It Might Not Be Metal But It Makes Metal What It Is

It Might Not Be Metal But It Makes Metal What It Is
By Dark Juan

It might surprise you all to hear that you are just as likely to find me listening to Cabaret Voltaire or Siousxie And The Banshees or some obscure Disco classic, as you are to discover me spinning the latest Metal platter. This is because it took me rather a long time to understand that most forms of music have some redeeming qualities, and that it furthers and broadens your understanding of the righteous faith and the One True Path that is Heavy Metal to listen to other styles and forms of music – as an example, all round superb gentleman, rock singer extraordinaire and my musical hero Mr. Graham Bonnet, a man whose CV is peerless and includes stints with Rainbow, Alcatrazz, Impellitteri, and MSG as well as being a solo artist beyond compare, started his musical career being a backing vocalist for the Bee Gees as well as performing in the decidedly not Metal The Marbles, before finding the One True Path. 

I have frequently trumpeted my thoughts about the Metal fan who confines him / her or their self only to Metal missing out on some of the things that made Metal what it is (the likes of Sir Lord Baltimore and Coven, Free and The Doors, Ten Years After and Atomic Rooster, Blue Oyster Cult and Iron Butterfly) and form the bedrock for everything that is Metal today – whether or not that might be Five Finger Death Punch or Anaal Nathrakh. This music of the past is still relevant because it is the living history of Metal and without it, and the bands and performers who played it, Metal would not exist.

There’s hardly any species of music out there which has had close to zero, or at least a marginal influence on Heavy Metal, and I am here to tell you that all forms of music are just as viable and exciting as Metal if you listen with an uncritical ear. Disco and Funk are ridiculously complex compositions that require incredible dexterity and skill from the musicians playing them. Disco and Funk is where the bass player shines, as some of the basslines are phenomenally complicated and they are what drives the whole platform-soled shebang. 

Synthwave is the neon-dripping sound of the 80’s action movie and the musclebound lead man quipping his way through the thousands of enemies he is mowing down with his M60 machine gun and leads you down paths of nostalgia for early 80’s TV shows involving customised helicopters / cars / motorcycles or soldiers of fortune being captured and fortuitously imprisoned in a large metal barn with a fully functional vehicle and all the scrap metal and welding and cutting gear (including masks and gauntlets) you could ever wish for if you had a requirement to escape said capture in an armoured battlewagon. And they are left alone to do this without any form of check on them because they are making so much noise while they do a bit of frontier metalwork. 

Psychedelia took the basic building blocks of the Blues and Rock ‘N’ Roll, then ingested a bath-load of LSD and then recorded the subsequent, cosmic, rainbow-hued results and used them to foment social change in an America that was rooted in traditional values and violently opposed to any form of social development that didn’t involve women knowing their places and a shirt and tie being worn. See McCarthyism. Without the hippie, you wouldn’t have the Metalhead, so remember that the next time you’re sparking up a joint and having a beer and give thanks for free love and respect. After all, they are still values that the Metalhead cherishes, otherwise the mosh pit would be a brutal and anarchic place where injury and suffering would be commonplace, rather than the good-natured bump-a-thon where everyone helps if someone goes down. Apart from pit killers. Those tiny-dicked buttnuggets can get to fuck. 

Without the Post-Punk, the Goth Rock and New Wave, you wouldn’t have the entire Gothic or Emo aesthetic and love of exploring the darker side of humanity and feelings that are a central plank of just what this thing called Heavy Metal is. Without the initial explorations into electronics that Delia Derbyshire, Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse pioneered there would be no Industrial, no Nu-Metal, no Neue Deutsche Harte, no Stadium Rock, no Limp Bizkit (granted, this would not be a bad thing. Dammit, Delia Derbyshire, why couldn’t you have picked up a skillet instead of a Moog?) or Linkin Park, or Ministry. 

