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Thursday 25 June 2015

Heavy Metal music

William Burroughs is credited with coining the phrase, 'heavy metal.' He used it in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine, describing his character Uranian Willy as "the Heavy Metal Kid."

The Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut album, Are You Experienced was  highly influential in the development of heavy metal. Hendrix's virtuoso technique would be emulated by many metal guitarists and the album's most successful single, "Purple Haze", is identified by some as the first heavy metal hit.

Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" was the first popular song to use the phrase 'Heavy Metal,' with the lyrics: "I like smoke and lightning. Heavy metal thunder." They weren't talking about a music genre in the song, but were referring to a motorbike.

The first documented use of the phrase “heavy metal” to describe a type of rock music appeared in a review by Barry Gifford. In the May 11, 1968, issue of Rolling Stone, he wrote about the album A Long Time Comin' by Electric Flag: "Nobody who's been listening to Mike Bloomfield—either talking or playing—in the last few years could have expected this. This is the new soul music, the synthesis of white blues and heavy metal rock."

The English rock band Led Zeppelin's 1969 self-titled debut LP is recognized by some as the first major album to be credited with the development of the heavy metal genre. Others cite Black Sabbath's eponymous debut long player, which was released on February 13, 1970.

Led Zeppelin performing at Chicago Stadium in January 1975. By tony morelli  Wikipedia Commons

Black Sabbath started as a blues band called Earth, but changed their name after seeing the Boris Karloff horror movie Black Sabbath. They liked "that people paid money to be frightened".

Speaking to music historian Eddie Trunk, Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler said  the term was used derogatorily at first. “When we were on tour in America – I think it was the second tour in the States – I read this review, and the guy said, ‘This isn’t music; it sounds like a bunch of heavy metal being smashed together,’” Butler recalled. “Somehow that got over to England, and from then on it was like the sarcastic thing they used to apply to us – ‘this isn’t music, it’s a load of heavy metal being smashed together.’ And for some reason we got stuck with it.”

The sound quality of AC/DC's album Back in Black is so good, that after its release, studios in Nashville would use it to check the acoustics of a room, while Motörhead would use it to tune their sound system.

Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, Christopher Lee's fourth and final album was released on May 27, 2013 – the English actor's ninety-first birthday. It made him the oldest heavy metal performer in history.

Wikipedia Commons

Van Halen's "Jump" was in 1984 the first heavy metal song to top the US pop charts.

Metallica’s "Master of Puppets" was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" enough for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the United States Library of Congress in 2016, the first metal recording to do so.

Finland has the most heavy metal bands, with 53 per 100 000 people.

Metal music is so popular in Finnish Culture, there's a metal band in Finland targeted towards children. The band is called Hevisaurus and they are a heavy metal band that sings about dinosaurs and children's stories.

A Data Scientist revealed that "Burn" is the most metal word in the English language. The study was compiled by taking the frequency of a word appearing in heavymetal lyrics and dividing them by the frequency of the same word as it appears in the Brown Corpus Manual.

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1019960

Research has shown that cats get stressed out when they listen to heavy music. If you put headphones on a cat and play it AC/DC music, its heart rate and pupil size will increase. However, when they're played classical music, by contrast, cats' heart rates and pupil sizes decrease.

Sharks love heavy metal because the low-frequency vibrations are similar to the sounds made by struggling fish.

Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing.

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