I don't know about you guys, but I love heavy metal. I get many weird looks whenever I say that but I don't really know how to care. Today I'm going to give a run though of the history of heavy metal. We'll start with the origins. In order to do this, we need to go way back. I'm talking a couple centuries back. All the way back to the Renaissance.

Back then there was a lovely little musical interval called the tritone. This little progression, to the church, sounded evil basically. It was the dissonance created by it didn't sound natural to them, and they thought it was demonic and evil in nature. So the church did what they always do and they banned that shit. Save this bit of information. You'll need it later.

Fast forward a few hundred more years and we get negro spirituals. I always giggle when I say that out loud. Anyway, negro spirituals, as we all know, were song sung by slaves as, essentially, a relief for the constant misery. They were about the possibility of freedom, hope in a better future, and all that jazz. This style became the root of blues music, which dealt with the aforementioned ideas as well as matters of the heart. White folks naturally started calling it the devil's music. And do you know why? It wasn't because it was being made by black people. Its because the blues makes heavy use of the tritone. When you thing of the blues, the first thing that comes into your head is that signature blues riff. That's the tritone. So we have a style of music that makes explicit use of an interval that has been associated with the devil. Not good.

You can already see how this ties into heavy metal. The first handful of pioneer "metal" bands, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, Deep Purple and shit, they were all explicitly influenced by blues music. I think Black Sabbath early in their career called themselves heavy blues. All of the characteristics are there. The tritone, which is why metal was considered demonic as well, the lyrics that focus on the less than positive sides of life, and generally being more technical than other styles. It was like blues 2.0. The blues influence can still be heard today in bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Stone Sour. Somewhere along the line bands started taking more influence from classical music, but the blues is definitely still there. If not in the instrumentation or song structure, then definitely in the lyrics.

And that is a brief history of heavy metal. The next time someones says you shouldn't like metal because you're black, just tell them its technically still a black art form.