Heavy metal is a form of music characterized by aggressive, driving rhythms and highly amplified distorted guitars, generally with grandiose lyrics and virtuosic instrumentation. Heavy metal is a development of blues, blues rock, rock and prog rock. Its origins lie in the British hard rock bands who between 1967 and 1974 took blues and rock and created a hybrid with a heavy, guitar-and-drums-centered sound. Most of the pioneers in the field, like Black Sabbath, were English, though many were inspired by American performers like Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix.

In the early 1970s, the first major American bands began appearing, like Blue Öyster Cult and Aerosmith, and musicians like Eddie Van Halen began their career. Heavy metal remained, however, a largely underground phenomenon. During the 1980s, a pop-based form of hard rock, with a party-hearty spirit and a glam-influenced visual aesthetic (sometimes referred to as "hair metal") dominated the music charts, led by superstars like Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt. The 1987 debut of Guns N' Roses, a hard rock band whose image reflected the grittier underbelly of the Sunset Strip, was at least in part a reaction against the overly polished image of hair metal, but that band's wild success was in many ways the last gasp of the hard-rock and metal scene. By the mid-1980s, as the term "heavy metal" became the subject of much contestation, the style had branched out in so many different directions that new classifications were created by fans, record companies, and fanzines, although sometimes the differences between various subgenres were unclear, even to the artists purportedly belonging to a given style. The most notable of the 1980s metal subgenres in the United States was the swift and aggressive thrash metal style, pioneered by bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica,Slayer, Ludichrist, and Mucky Pup.

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1990s to the present

Perhaps the most important change in the 1990s in American popular music was the rise of alternative rock through the popularity of grunge. This was previously an explicitly anti-mainstream grouping of genres that rose to great fame beginning in the early 1990s. The genre in its early stages was largely situated on Sub Pop Records, a company founded by Bruce Pavitt and John Poneman. Significant grunge bands signed to the label were Green River (half of the members from this band would later become founding members of Pearl Jam), Sonic Youth (although not a grunge band they were influential on grunge bands and in fact it was upon the insistence of Kim Gordon that the David Geffen company signed Nirvana) and Nirvana. Grunge is an alternative rock subgenre with a "dark, brooding guitar-based sludge" sound ^[74], drawing on heavy metal, punk, and elements of bands like Sonic Youth and their use of "unconventional tunings to bend otherwise standard pop songs completely out of shape" ^[75]. With the addition of a "melodic, Beatlesque element" to the sound of bands like Nirvana, grunge became wildly popular across the United States ^[76]. Grunge became commercially successful in the early 1990s, peaking between 1991 and 1994. Bands from cities in the U.S. Pacific Northwest especially Seattle, Washington, were responsible for creating grunge and later made it popular with mainstream audiences. The supposed Generation X, who had just reached adulthood as grunge's popularity peaked, were closely associated with grunge, the sound which helped "define the desperation of (that) generation" ^[77]. Later Post Grunge bands such as The Foo Fighters and Creed became popular form of Alternative rock because it was and still is very radio friendly unlike the Grunge band of which they were musically influenced by. Pop Punk bands like GreenDay and Blink 182 also gained popularity.

Gangsta rap is a kind of hip hop, most importantly characterized by a lyrical focus on macho sexuality, physicality and a dangerous, criminal image. Though the origins of gangsta rap can be traced back to the mid-1980s raps of Philadelphia's Schoolly D and the West Coast's Ice-T, the style is usually said to have begun in the Los Angeles and Oakland area, where Too Short, NWA and others found their fame. This West Coast rap scene spawned the early 1990s G-funk sound, which paired gangsta rap lyrics with a thick and hazy tone, often relying on samples from 1970s P-funk; the best-known proponents of this sound were the breakthrough rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

By the end of the decade and into the early 2000s pop music consisted mostly of a combination of pop-hip hop and R&B-tinged pop, including a number of boy bands and female divas. The predominant sound in 90s country music was pop with only very limited elements of country. This includes many of the best-selling artists of the 1990s, like Clint Black, Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the first of these crossover stars, Garth Brooks ^[78].

