The Scene of the Past: Metal Albums 40 Years Back

Among the seemingly endless listicles and galleries the VH1 website regularly churns out, one caught my eye a week or so ago -- finding its way into my Facebook stream, if I remember rightly -- a gallery that takes us back into the years before metal becomes a self-conscious movement, and has yet to extricate itself from the closely aligned and still more vague genre of "hard rock":  20 Classic Metal Albums Turning 40 in 2015.

Perhaps it's because I'm myself near to the midpoint of my own 40s that this retrospective -- among so many others -- got me ruminating as I clicked through the albums picked out by the VH1 writers.  I can say that my friends and I quite literally grew up as teens with classic metal in the 1980s, and became excited in  our childhoods by bands in the 1970s we didn't even realize might form part of a broader and deeper musical movement -- formative years for sensibilities and imaginations.  Of course, our generation could have that experience precisely because an earlier generation had been over the previous decade gradually feeling their way -- some more deliberately and consistently, others almost by happenstance or experimentation towards sounds that embodied and incorporated elements that would turn out to be central in later metal music.