Heavy metal has always been the oddball out when it comes to music, always somehow managing to live along the fringes no matter what is actually happening within. During its 50+ years of existence, it has been vilified as the music of the devil corrupting our precious youth’s minds, soared to unimaginable commercial heights, likened to both caveman music and, interestingly enough, the classical composers of the past and most of all—declared dead more often than one can count.
Two of the most iconic incidences go back slightly over 20 and 30 years, both of which had been dubbed heralds of metal’s impending doom or the flat-out declaration of it already being dead. The first one came during the meteoric rise of Nirvana and subsequently the grunge movement in the early 90s. It was the direct antithesis to metal with its more distorted, down-tuned guitars, heavy use of bass, often plaintive and almost subdued sounding vocal to match the down-tuned riffs and darker, sociocritical or negative lyrics. It was basically a complete departure from the soaring, heroic vocals, screaming guitars, pounding drums, epic lyrics and over-the-top image that most people had of heavy metal.
Conveniently disregarding the fact that it basically was two completely different musical styles, even though born from similar roots, the sudden rise of the grunge movement was generally seen as fans moving on from the flamboyance of hair metal that was designed to take everything to the extreme (at least in terms of imagery and attitude) to a more down-to-earth, authentic and culturally relevant approach that seemed more “real”, closer to what actually was happening in every-day life. As with many of the musical tides rising and ebbing throughout history, the “new” sound took off commercially and metal in general took a hit, leading to musical experts and publications declaring metal outdated and even flat-out dead in some instances.
Fast-forward ten years and a similar meteoric rise, but this time in the shape of a piece of software named Napster, which had been designed to be a peer-to-peer file sharing service. While not the first of its kind, its ease of use and specialization in MP3-file music made it highly popular and began to take on a life of its own when it drew the attention of several high-profile artists, among them Metallica, who discovered that their whole back catalogue was easily—and most of all freely—available through the network.
Refusals by Napster to remove their works from its service despite written requests (there were other artists that did the same, such as Dr Dre) led to several lawsuits by both musical artists and record labels for copyright infringement and—in more relevance to this article—the negative commercial impact of the free sharing of files that would hurt sales and subsequently put record labels and bands out of business, which translated to the relatively small commercial market for metal as basically killing it. Again.
Now when looking at the time between these two isolated incidents and the present, several more or less surprising narratives stand out. While the grunge movement ebbed away after about a decade and Napster had to declare bankruptcy soon after lawsuits began to pile up, the former has left a long-lasting legacy that influenced numerous minor resurgences and adjacent style crossovers and the latter’s principles sparked countless iterations that paved the way for today’s streaming services and even ended up being used as excellent promotional avenues for smaller bands and labels to propagate their music to a wider fanbase than they could have reached otherwise.
To circle back to the very beginning of the article, though, when accessing Metal Archives and conducting a search of releases, limiting it to just January of 2022, a staggering number of 1,528 entries can be found (valid at time of publication), encompassing anything from demos over singles, Eps, studio and live albums to compilations, proving one thing for sure – heavy metal is as active as ever, from old established acts from decades ago to brand-new bands emerging in every “corner” of the globe, despite all the various declarations of its demise throughout the decades, which would place it into a permanent state of being “undead” as in general death is widely accepted as a fairly final condition.
So despite being called dead, having been maligned and judged as evil that had to be condemned and erased from the face of the earth and many other things countless of times, it is safe to say, heavy metal is not doing “too bad”.