[

International and social impact

American popular music has become extremely popular internationally. Rock, hip hop, jazz, country and other styles have fans across the globe. BBC Radio DJ Andy Kershaw, for example, has noted that country music is popular across virtually the entire world ^[79]. Indeed, out of "all the contributions made by Americans to world culture... (American popular music) has been taken (most) to heart by the entire world" ^[80]. Other styles of American popular music have also had a formative effect internationally, including funk, the basis for West African Afrobeat, R&B, a major source for Jamaican reggae, and rock, which has profoundly influenced most every genre of popular music worldwide. Rock, country, jazz and hip hop have become an entrenched part of many countries, leading to local varieties like Australian country music, Tanzanian Bongo Flava and Russian rock.

Rock has had a formative influence on popular music, which had the effect of transforming "the very concept of what popular music" is ^[81] while Charlie Gillett has argued that rock and roll "was the first popular genre to incorporate the relentless pulse and sheer volume of urban life into the music itself" ^[82].

The social impacts of American popular music have been felt both within the United States and in foreign countries. Beginning as early as the extravaganzas of the late 19th century, American popular music has been criticized for being too sexually titillating and for encouraging violence, drug abuse and generally immoral behavior. Criticisms have been especially targeted at African American styles of music as they began attracting white, generally youthful audiences; blues, jazz, rock and hip hop all fall into this category^[83]].

[

References

• ^  Nashville sound/Countrypolitan. Allmusic. Retrieved on 6 June, 2005.
• ^  Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) (1963). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-18474-X. , cited in Garofalo, pg. 76
• ^  Blush, Steven (2001). American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Feral House. ISBN 0-922915-71-7. 
• ^  Clarke, Donald (1995). The Rise and Fall of Popular Music. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-11573-3. 
• ^  Collins, Ace (1996). The Stories Behind Country Music's All-Time Greatest 100 Songs. Boulevard Books. ISBN 1-57297-072-3. 
• ^  Ewen, David (1957). Panorama of American Popular Music. Prentice Hall. 
• ^  Ferris, Jean (1993). America's Musical Landscape. Brown & Benchmark. ISBN 0-697-12516-5. 
• ^  Garofalo, Reebee (1997). Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA. Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0-205-13703-2. 
• ^  Gillett, Charlie (1970). The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. Outerbridge and Dienstfrey. ISBN 0-285-62619-1. ; cited in Garofalo
• ^  Jones, Alan and Jussi Kantonen (1999). Saturday Night Forever: The Story of Disco. A Cappella Books. ISBN 1-55652-411-0. 
• ^  Lipsitz, George (1982). Class and Culture in Cold War America. J. F. Bergin. ISBN 0-03-059207-0. , cited in Garofalo, pg. 95
• ^  Malone, Bill C. (1985). Country Music USA: Revised Edition. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-71096-8. ; cited in Garofalo
• ^  Marcus, Greil (June 24, 1993). "Is This the Woman Who Invented Rock and Roll?: The Deborah Chessler Story". Rolling Stone: 41. ; cited in Garofalo
• ^  Morales, Ed (2003). The Latin Beat. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81018-2. 
• ^  Palmer, Robert (April 19, 1990). "The Fifties". Rolling Stone: 48. ; cited in Garofalo, pg. 95
• ^  Hank Williams. PBS' American Masters. Retrieved on 6 June, 2005.
• ^  Miller, Jim (editor) (1976). The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. Rolling Stone Press/Random House. ISBN 0-394-73238-3.  (chapter on "Soul", by Guralnick, Peter, pgs. 194-197)
• ^  Ward, Ed, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker (1986). Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll. Rolling Stone Press. ISBN 0-671-54438-1. 
• ^  Broughton, Simon and Ellingham, Mark with McConnachie, James and Duane, Orla (Ed.) (2000). Rough Guide to World Music. Rough Guides Ltd, Penguin Books. ISBN 1-85828-636-0. 
• ^  Nashville Sound. Roughstock's History of Country Music. Retrieved on 6 June, 2005.
• ^  Sawyers, June Skinner (2000). Celtic Music: A Complete Guide. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81007-7. 
• ^  Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504043-0. , cited in Garofalo, pg. 26
• ^  Szatmary, David P (2000). Rockin' in Time: A Social History of Rock-And-Roll. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-188790-4. 
• ^  Werner, Craig (1998). A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. Plume. ISBN 0-452-28065-6. 