Even Pop has its place within Metal, when you hear backing vocals or a particularly perfect melody – Bon Jovi, for example, and to a lesser extent Ghost owe lots of their sound to Pop music – ABBA are a pervasive influence on those worthy Swedish Satanists as they are to Bon Jovi and other stadium-friendly rockers and metallers. Roky Erickson is an influence on any Metal band who has listened to guitar music at any point in the past fifty years – Even Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) can be proved to have had an impact on contemporary Metal at some point when Ugly Kid Joe of all people covered ‘Cats In The Cradle’. Just look at some of the Metal covers of classic Pop songs:

• Rammstein covering Depeche Mode’s ‘Stripped’.
• Ghost covering ABBA’s ‘I’m A Marionette’ and Roky Erickson’s ‘If You Have Ghosts’.
• Disturbed butchering…. I mean covering Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’ and Genesis’ ‘Land Of Confusion’ and very famously, Tears For Fears’ ‘Shout’.
• Marilyn Manson covering every Pop song ever written – Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’, Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’, Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’.
• Nine Inch Nails covering Adam Ant’s ‘Physical’.
• Urge Overkill covering Neil fucking Diamond’s ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’.
• And, of course, the best cover version of all time, being a gloriously over-the-top Scandinavian Folk Metal band covering a British/ German Disco Funk song – this being Turisas doing their barnstorming version of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’.

Even the more extreme side of Metal has got on the Pop bandwagon – Surely the absolute, arse-puckering horror that was the cover version of Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’ by Cradle Of Filth and their priapic little howler monkey of a vocalist is burned on the psyche of every Metal fan, never to be spoken of again? My Dying Bride turning Simon and Garfunkel’s version of  ‘Scarborough Fair’ into a miserable Yorkshire dirge? Well, my friends, I can easily fucking top that psychological torture for you – Even The Berzerker, erstwhile hyperextreme Australian blenders of Grindcore and Gabba Techno decided to hop on to the Pop cover bandwagon with a most esoteric choice of song. 

Yes, The Berzerker elected to do a cover version of ‘All The Things She Said’ by Russian faux-teen, school uniform-wearing pretend lesbians T.a.T.u. This went exactly as you might imagine. It sounded like someone putting up a metal shed really quickly with a man grunting in a most inappropriate fashion considering the subject matter of teenage schoolgirl lesbian shenanigans.

My point, then, is that Metal has a lot of diverse and, upon initial inspection, undesirable influences. The ultimate point is that there are NO undesirable influences, regardless of what your viewpoint is on Trap Metal. If you want Metal to not be stagnant, then you must accept that Urban music is going to creep in there, as well as other styles. I mean, hell, if you’re prepared to accept a bunch of shrieking Japanese fake-teen idol girls battering the senses with a mix of kawaii J-Pop antics and Metal, and I know a lot of you are, you can accept Nik NXK or Sam Astaroth roaring at you over Urban beats. 

Metal EVOLVES. Metal has sucked in everything from the Blues to Classical music over the decades (Whitesnake, The Quireboys, The Black Crowes, Guns N’ Roses to Yngwie J. Malmsteen, Nightwish, Dream Theater, Rhapsody Of Fire), twisted them out of all recognition (Stoner and Doom have strong links to Blues music) and they have become new versions of Metal. Look at the explosion of Rap Metal in the 90’s – Public Enemy and Anthrax discovered that the two styles can mix and mix explosively, leading to a flurry of copyists, but with a few unique and viable bands coming out of it. Thrash Metal is Metal and Punk colliding and the likes of Carnivore and Nuclear Assault amply demonstrate this by sounding distinctly different from traditional Metal bands like Accept, Iron Maiden or W.A.S.P. Hell, even the band that supposedly started it all, Black Sabbath, don’t believe that they are all that Metal, with Tony Iommi himself describing their sound as “Heavy Blues”.

It is instructive to listen to music other than Metal in order to further your understanding of Metal and Extreme music. Henceforth, I would like to share with you a few of the songs that I enjoy, that aren’t anything to do with Heavy Metal per se, but have had an influence upon it, but most importantly, they are just absolutely brilliant music.

‘Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’ – ABBA. The absolute pinnacle of 70’s Pop music. Lushly produced with an absolutely earth-shaking chorus and hook and performed with gusto and enthusiasm by a bunch of people who had raided the bonus bins of Nylon clothes manufacturers for their stage outfits.

