The Era for Rock

1968-1978

First bands like Blue Cheer demonstrated the distorted sound, then Iggy Pop and the Stooges brought proto-punk into the equation, then progressive rock bands like King Crimson and Jethro Tull expanded on the idea, and finally, Black Sabbath released the first heavy metal album in 1970,Black Sabbath. Following this, bands merged the Led Zeppelin style of Celtic folk-influenced hard rock with the Gothic horror movie soundtrack-influenced Black Sabbath, and created the first genre rock hybrid which immediately began to typecast itself and drove the creation of underground metal with Motor head.

1979-1987

Heavy metal became popular in the 1970s and got absorbed by the hedonistic, individualistic, pleasure-seeking culture of the time. This produced a type of stadium heavy metalish rock that sold well but lost sight of the artistic ambitions of the genre. At the same time, bands like Motorhead and the Sex Pistols were popularizing the punk sound that had intensified since innovators like MC5, Iggy Pop and Link Wray began experimenting with it in the 1960s. In response, the more alert heavy metal bands added more gothic and neoclassical elements to distinguish themselves from the fray. The fusion of these two threads, hardcore punk and neoclassical heavy metal, produced an explosion of genres, but only two, speed metal and thrash, matured directly.

1988-1992

During the last years of Ronald Reagan's reign, when conservativism reasserted itself against the anomic search for meaning of a generation born into ideals it did not feel the nation upheld, the political conflict between these two forces heated up. Death metal, originally developed for the artistic vision that when death and horror are more real than individual moralization, people rediscover life, flourished, but also found itself under onslaught from gazillions of imitators. With the rise of Suffocation, a speed metal-influenced death metal band, the clones finally had reason to exist and so death metal exited in chorus of "me toos" as black metal rose from its ashes with a new sound and a less-tolerant ideology, just as the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States turned more liberal.

1993-1996

Death metal became a field of Suffocation clones, and bands increasingly turned toward either going "technical" to distinguish themselves, or assimilating themselves into mainstream styles like rock (Asphyx - God Cries), jazz (Pestilence - Spheres), funk (Mordred - In this Life) and punk (Pyrexia - Hatredangeranddisgust). At the same time, black metal rolled onto the verge of what would be the most popular style of metal to come from the underground, mainly because its primitive riffs and nocturnal melodies were part lullabye and part nightmare, apppropriate for an audience that was both aware of the decay of civilization but too disorganized to do anything about it. As soon as its popularity grew, especially with the release of that template for black metal from The Abyss, The Other Side, black metal too became inundated in imitators, although some late forming bands and middle era albums by classic bands helped flesh out its style and bring it to maturation.

1997-2008

Since 1997, very little of vitality has occurred in metal. Black metal bands continue the style, either by attempting to expand traditionalism or "new" combinations made of black metal plus any number of already extant genres (some of the former are bad, all of the latter are stupid). Death metal continues with some absorption by metalcore and emo, which has created a queasily hybrid style that few fans of the older material want to hear, and many newer fans find too mixed for their tastes. What has radically expanded are the continuation of speed metal and neoclassical heavy metal, power metal, and the skipped generation descendant of thrash, metalcore, which reverses the thrash pattern by putting hardcore riffs into metal-style songs. The sub-genres are converging again by becoming more similar, which may enable newer acts to get more distance from convention and find a style in which writing makes sense.