

Explain that they will take on the role of music journalists from the early 1970s.

Common Core: Students will work collaboratively with a partner to write a music review that will include citations to supporting evidence from the Viewing Stations studied in class (CCSS Writing 1 CCSS Writing 8 CCSS Speaking and Listening 1).Common Core: Students will evaluate and analyze texts, photos, videos and music and summarize key details (CCCS Reading 2 CCSS Reading 7 CCSS Speaking and Listening 2).Trace musical expression to the specific historical and social context from which it emerged.Develop listening skills by comparing and contrasting different musical genres and artists.Investigate the musical, social, and historical origins of Heavy Metal music.The contributions of early Heavy Metal bands including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Blue Cheer.


While taking cues from Hard Rock, Metal took its musical ideas into new territory, where an emphasis on volume and distortion came to represent a vision of power that resonated deeply with Metal’s overwhelmingly male fan base. To compensate for his injured fingers, Iommi loosened the strings, resulting in a darker sound.) (It could be said that the factory life influenced the musical sound of Heavy Metal as well as its general tone: Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi’s thick, grungy sound was the result of a factory accident in which a machine sliced off the tips of two fingers on his right hand. Musically, Heavy Metal has deep roots in the Hard Rock of the 1960s, and by extension in the Blues, as filtered through the work of early Rock musicians such as Link Wray and The Kinks, as well as later bands such as Led Zeppelin and Cream. But over time, Heavy Metal evolved into a musical movement that embraced escapism and fantasy in a way that Punk did not. Metal in Britain grew out of the same conditions as Punk speaking in a simlarly anti-establishment voice, both could be considered a form of protest music. dead end, working-class factory life of the industrial Midlands.”Īs have many other forms of Rock and Roll, Heavy Metal reflected the mood of disenfranchised youth on the margins of society. Cope writes in Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music, “One cannot dismiss simply as coincidence that the dark, angry and serious forms of music evident in the early work of Black Sabbath seem to correlate to the. This period of economic decline continued into the late 70s and early 80s, marked by inflation, labor strikes, and general economic decline.īlack Sabbath, arguably the first Heavy Metal band, sprang from Birmingham and gave voice to this experience of desolation. In the early 1970s, the economic growth that Britain had seen after World War II began to slow, and unemployment started to rise. In the late 1960s, the British industrial city Birmingham was a blue-collar factory town with limited options for young people.
