The Difference Between Metal and Heavy Metal
History of Heavy Metal: The Difference Between Metal and Heavy Metal by Preston Cram Heavy metal may be the most widely misunderstood form of music in Western culture, and its identity has grown increasingly obscure over the past four decades as fans, journalists, and musicians have continued calling new and more divergent stylistic evolutions by the same name. The result is the all-too-familiar experience for fans of metal music to strike up a conversation with each other only to discover that they share no common interests in music. Despite the frequent use of "metal" and "heavy metal" as interchangeable terms, it's relevant and accurate to think of them as their own categories of music. Fortunately, the difference between them is easy to understand by looking back over the history of heavy metal. Dio - "Stand Up and Shout" (1983) Note: The formation and naming of new genres is always a messy process and much easier to parse with hindsight, and so th...