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What do you think of country music? How about rap or evergreens? Do you like opera and classical music? Would you like to listen to jazz or techno/dance music? What music makes you feel good and what makes you furious? See our poll on right sidebar. Please leave your opinion to that poll. We will publish the results in the end of this month.
Have you ever thought how stupid our domain name (metal-music-videos.com) is? Oh yes, we have thought about it as well. It is THE most stupid domain name ever! That’s why we will set up a totally new blog with a good name. Oh yes, we know that we will loose backlinks, but that’s the price we have to pay. We were rookies when we started up this blog. Now we know a thing or another on blogging, so we will start it all over again. Stay with us! You will soon see our new and staggering metal music blog!
You know, all metal music bloggers write their version of the history of metal music. I am not going to be different; I am going to do it too. Why on Earth should I write a “yet another version of the history of heavy metal”? Well, there is just one reason. It is interesting and I just want to write it in my own words. Probably many of you readers are highly experienced metal heads and I more than familiar with this topic, but there are always those who are not so familiar. With this article series I am trying to reach those people. So, if you are an experienced metal head, I recommend you to check out my previous articles, such as Great Heavy Metal Bands of All Time - Accept and Godsplague - Damn Good Heavy Metal Music from Finnish Godsplague. If you are not familiar with this topic and you are interested, just keep on reading.
This article series is divided into six parts, just like it is done in most of the literature. Everything is based on what I have read, heard and understood during my years in metal music. This article series is a combination of what is available in books, DVD’s, Internet and heavy metal music itself. It is just interpreted and written by me.
The history of heavy metal is usually (in literature) divided as below. This first article discusses about the early days of heavy metal music.
- The early days: early and middle 1960’s
- The basis: late 1960’s and early 1970’s
- Mainstream: late 1970’s and 1980’s
- Genres are born: 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000
- Alternative and new metal: 1990’s and 2000
- Future: 2005+
The Early Days of Heavy Metal - Early and Middle 1960’s
It is widely understood that American blues music has strongly influenced the early British rock musicians. Some sources claim those 1940 and 1950’s rhythm and blues guitarists were the early pioneers of metal music, because they were interested in playing loud their distorted guitars. One of the examples is Willie Johnsson, the guitar player from Howlin’ Wolf. Another explanation supporting blues music for being the starting point of metal music is that British bands The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds used to record electric cover songs of traditional blues songs. It was on those days when the British musicians developed the loud distorted guitar sounds around power cords, which is the recogniseable element in metal music.
American blues music is not the only music style that has been recognized as the starting point of metal music. Psychedelic rock brought the amplifier feedback into music, which was utilized by The Kinks, Tridents and The Who. As the loudness of electric guitars increased in music, drumming turned into more simple repeating rhythms with small drum sets. Also singing became more and more powerful and dramatic.
One of the leading pioneers in metal music was Cream, who combined blues rock and psychedelic rock. Their two albums, Fresh Cream and Disraeli Gears, are recognized as the important influencing albums in heavy metal music. Another remarkable artist was Jimi Hendrix, the guitar virtuoso, who has been one of the most important idols for many musicians. A website called Anus.Com says it pretty well: “Much can be said about these bands, but what is most important is that they took the traditions of folk and blues improvisation and turned them into something technically on par with the jazz and big band acts of the day, adding guitar fireworks and lengthy songs to a genre that was otherwise strictly radio-play ditties“. Check out that website, by the way. There is a great viewpoint to the history of metal music.
I recommend you to check out these few great bands who have inspired many heavy metal bands:
Cream
Howlin’s Wolf
The Rolling Stones
The Yardbirds
Jeff Beck Group
The Kinks
Jimi Hendrix
Scott wrote an interesting article with a title What Is “Real” Metal? As Scott says, there are always dudes commenting “how this band or that band is not ‘Real’ metal“. Scott is asking now “what is ‘real’ metal“?
It is difficult to say which music is not metal and which music is metal. According to Scott, some folks might say nu-metal and metal core are not real metal music. Some of my readers might think the same, while some might get furious for such a statement. All in all, the point is that it is hard to draw the line and say if certain music is not “real” metal. I am pretty much on the same page with Scott. There are very many genres but they are all metal music. I love Arch Enemy, Children of Bodom and Trivium. Those are all true metal bands for me and probably for you as well, but I enjoy also Apocalyptica, Wintersun, Luca Turilli and Rusty Eye. Are they metal bands for you?
Read more about this in Scott’s blog Metal Martyr. Oh, and remember to check out Scott’s other articles. He really writes interesting posts!
Here is one great band in my opinnion plays damn good real metal music. Trivium from Orlando!
As I lived my youth in the 80’s, I have been privilidged to see the rise and fall of hair metal bands. Do you remember bands like Motley Crew, Poison, Kiss, Hanoi Rocks, LA Guns, Slaughter, New York Dolls, Van Halen and Cinderella? I won’t even mention Bon Jovi, it sucks too much..
Looking back nowadays all that seems so funny, especially the clothing and hairstyles. Especially the hairstyle of Poison, it was really awesome. Man, Poison is the reason for our planets’ ozone holes because of their chemicals. Recently I came across with this video in Youtube and I wanted to share it with you. This video brings me back to 80’s. Although it is funny, I am glad that melodic death metal is here right now. I got enough hair metal in the 80’s and now the time is for something harder.
If you were looking for TheLastDawn.Com metal music blog, you were just redirected to this blog. I have set up this blog to replace TheLastDawn.Com and TheLastDawn will be shut down soon. Why this new blog? We are interested to provide you much better metal music experience than we could have done with TheLastDawn. We have found music blogging interesting and we are expanding our blog with new ideas.
Thank You for reading TheLastDawn. Enjoy now metal-music-videos.com and come back again later. We will launch new interesting things in this blog during this ongoing year and next year!
Hi and welcome to MetalMusicVideo.Com. This is a metal music video blog aiming high. We are a group of fanatic headbangers and we have interesting new ideas for blogging metal music and related stuff. I am the driving force behind this blog and I hope we can provide you good content.
I started up TheLastDawn a couple of months ago. Soon I realized the limitations of blogspot.com and therefore I reserved this domain name and created a new blog with better interface. My primary reason for blogging metal music was my passion to share the feelings I get from metal music with people around the world. Have you ever spent time with your friends by listening music and probably drinking some beer? Have you felt that you would like to play some of your favourite bands for your friends but the night is too short and there is no time enough to play all those great pieces? Since I discovered metal music (some 21 years ago) I have always wanted to share it with my friends and discuss about it. Now with the Internet this get BIG. Just think about it. I’m here in Finland listening good old Sentenced. I find it good and I’d like to share my thought about it with people. I write about it in my blog and soon guys from the other side of this planet read about it and listen to it! Man, that is great!
So what is this blog going to provide? The main content will be metal music videos with our thoughts, the articles. In addition to videos, the articles will contain reviews, news and interviews. Additionally we’ll provide our own e-shop from which you can buy albums and stuff of the bands promoted in this blog. We’ll have competitions in which you will have a change to win albums and other stuff. Finally, we have a number of ideas I wouldn’t like to publish yet.
We are living interesting times and we are enthusiastic with our new blog. I’m glad you visited and read this. Come back again, read posts, comment, share your thoughts and bang your head.
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