Week Four: Forging the Heavy Metal Sound & Style

The new wave of British heavy metal brought a whole new realm of music that inevitably invaded the United States. Where the music came from and the culture that surrounded it is particularly interesting to me, however. The film we watched in class discussed the community of the British heavy metal was very small, connected an intimate in the sense that bands would pool together enough money to create an EP and press a small number of albums to be handed out, making their music personal and required to be shared in order for more people to hear them outside of live shows. This is really interesting to me because it’s very different from how music, and even metal, today has developed. Today albums are mass produced and can be bought nearly anywhere. During the new wave of British metal, these albums were part of the community of young people who shared the EPs, within the pubs and the larger community of fans that followed these groups.

Waksman states, “Live music, or alternatively, the gathering of fans to listen to a genre-specific records as occurred at Neal Kay’s soundhouse, was crucial to the growing momentum of heavy metal” (p. 179). I believe the physical space for metal fans to come together was crucial to the movement and progression of metal due to the fact that metal developed into a community of people who cam together to escape their mundane lives, thus coming back to the concept of re-enchantment. Therefore, this tight-knit community, sharing of exclusively released albums, and physical spaces for the metal community served as the stepping stones to the greater re-enchantment of metal on a large scale as we later see Iron Maiden becoming popular in the United States and greater Britain.

Waksman goes on to explain that, “In what was becoming a pattern, the band drew considerable attention on the basis of a self-released cassette of demo recordings that circulated under the name “Soundhouse Tapes,” in tribute to Neal Kay’s role in popularizing the group by playing their unreleased songs at the Bandwagon” (p. 180), which I touched on earlier. This sense of DIY mentality in the metal scene is also something we see as a cross-over from punk. I found it really interesting in the video how Kay had such an influential role in the metal community, particularly through his construction of the top metal hits lists. As the DJ, Kay had a unique perspective on the metal scene, allowing him to see both the bands and their construction of music and the changes throughout the music, as well as the responses of the audience to various changes. Within the community, Kay became somewhat of a role model as well as an opinion leader through his list constructions.