This is the 2nd Edition of a popular series of posts I wrote last year and early into this year. I enjoyed making the posts and people enjoyed them. I am going to repost these, but they will not be complete reposts. I will also add to them based upon comments from the original posts and will also add potentially new information I can find. I may add some more branches to the tree as well. These will all be under the tags #metaltree, #metal, #music, #history, #anthropology
I wrote a post on documentaries the other day about metal. One of the documentaries I covered in the most depth was Metal Evolution by Banger Films and Sam Dunn. It only had that one season and then was done.
During the series it keeps showing a very colorful chart, or family tree if you will of many sub-genres of Heavy Metal music. It had many band names listed, and it gave hope for a lot of cool future episodes of Metal Evolution. That never happened. In addition, the episodes that do focus on some of those nodes of the tree only touch upon some of the bands listed.
I have decided I am going to do my own series where I go through each of the nodes on that tree and perhaps some nodes from trees made by other people on the internet. I would like to explore Heavy Metal and it's sub-genres and make a Metal Tree.
I suspect it will take me quite awhile to get through this tree. I will post no more than one such post per day, and I will likely skip some days occasionally. I will most likely not make posts of this nature on the weekends, but I may change my mind depending upon where the inspiration takes me. I will tag these posts with the tag #metaltree .
#metaltree
I will also steer you towards the works of people like Sam Dunn, and other artists. I fully expect to learn a lot during this process as well as there were many things on Sam's chart that I was unfamiliar with.
I know not all of my followers are into metal. This is another reason I am limiting myself to a single such post per day. That will leave me up to 3 other posts that I can use to write about other things.
Banger Films does have a poster version of their Metal Evolution Family Tree for sale on their website for $100. That's pretty expensive, but it is out there if any of you are die hard collectors and are up to it.
Links To Original Posts In this Series
If you don't want to wait for my 2nd edition version. Here are links to all the previous posts on the 1st Edition of this series.
- Episode 2 - Before there was heavy metal
- Episode 3 - The roots and rise of heavy metal in the United States
- Episode 4 - The roots and rise of heavy metal in the UK and Australia
- Episode 5 - Taking a parallel path... Progressive Rock while not always metal was influential
- Episode 6 - We don't need your technical eliteism!!! Original Punk Rock blasts onto the scene
- Episode 7 - Gasps from the audience... Did they just do that? This is Shock Rock.
- Episode 8 - With punk a force metal was dying, or was it? Enter the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (aka NWOBHM)
- Episode 9 - You can have your Game of Thrones and Metal at the same time... it does the mind good.
- Episode 10 - Wow... That singer is a beautiful woman... Dude, that's a guy! Glam Metal
- Episode 11 - Did I just hear that? What is this? I've never heard anything this intense... Thrash Metal
- Episode 12 - Punk gets harder, and embraces more distortion, still not caring about prowess... Hardcore
- Episode 13 - Practice, Skill, a little of this, a little of that, and add distortion. Progressive Metal
- Episode 14 - Too much hair, too much technical, you're losing touch with the soul... Grunge Rock
- Episode 15 - Evil is fun... Evil sells... Horror sells... or so thinks the First Wave of Black Metal
- Episode 16 - Jesus built my hotrod... sometimes called just Industrial... on some charts Industrial Metal
- Episode 17 - Do you hear that? The drums in the deep... are we in Mordor? No that's just the DOOM METAL
- Episode 18 - The growl that rumbles... the gutteral sounds... battlefield scavengers... DEATH METAL
- Episode 19 - Go ahead... see if you can resist the urge to mosh... Metalcore
- Episode 20 - Not quite this... not quite that... but often quite heavy... Hard Alternative
- Episode 21 - How black can black get... black days, black thoughts, black actions... Black Metal
- Episode 22 - Grunge the gift that keeps giving... another sub-genre of Metal is called Post Grunge
- Episode 23 - Metal shards fly as the grinder spins... moshers slam into each other... this is Grindcore
- Episode 24 - A New Generation with a new approach to Metal results in... Nu Metal
- Episode 25 - A mixture of haunting vocal stylings male, and female... good orchestration... Gothic Metal
- Episode 26 - Metal keeps going and in the Metal Tree there is a New Wave of American Heavy Metal
- Episode 27 - Swedish Extreme Metal might be where the chart that inspired this ends... but this is not the end
- Episode 28 - Neoclassical Metal is a style of music people will often say "that's not metal".. What else is new?
- Episode 29 - Hey Djinni is pronounced genie... Oh, okay well Djent is pronounced Jent... Metal - Djent
- Episode 30 - Metal Tree - The Summation of my Metal Genealogical journey.... it spanned many episodes