G’n’R isn’t heavy metal.
Dingdingding. GnR falls cleanly into Hair Metal, AFAIK, which, despite the name, is not an offshoot of the metal supergenre. Furthermore, your view on “heavy metal” (if it’s popular it’s more likely Nu Metal (Slipknot, Disturbed), if it’s truely gruesome it’s probably Death Metal (Behemoth, Death), if it’s offensively lo-fi it’s probably Black Metal (Burzum, early Dimmu Borgir), if it’s full of screeching, squeeling, and incredibly out-of-place breakdowns it’s probably metalcore (suicide silence, BFMV, Heaven Shall Burn)… pure heavy metal has not been very big lately) is incredibly limited, and you are exactly the kind of person the OP is dealing with. It’s not the music’s fault. The music is designed to be raw and grating–it helps create a very powerful atmosphere, and unfortunately will turn the uninitiated listener right off, in the same way that a 15-year-old girl who likes Kesha or Bieber might not grasp the significance/atmosphere behind Stairway To Heaven, Freebird, or virtually anything off of Srg. Pepper’s.
Is Guns N Roses hair metal? I just consider them bog standard hard rock. They’re not usually lopped in with the other typical hair metal bands, in my experience.
I’d say G’n’R was influenced more by the Rolling Stones than anyone else. They were always just a rock band to me (and a damn good one at that).
Fair enough, as said, I wasn’t sure. I just knew for a fact that those guys are not metal. The closest thing they have ever brought out to Metal was Welcome To The Jungle, and even that is less “metal” than most of the good Deep Purple I’ve heard.
To follow up my earlier post, I shot the School of Rock “Iron Maiden vs Judas Priest” show earlier today. (They had t-shirts that had it as “Maiden vs Priest” which I thought was a Victorian erotica genre).
The setlist:
Hellion/Electric Eye
Wrathchild
Metal Gods
Judas Rising
22
Beyond The Realms of Death
Trooper
Green Manalishi
Aces High
Two Minutes
Headed Out To The Highway
United
Iron Maiden
Hell Bent For Leather
Run To The Hills
Breaking The Law
Flight of Icarus
Hallowed Be Thy Name
Pain Killer
I’ll post clips in the next few days. There was some very tight playing, and the singing was really outstanding.
Appetite for Destruction was definitely a metal record. If you want to exclude anything that doesn’t have chugging guitars from heavy metal, you’ll be missing out on an awful lot of music, including half of Judas Priest’s discography.
It’s true that the rest of their ouevre was probably closer to hard rock than heavy metal, but Guns n’ Roses were definitely a metal band. At least for a while.
I can’t stand metal especially on Karaokee night until I sing this one. Maybe it’s
because Drowning Pool is an American alternative metal group.
And nobody sings it louder than me.
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Beaten why for
Can’t take much more
Here we go…Here we go…Here we go
One - Nothing wrong with me
Two - Nothing wrong with me
Three - Nothing wrong with me
Four - Nothing wrong with me
Damn, I forgot KISS because I thought they were rock.
Lick it up, lick it up, oh, oh, oh.
Lick it up, lick it up, oh, oh, oh
and AC/DC who had some of the biggest metal hits of the 20th Century
and the place goes nuts when I sing Highway to Hell and TNT.
Highway to hell, highway to hell, I’m on the highway to hell.
No stop signs, speed limits, nothings gonna slow me down
And my friends are going to be there too and Im going all the
way down
This seems to miss an awful lot of albums. I wouldn’t even put A for D all that high on the list of influential metal. Paranoid, Master of Puppets, and Highway to Hell are all IMO better albums. Further, just as (as has been already pointed out), there are bands today that are still turning to Black Sabbath for inspiration, Master of Puppets has its followers in later day speed metal, and a quick listen to Jet shows clear signs of the influence of early AC/DC. I think that the disparaged Cookie Monster vocals probably owe an ultimate debt to Motorhead, so let’s throw Ace of Spades on there as well.
All this and avoiding the “does Led Zeppelin count as heavy metal” question. (The answer is yes.)
As for whether or not GNR count as metal, I’d point out that the majority of bands fall into more than one style category. All Music lists GNR’s styles as Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, and Album Rock, which sounds about right.
No.
For those insisting that all metal is about swords and sorcery, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands:
If the outro doesn’t move you, then you have no soul.
ETA: Yes, they rhymed “you” with “you” and “test” with “test”. I don’t care. It’s still a hauntingly beautiful song.
Katatonia fucking rules!
I never get tired of Soil’s Song!
And talk about a band who’s sound has evolved over the years! They don’t even bear a passing resemblance to the way they sounded on their first album: In Silence Enshrined from Dance of December Souls (1993).
I’m glad somebody else said this, because it needed to be said. There’s nothing wrong with not liking metal, it’s not for everyone, but it is a legitimate genre of music, and describing it as “god-awful, terrible noise that is supposed to have the deep themes that only a few distressed souls can understand” is utterly missing the point of this thread. To say that is like saying rap is just stringing together rhymes about killing people and banging chicks that only thugs can understand, or that all electronic music is just a repetitive synth melody over a pounding beat that only druggies and nerds can appreciate.
Sure, some subgenres, especially Death Metal, Black Metal, Doom, and Grindcore are pretty inaccessible, but if you like the sound of Guns and Roses, there’s literally hundreds of metal bands that attribute influence to them and it’s fairly obvious when listening to many of them. Hell, a number of my favorite bands attribute significant chunks of their influence to non-metal bands, and yet they’re all over the spectrum from progressive to death metal.
Regardless, I think the point is that it is as legitimate a music genre as any other and far more diverse than the few commercially successful bands today would lead most people to believe.
Also, Katatonia is definitely awesome. And they’re a fantastic example of the type of powerful lyrics that metal can have. Here’s a couple of my favorites off the top of my head.
From Evidence, well frankly the whole song, but I find the chorus moves me more than the outro:
“Be still for a moment
Everything depends upon you
If you die I will die too
Once we were heroes
But everything has changed since then
Now they recognize you too”
Or from Departer:
“Brother
In your eyes I was the stronger
So how am I to cover you now
Without shadowing your path
This time
I watch from the sidelines
Your ghost in the limelight
Face your fears
And pierce the night”
For me, “inaccessible” when applied to music or another art form has always been synonymous with “crappy”.
And your point is…? 
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Now that’s just poor reasoning. Apply it to everyone and all of a sudden all music that isn’t incredibly simply and lousy pop and country is “crappy”, and what’s left is crap by its own merits. Inaccessible is very, very different to “crappy”. In one case it’s the material’s fault. In the other, it’s the listener’s fault. In short: you are crappy.
That definition does make the “artist” feel better when nobody buys his stuff or attends his events.
Bach was more or less inaccessible to the people of his time. He was almost completely forgotten until the orchestras of the classic era took up his material. Does that make him crappy?
Most jazz is completely inapproachable for modern teens. They don’t understand the music at all, or think it primitive compared to more modern music. Does that make the works of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and their ilk worthless?
Many people, both nowadays and in the past, fail or failed completely to grasp the meaning of a genre of music. Now, sometimes it’s just crap. I’ll admit that. But when you have fans extolling the virtues, and explaining not only why they like it, but why you might not like it, it’s a good sign that the problem is not the music… It’s you.
Oh yes, the classic, “You just don’t get it, man!” argument. Always a winner.