Metal: Heavy-Metal

This genre of rock music is often defined as simply metal. Heavy metal emerged in the end of 1960s. The USA and the Great Britain are the biggest centers of heavy metal. This genre originated from psychedelic rock and blues-rock music. Heavy metal is characterized by extended guitar solos, massive sound highly amplified distortion of sound, overall loudness and emphatic beats. The very first heavy metal groups were: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and of course Led Zeppelin. These bands gathered very large group of public at their concerts.
In the 1970s Judas Priest pushed the evolution of the genre excluding its blues elements. Moreover, Mot?rhead made a big accent on speed and presented a sensibility of punk rock in such way. The other bands of that time followed them. Heavy metal interested people all over the world.
In the 1980s, the new styles such as thrash metal, nu metal and metal core appeared and were presented by metal bands such as Metallica.

Properties of heavy metal
The genre has: vigorous vocals, loud distorted guitars, emphatic rhythms and dense bass-and-drum sound. Different subgenres of heavy metal omit, change or emphasize on these elements.
The main role of the vocalist and guitar always conflicted in heavy metal. This issue created some kind of musical tension and made a composition more interesting for its listenres.
Heavy metal showed the emotions projected by vocal.
Simon Frich stated that the tone of singer's voice used to be more important than the heavy metal's lyrics. There are several types of vocals in heavy metal such as gruff style of Motörhead's Lemmy and Metallica's James Hetfield, theatrical approach of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson and Judas Priest's Rob Halford and the growling of death metal bands.
The bass plays a big role in heavy metal as well. We can even say that it is a key element of the metal sound. The bass guitar creates a sound that makes the music really heavy. There is a wide verification of basslines complexity. Some performers of heavy metal set the bass as the main element, for example: Cliff Burton from Metallica in the beginning of the 1980s.
Another important element in heavy metal is metal drumming, which creates a powerful sound and speed beats. The endurance of drumming has its own secrets, thus the heavy metal drummers develop a perfect coordination, substantial speed and of course the dexterity. Some specialists determine heavy metal as a sensory equivalent of war. Moreover, some of them stated that heavy metal would shoot the vitality of youth and brush up the listeners into the sound.
Heavy metal is characterized by dynamic rhythm and deliberate stresses as well.
One and the most distinguished feature of heavy metal is the guitar power chord. Often power chords used to be played with help of consistent finger arrangement.
Modal scale progressions, the use of pedal points and tritone and chromatic progressions are three main traits. The riffs are created with these three traits.
Pedal point is a harmonic basis for heavy metal songs. A pedal point is a very long tone and is utilized in the bass range.

The origin of the term
The term heavy metal is not musical. It was, probably, borrowed from chemistry and metallurgy.
A well known writer William S. utilized the term for the first time in his novel "The Soft Machine", which included contained a character "Uranian Willy" known as Heavy Metal Kid.
Burroughs utilized and developed the term in his novel "Nova Express". His used heavy metal to name the drugs. Hippie used the term heavy as a synonymous with "profound". Later the term heavy was used in countercultural and beatnik slang. The debut album by Iron Butterfly was marked as Heavy.
Chas Chandler argued that the term heavy metal was born in the article about a Jimi Hendrix performance in New York Times. Nevertheless, that issue has never been found.
Some specialists argue that "hard rock" and "heavy metal" are equivalent terms especially in 1970s. The famous American heavy metal band of the 1970s was Aerosmith.

Evolution of the heavy metal
Such bands as The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds started to develop blues-rock. Heavy metal became to evolve in such way. The Kinks popularized the sound of guitars distortion in their hit "You Really Got Me". The invention of new generation of amplifiers made a really big contribution to the guitar power sound development. Moreover, such guitarists as The Who's Pete Townshend, the Tridents Jeff Beck and the Kinks Dave Davies experimented with feedback.
The sound of the guitars was really powerful and vocalists began to adjust their techniques. They became to utilize more amplification. Thus rock bands utilized sheer volume, the "bigger-louder-wall-of-Marshalls" by The Who had a perfect and essential approach.
Heavy metal developed on the basis of psychedelic rock and blues-rock blend. The British band Cream helped to merge these genres and their guitars sounded powerful and in unison. Their two releases "Fresh Cream" and "Disraeli Gears" became a model for future style development.
Nevertheless, we can notice the fusion of heavy metal in 1968. In 1969, Led Zeppelin released their self titled album, which gained 10th place on the Billboard chart. Nevertheless, Led Zeppelin denied they were a heavy metal band and stated they were the hard rock group. At the same time, Led Zeppelin established the main aspects of the heavy metal. They were known by Robert Plant's dramatic and wailing vocals and highly distorted guitar style of Page. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Metallica, Kiss, the Scorpions, AC/DC and other heavy metal bands made a really big contribution in heavy metal development in the 1970s.
On the basis of heavy metal development, a lot of subgenres appeared. Underground was a really complicated subgenre and included such categories as black metal, power metal, and the related subgenres of doom, thrash metal and gothic metal.

In the 1990s another kind of heavy metal emerged in the USA. Metal groups were influenced by alternative and in that situation the "nu metal" emerged. We can mark such well known nu metal groups as Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Linkin Park, Korn and P.O.D. They borrowed some elements from hip-hop, death metal and rap-style vocals. Nu metal became quite popular in the 1990s and reached the top points on MTV.

Metal became very popular in Scandinavian countries and Germany as well. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest are very popular at present time in Europe. Their releases reach the top of different charts. Iron Maiden became the first metal band that got the Brit Award for best live band.
Heavy metal has a lot of different subgenres and styles. It continue to develop at present time and the its audience increases all the time.