[

Notes

1. ^  Garofalo is an example of starting with Tin Pan Alley, in a chapter that also contains the coverage of ragtime
2. ^  Ewen is an example, covering national ballads and patriotic songs, folk music, songs of the Negro, minstrel show and its songs and extravaganza to vaudeville
3. ^  Ewen, pg. 69 Ewen claims Dan Emmett was a “popular-song composer”, then goes on another, and even more significant, was his contemporary, Stephen Foster -- America’s first major composer, and one of the world’s outstanding writers of songs.
4. ^  Clarke, pgs. 28-29 Clarke notes the song "Massa's in the Cold Ground" as a clear attempt to sentimentalize slavery, though he notes that many slaves must have loved their masters, on whom they depended for everything. Clarke also notes that songs like "Nelly Was a Lady" describe the black experience as ordinary human feelings; they are people as real as the characters in Shakespeare.
5. ^  Ewen, pg. 81 When Milly Cavendish stepped lightly in front of the footlights, wagged a provocative finger at the men in her audience, and sang in her high-pitched baby voice, “You Naughty, Naughty Men” -- by T. Kennick and G. Bicknell -- the American musical theater and the American popular song both started their long and active careers in sex exploitation.
6. ^  Ewen, pg. 94 Ewen claims Ne York was the music publishing center of the country by the 1890s, and says the ‘’publishers devised formulas by which songs could be produced with speed and dispatch... Songs were now to be produced from a serviceable matrix, and issued in large quantities: stereotypes for foreign songs, Negro songs, humorous ditties, and, most important of all, sentimental ballads.
7. ^  Ewen, pg. 101 Ewen is the source for both "Drill Ye Tarriers" and the nature of coon songs
8. ^  Ewen, pg. 101 and Clarke, pg. 62Ewen attributes "New Coon in Town" to Paul Allen, though Clarke attributes it to J. S. Putnam -- both agree on the year, 1883
9. ^  Clarke, pg. 95 Clarke dates the golden age as c. 1914-50
10. ^  Clarke, pgs. 56-57 Coon songs came out of minstrelsy, and were already established in vaudeville, when all this culminted in ragtime... ragtime may have begun with attempts to imitate the banjo on the keyboard.
11. ^  Ferris, pg. 228 Conceived as dance music, and long considered a kind of popular or vernacular music, jazz has become a sophisticated art form that has interacted in significant ways with the music of the concert hall.
12. ^  Clarke, pgs. 200-201 From 1935 until after the Second World War a jazz-oriented style was at the centre of popular music for the first time (and the last, so far), as opposed to merely giving it backbone.
13. ^  Garofalo, pg. 45 The ukulele and steel guitar were introduced to this country by the Hawaiian string bands that toured the country after Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900.
14. ^  Collins, pg. 11 In addition, Collins notes that early pseudo-country musicians like Vernon Dalhart who had made their name recording 'country music songs' were not from the hills and hollows or plains and valleys. These recording stars sang both rural music and city music, and most knew more about Broadway than they did about hillbillies. Their rural image was often manufactured for the moment and the dollar. In contrast, Collins later explains, both the Carter Family and Rodgers had rural folk credibility that helped make Peer's recording session such an influential success; it was the Carter Family that was Ralk Peer's tie to the hills and hollows, to lost loves and found faith, but it took Jimmie Rodgers to connect the publisher with some of country music's other beloved symbols -- trains and saloons, jail and the blues.
15. ^  Broughton, Viv and James Attlee. "Devil Stole the Beat" in the Rough Guide to World Music, Volume 2, pg. 569 Its seminal figure was a piano player and ex-blues musician by the name of Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), who began composing songs based on familiar spirituals and hymns fused to blues and jazz rhythms. (emphasis in original)
16. ^  Garofalo, pg. 72 The first pop vocalist to engender hysteria among his fans (rather than simple admiration or adoration) was an Italian American who refused to anglicize his name -- Frank Sinatra, the "Sultan of Swoon".
17. ^  Rolling Stone, pgs. 99-100 Ward, Stokes and Tucker call cover versions the ants at the increasingly sumptuous rhythm-and-blues picnic.
18. ^  Gillett, pg. 9, cited in Garofalo, pg. 74
19. ^  Szatmary, pgs. 69-70 Also a guitar enthusiast who had released a few undistinctive singles on his own label in 1960, Dale worked closely with Leo Fender, the manufacturer of the first mass-produced, solid-body electric guitar and the president of Fender Instruments, to improve the Showman amplifier and to develop the reverberation unit that would give surf music its distinctively fuzzy sound.
20. ^  Rolling Stone, pg. 251 Though the Beach Boys' instrumental sound was often painfully thin, the floating vocals, with the Four Freshman-ish harmonies riding over a droned, propulsive burden ("inside outside, U.S.A." in "Surfin' U.S.A."; "rah, rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah" in "Be True to Your School"} were rich, dense and unquestionably special.
21. ^  Garofalo, pg. 201 Garofalo specifically lists "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry, "Long Tall Sally" by Little Richard, "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers, "Money" by Barrett Strong, "Boys" and Baby It's You" by The Shirelles, "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and "Chains" by The Cookies.
22. ^  Garofalo, pg. 218 The Grateful Dead combined the anticommercial tendencies of white middle-class youth with the mind-altering properties of lyseric acid diethylamide (LSD).
23. ^  Garofalo, pg. 448 Garofalo describes a sampler called Sub Pop 200 as an early anthology of the dark, brooding guitar-based sludge that came to be known as grunge.
24. ^  Garofalo, pg. 451 From (Glenn Branca's) group they learned to use unconventional tunings to bend otherwise standard pop songs completely out of shape, a trademark of Sonic Youth that, in Seattle, resonated as well as the dark side of their musical vision.
25. ^  Szatmary, pg. 285 Recording the songs that would become Nevermind, Nirvana added a melodic, Beatlesque element, which had shaped Cobain, Novoselic, and new drummer Dave Grohl.
26. ^  Szatmary, pg. 284 Grunge, growing in the Seattle offices of the independent Sub Pop Records, combined hardcore and metal to top the charts and help define the desperation of a generation.; in context, this presumably refers to Generation X, though that term is not specifically used.
27. ^  Kershaw, pg. 167, from the Rough Guide to World Music, Part Two, "Our Life Is Precisely a Song", pg. 167 Kershaw specifically notes that North Korea was the only country in which he never heard country music
28. ^  Ewen, pg. 3 Of all the contributions made by Americans to world culture -- automation and the assembly line, advertising, innumerable devices and gadgets, skyscrapers, supersalesmen, baseball, ketchup and hot dogs and hamburrgers -- one, undeniably native has been taken to heart by the entire world. It is American popular music.
29. ^  Garofalo, pg. 94 Suffice it to say, lest we get lost in history, that the music that came to be called rock 'n' roll began in the 1950s as diverse and seldom heard segments of the population achieved a dominant voice in mainstream culture and transformed the very concept of what popular music was.
30. ^  Gillett, pg. i, quote from Garofalo, pg. 4 Garofalo quotes Gillett as Rock and Roll (sic) was perhaps the first form of popular culture to celebrate without reservation characteristics of city life that had been among the most criticized.

