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At 4/25/14 06:40 AM, S3C wrote: IMO, changing the lyrical content is game changing. It's the part of the song which carries the most objectively communicable message, so it's very important. Your reasoning just seems limiting, and even counterintuitive to a discussion by not being able to further categorize a group of bands by developing a corresponding genre name.

The big problem with white metal, viking metal, pirate metal, christian rock, etc. it's that these genre specifically have nothing to distinguish themselves as a genre from the genre they are in fact a part of. Just take white metal for example again. The genre was basically created to oppose the tendency in bm to have satanic lyrical themes. But that was a tendency, and not genre defining. Only the second wave of black metal was notorious for it's anti-christian and anti-religion lyrical themes. The first wave wasn't. So it was not genre defining anyway. So creating "white metal" would justify just about anyone to create a new genre because of the lyrical theme....

I get your point, but I don't see how it effectively works when it comes to defining what is a real genre and what is just made up. Especially considering that before there was Christian Rock, for example, there were already rock bands with christian themes...

Genres can be insanely specific, but can be insanely broad as well. For example, if I say 80s music, that can semantically be comprised not of just cheesy electronically produced pop music of the 80s (which most people would probably immediately think of) but all the rock, metal, hip-hop, classical, folk, gospel, and so forth music that was produced in the 80s. Categorizing genres can also work retroactively. For example, pentatonic music. Most early cultures throughout the world had early music where the melodies where based on five note patterns (pentatonicism- has to do something with aesthetically pleasing sounds related to Pythagorean ratios, although aesthetics will always be inherently subjective) but it wasn't really until centuries later that Europeans started intentionally classifying and theorizing music in such a way. Doesn't mean the genre didn't exist! Also, not sure how much you have delved into music theory- such detailed music classification and dissection is largely a Western concept, many cultures don't even have a recognizable term for music- it's just something that exists and is a part of the lifestyle. Another example, many contemporary jazz musicians extensively and intentionally use hybridized scales/modes which is something you wouldn't commonly find in jazz over the previous decades, even in modal jazz itself...yet such melodic fragments and sounds are found in bebop heads and solos of the 1940s. Where bop artists of this time using hybridized scales intentionally? Probably not.

80's music refers to a time period and not to a genre, which is why it seems so broad to you. When I say "death metal" for example, I'm talking about types of riffs, song structures, etc. Sure, genres are tied to historical periods, but it doesn't make the time period a genre.

Also pentatonicism as you defined it refers to a five not pattern you can find within some types of music, it is about observing factual and objective structures within the music. But when talking about white metal, christian rock, viking metal, etc, these are just lyrical themes. It can't work retroactively since it's highly subjective and purely based on "Does this band has enough or not enough "viking" elements in their music?. I could do the same crap with just about any kind of lyrical theme... I could start this new "mystical death metal" crap and just lump anything that is somewhat mystical under this genre name, even if it has nothing to do with how the music is writen.

If the music exalts Jesus or some other Christian principle, then yes, absolutely.

Newly created genre: Mystical Metal
And here we have Lovecraft Metal
And this Occult Metal !!!

I just don't think it works. I get what you mean, I really do. I just don't think that the lyrical themes can be used to define a genre, except of course if the whole genre was created around those these and that a totally new sound was developed by a few bands who had these elements at the core of their music and that it did influence the way the genre was first structured. But for things like christian rock, it just isn't the case. It's basically rock with lyrics about Jesus.

You can use christian as an adjective to place in front of the genre, though. And that's perfectly fine. But the "christian" in christian rock doesn't hold the same place as the "death" in death metal.

If you can't answer in a few sentences with clear concrete compositional and/or textural/instrumental, that illustrate the differences, then it should not be too difficult to see why many cannot discretely hear the disparities between hard rock and metal.

I tried to explain earlier that even if, let's say black metal and power metal don't have much in common, you can easily retrace the roots of both genre. Black came from thrash, that came from heavy. And Power came from heavy. So both are completely different, but you can trace the metal roots. When it comes to Nu-metal what are the metal roots? What did it evolve from?

THIS is metal music.

At 4/25/14 04:28 PM, HeavenDuff wrote:

When it comes to Nu-metal what are the metal roots? What did it evolve from?

Nu-metal actually comes from thrash metal, grunge, and hardcore. Now I'm not saying I like nu-metal, but people should actually understand that it was the natural direction metal was taking in the 90's, because of grunge.

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At 4/25/14 05:56 PM, DrWhoopass wrote: Nu-metal actually comes from thrash metal, grunge, and hardcore. Now I'm not saying I like nu-metal, but people should actually understand that it was the natural direction metal was taking in the 90's, because of grunge.

Do you have good examples of thrash metal riffs in nu-metal music? Because I see the hardcore, I see the grunge (bad grunge, though), but not much when it comes to thrash.

At 4/27/14 04:56 PM, HeavenDuff wrote:

At 4/25/14 05:56 PM, DrWhoopass wrote: Nu-metal actually comes from thrash metal, grunge, and hardcore. Now I'm not saying I like nu-metal, but people should actually understand that it was the natural direction metal was taking in the 90's, because of grunge.

Do you have good examples of thrash metal riffs in nu-metal music? Because I see the hardcore, I see the grunge (bad grunge, though), but not much when it comes to thrash.

If you see the hardcore, then you're also seeing the thrash. Thrash is just a hybrid of metal and hardcore so by saying both thrash and hardcore spawned nu metal, I was being somewhat redundant. I just get annoyed at those people who complain that nu-metal and metalcore aren't metal, even though it's quite obvious that it is.

Metal is just Heavy Blues.

At 5/5/14 12:40 AM, Viper wrote:

At 5/3/14 10:05 AM, DrWhoopass wrote: Thrash is just a hybrid of metal and hardcore

I couldn't stop reading this one part of what you said.
For starters no it is not. Thrash is a faster more aggressive version of Metal. And second it has been around since the early or mid 70s. It's creation is generally attributed to either Queen or Black Sabbath (depending on who you ask). The songs in question for those would be either Stone Cold Crazy or Symptom Of The Universe.

Fun Fact: Symptom Of The Universe is not only one of the first Thrash Metal songs, it is also considered the first Prog. Metal song.

Let me elaborate:
Thrash metal came about in the early 80's as a combination of Speed Metal/NWOBHM and Hardcore. Speed Metal is what you are thinking of that came about in the mid 70's, through bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. The aggression that you see in Thrash Metal comes from Hardcore.