Euronymous, who apparently arranged the scene to make it a better-looking photo and hadn't even, like, contacted the cops yet to say, like, hey, my friend killed himself, he was taking pictures of it instead. So, like, this is, like, this is black metal. Well, they're also rife with white supremacists. Yeah. And I'm not, so I don't, I'm sure, positive that there are black metal bands out there that are not down with all of that. Yeah. But I would guess that they're not the majority.

And I don't mean to put down the whole thing and sound like a pearl clutching, like, parent. Because I'm not, I'm just trying to get across, like, how. like, legitimate what these guys are saying is. And, like, if you read the lyrics, they're like, wow, this is really nuts, man. It's cool. And I don't actually know where these guys fall, like if they're white supremacists or anything.

But I know that they are exemplary of Norwegian or Scandinavian black metal called Emperor. And they have a song called The Loss and the Curse of Grace, I think. Okay. And it's got a great video. like it's a really cool song read the lyrics along with the song okay and you'll be like okay i understand black metal that's a great entree to it i think all right i'll do it okay but i don't i'm not really into the sound because i've read that it's deliberately meant to be noisy and put off

people like me squares yeah let's just say it yes squares who aren't into black metal from Scandinavia. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a supersized part one. I think we'll probably have the supersized part two. And there's also going to be a fun little short stuff this week.

So I guess we should just call this Metal Week. And we don't do listener mails at the end of a part one, right? No. No, we don't. So take us home, baby. Okay, you ready? Yeah. We are going to stop.

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