[

Further reading

• Bayles, Martha (1994). Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music. Free Press. ISBN 0-02-901962-1. 
• Booth, Mark W. (1983). American Popular Music: A Reference Guide. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-21305-4. 
• Ennis, Phillip H. (1992). The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6257-2. 
• Hamm, Charles (1979id=ISBN 0-393-01257-3). Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. W.W. Norton & Company. 
• Joseph, Mark (2003). Faith, God, and Rock + Roll: From Bono to Jars of Clay: How People of Faith Are Transforming American Popular Music. Baker Books. ISBN 0-8010-6500-3. 
• Joyner, David Lee (2002). American Popular Music. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-241424-3. 
• Kenney, William Howland (2003). Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517177-2. 
• Mahar, William J. (1998). Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06696-0. 
• Pratt, Ray (1994). Rhythm and Resistance: The Political Uses of American Popular Music. Smithsonian Books. ISBN 1-56098-351-5. 
• Rubin, Rachel and Jeffrey Melnick(eds.) (2001). American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-268-2. 
• Sanjek, Russell (1988). American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years: Volume III, from 1900 to 1984. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504311-1. 
• Scheurer, Timothy E. (ed) (1990). American Popular Music: Readings from the Popular Press: The Nineteenth Century and Tin Pan Alley. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. ISBN 0-87972-465-X. 
• Scheurer, Timothy E. (ed) (1990). American Popular Music Vol 2: The Age of Rock. Bowling Green University Popular Press. ISBN 0-87972-468-4. 
• Starr, Larry and Christopher Alan Waterman (2002). American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510854-X. 
• Vautier, Dominic (2000). Sex, Music & Bloomers: A Social History of American Popular Music. Abelard Press. ISBN 0-9677046-3-4. 
• Wilder, Alec (1990). American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-501445-6. 

[

See also

• Blackface
• American Idol
• Pop culture
• Christian pop culture

[

External links

• Center for Popular Music at the Middle Tennessee State University
• Database of popular songs in American history
• Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh

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