Classic Metal Class Session 8 - NWOBHM and Metal Identity

We are starting off the 2021 year of monthly Classic Metal Class sessions this Saturday with a discussion that continues delving into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) in the early 80s.  This time the focus is on how the musicians and fans were involved in something that was not just a musical movement, but involved developments of what we can call a more and more self-conscious "metalhead" identity.

There are a number of aspects to this, and I'm sure the conversation - as always - will stray a bit past the limits of these topics, but what we plan to discuss include:

• the progressive formation of consciousness of self as "metalheads"
• the thematization of heavy metal as a type of music and experience within song lyrics
• the development of and influence on genres of metal by bands in this period
• the continuities between older British, American, and European metal and the NWOBHM

As always, I'll be joined by my cohost and special guest, Berklee School of Music guitar professor and fellow metalhead-since-childhood, Scott Tarulli (you can check him out here).  We'll kick the ideas back and forth for half an hour or so, and then start responding to questions and comments - we always get some great ones from participants!

Here's the Zoom link for the session - the session is this Saturday, 12:00 PM Central Time.  Hope you can join us for what will be a rich conversation about classic heavy metal!

Q&A with the HMP: My 10 Favorite NWOBHM Albums

After my last post, reminiscing a bit about Raven and reviewing their latest (and amazingly good) album, one of the followers on my Facebook page asked me:  "Out of curiosity, what are some of your favorite NWOBHM albums?"  I responded that I'd have to think about it, but I wanted to strike before the iron cooled off, and since Sunday is -- while not a day of rest for me, since I held a 2-hour online class session in my Philosophical Foundations class! -- a day when I get to indulge myself a bit, I thought over some IPA and cigarillos, I'd put other writing projects aside and hammer out this post.

There's some dispute about just what precisely counts as New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), but while acknowledging that, I'm not going to really discuss that tangled issue here -- it will supply fodder for another blog post down the line, I promise!  I'm not going to include any works by bands that, while not British, play with a definite NWOBHM sensibility -- like the American band, Riot, the Finish act, Oz, or the Japanese group, Loudness.  I also won't include Judas Priest or Motorhead, since although they played a significant and even seminal role, they do antedate the movement somewhat (and by not discussing them, it opens some space for less well known acts).  It's going to be -- as these sorts of things always are -- rather subjective.  but in any case here they are:

Metal Origins: Some Key Early Bands

There's been a tendency in recent years -- one I see particularly among fans into more recent "genre" metal (all the stuff ranging from "black" to "sludge" to "viking" . . .) -- to accord the origins of heavy metal primarily to on band, Black Sabbath.  This claim has been given considerable weight by a key practitioner and early innovator, Rob Halford, for whom it's become somewhat of a party-line that first there was Sabbath, and really nobody else doing it, and then there was Judas Priest.  My aim, in this and some follow-up posts yet to come, is to argue that this is far from the case -- that the story is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Don't get me wrong -- in the narrative as I reconstruct it, Black Sabbath certainly gets given their rightful pride of place.  They possess a napoleonic status of "first among equals."  I'd even go so far as to say that without Sabbath, metal might have coalesced rather differently -- and perhaps less powerfully, less coherently -- as a genre.  But it's a mistake to portray them as the sole seminal band.

"Define" Heavy Metal, You Say?

You'll notice that, at first, it looks like I've placed the quotation marks in the wrong places in the title of this entry.  But, no. . .  they're set around just the right term -- define.  You'll see, or rather read, why momentarily.  First though, a bit of back-story.

I would say that one of the words I hear most often from non-philosophers in early-on conversations with philosophers, almost always placed in the interrogative is "define," as in "now, how would you define. . . ?" or "what's your definition of . . . ?" or "can you define. . . .?"  Occasionally, most often I'd say in student papers, I end up seeing the indicative ". . .  is defined as . . .  according to the . . . .   dictionary/encyclopedia/my uncle Jake, etc."

I don't hear "definition" pop up all that often when philosophers are plying their trade, teaching, or talking amongst themselves.  Why is that, you might wonder?  Well, although we hale from a profession and tradition that gets a good early start with Socrates wandering around asking people for definitions of key concepts, like virtue, justice, knowledge, and so on. . .  most of us have come to realize -- one way or another -- just how difficult it can be to provide adequate definitions for any really interesting concept, experience, phenomenon.  "Give me a definition of. . . "  You demand that in many philosophical circles, and they rightly peg you as right off the bus, really or just ironically naive, or as playing at debater's tricks