Music that makes your Head-Bang

Heavy metal music is loud, powerful and aggressive styles that developed out of the sounds of such blues revival bands as the Rolling Stones, Cream and the Yard birds, with further the influences from the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Although a certain amount of overlap existed between the styles of heavy metal, they remained separate. Heavy metal singers concentrated on screaming often-obscured lyrics to the audience caught up more in the power of the sounds than with any meaning in the words.

Heavy metal bands generally used the electric guitars, bass and drum instrumentation. Heavy metal bands did sometimes vary their sounds by using acoustic instruments, but that was the exception, not the rule. Heavy metal also often included highly amplified and seemingly uncontrolled sound. It was aggressive and macho, frequently stressing rebellious attitudes of young men who felt caught between boyhood freedom and society's expectations of manhood, to the point of employing symbols of death and destruction to appeal to their aggressions as well as to upset their parents and other authority figures.

I came to like this heavy metal music because my brother influence me to listen to this kind of music. My brother has 3 bands; they were all heavy metal music. At first, I don't want to listen to the metal music. Although I'm a music lover but for me heavy metal music is like a male cat fighting another male cat in the middle of the night because of a female cat. I easily get irritated when my brother start to play the music. I really hate it! However, when I hang out with his band mates; go to different Rock Bars and play the metal music there, it was so awesome. I already know what it was all about the lyrics, use of instruments, what bands they have influence with, etc. Especially when you hear the effects of distortion and feedback used in the heaviest metal music was enhanced through the guitarist's use of power chords. Power chords are not traditional chord structures such as used in most rock music. Instead they are just two bass notes that are the interval of a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth part, for example “G” on the sixth string played with “C” or “D” on the fifth. When those notes are played and distorted, those sound of another note that is much lower than the guitar can normally play is created as a resultant tone. Power chords can be rhythmically pounded or sustained- either way they add much to the heavy depth and weight of the metal sound.

Heavy metal emerged in the U.S. and in England. Among its principal components are the American groups Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith and the British group Black Sabbath. Its immediate ancestors are the acid rock of the sixties, though heavy metal bands tend to be louder, use more electrically distorted sounds and employ endless short riffs. Black Sabbath is typical of the style. Depending upon once point of view, the lyrics are either mystical or meaningless. Led Zeppelin's is also typical of the style but more subdued. It is a long work (true to many heavy metal pieces) that begins almost sweetly, but toward the end it becomes increasingly loud and violent.

Most British heavy metal tended to use riffs as the basic structural element of music. The riffs were usually played by the bass and often started on high notes and ended on low notes, giving a very heavy, powerful effect. The riffs would drop off during instrumental improvisations that took place somewhere near the middle of the recording and then return to reintroduce the vocals. British heavy metals were generally less concerned with interesting vocal lines or complicated chord progressions, both characteristics being more common in American heavy metal.

Heavy metal was not a British invention. It developed out of the playing styles of many groups, both British and American. One of the first groups to use heavy metal's distorted guitar sound was Iron Butterfly; also, it was this band my brother has influence with. Unlike those recordings, however, they use the electric organ as their main instrument and added distorted guitar sounds.