‘Young Girl’ – Gary Puckett & The Union Gap. Listen to the lyrics. They are well dodgy and a precursor to Dark Angel’s ‘The Death Of Innocence’. It’s also a superb vocal performance throughout the song and it has uncommon power and presence. Even if it is slightly uncomfortable listening to the protagonist contemplating boffing jailbait, but as a misguided but ultimately well-meaning attempt to drag the horror of paedophilia into mainstream thought it’s a good one.

‘Animal’ – Aurora. Neurodiverse Norwegian semi-feral pixie is dragged out of her native forests, still with leaves in her hair, and proceeds to beguile and panic the listener with cheerful-sounding tinkly-bop Dance Pop with a lyric that could only be described as “Fucking Metal”. Should be well known to the Metal fan because of her contributions to Wardruna. See also ‘In Boxes’ and listen carefully to the lyrics there too. The lass is a bit of a dangerous one.

‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’ – Neil Diamond. A powerhouse vocal performance on this song, again about a young lady not yet being legal for shenanigans of a sexual nature, shows the versatility of a simple melody and guitar line intertwining and clearly demonstrates that less really can be more when it comes to composition.

‘One Night In Bangkok’ – Murray Head. An utterly batshit song from a batshit musical (Chess), performed in a batshit fashion by Murray Head, and written (incredibly) by ABBA’s Benny and Bjorn, this is an absolutely out to lunch song about playing chess around the world set to some of the most danceable Electro-Pop the Eighties had to offer. A proto Hip-Hop Rock crossover because of Head’s vocal performance on the verses, it’s a curiosity that absolutely has a grip on my musical tastes.

‘Tokoloshe Man’ – John Kongos. A clear contender to show just where Rock music and Psychedelia first crossed over, this is a muscular and dynamic tune that is a close, yet utterly different contemporary to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, with a strong Folk and Blues bent underneath the amplification, yet it is clearly a bona-fide attempt to create Hard Rock.

‘Baker Street’ and ‘Night Owl’ – Gerry Rafferty. The eight-bar sax line on the former by Raphael Ravenscroft is well known, but I wish to draw your attention to the absolutely incendiary guitar solo by Hugh Burns. A man who brought emoting on that instrument to a whole new level, it is an absolute piece of guitar mastery that showed that even Rock music had oodles of soul and feeling, and the lyrics occupy a very bleak place in the human psyche. ‘Night Owl’ is similar. The subject of the lyrics is a lonely soul indeed looking for an indefinable SOMETHING and is therefore easily able to elucidate the alienation that most fans of Extreme music have suffered at some point in their lives.

‘Whip In My Valise’ – Adam Ant. A song that is sleazy and scary in equal measure. The influence on Metal of the album ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’ is small yet pervasive. Without Adam Ant, there would be no Nine Inch Nails, Society 1 or Genitorturers. Lo-fi Punk production plus the limitations of Ant’s voice limit the impact of the whole thing until you listen to it carefully.

‘Das Modell’ – Kraftwerk. The starting point of all modern German Pop music and the precursor to all Neue Deutsche Harte, along with NEU! Experimental and curiously detached from humanity, yet still capable of surprising warmth, Kraftwerk were true innovators in music and their influence is still heavy in Electronica of most forms.

‘House Of The Rising Sun’ – The Animals. I don’t need to tell you about this all-time classic that has been covered by many a Metal band with varying degrees of success. Even Five Finger Death Punch have had a stab at it. Poorly.

‘California Dreamin’’ – The Mamas And The Papas. When hippies finally went proper Rock ‘N’ Roll and created a song that transcended itself in so many ways it was comfortable with a mainstream audience, rockers, hippies and even parents.

There are many, many more songs and artists in my collection that I could tell you about that have had some form of influence on our beloved Metal, but I shall leave you with this – 

“There’s so much music for you to choose, so don’t just be a Metal dude. It’s cool, fool.”

This from American Thrash maestros Sacred Reich, on their clunky, ham-fisted but ultimately well-meaning Funk song, ‘31 Flavors’ that was released on their classic album “The American Way”. They said it better than I ever could.

Go and expand your minds and you’ll find a new appreciation of Metal sitting at the end of your musical rainbow. Goodnight.

Disclaimer: This article is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.