I mean... of course there's Metallica, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Rage Against The Machine etc. Who got some exposure on mtv and even a little on the pop charts.

By mainstream i mean crossing over to the top 40 pop charts with multiple hits. Metallica is the only metal band to ever have a top 10 hit.

Do you think any metal band could break through like that? have multiple hits and appeal to a pop audience? while still being heavy?

in the 80s many metal bands had big hits but those songs were either power balads or rock songs with pop hooks.

No, not a regular metal group. "Hair Metal" was more female friendly as it has a pop element to it, that's why it crossed over to the Top 40. But many regular metal fans did not like hair metal and put it down, especially the makeup and fashions and that it appealed to women. The audience for straight metal & thrash has a more male audience. An act cannot have big Top 40 hits without appealing to a large female audience or a multi-ethnic one. It doesn't help that metalheads are usually white males who talk about how one guitar player can play an arpeggio faster than another. In pop the focus is the singer and metal the guitar player. How many female fronted metal bands do you see? Not many, and ones that are all female is even less and they're not given the same attention. The "Dungeon & Dragons" & Nordic type lyrics have limited appeal to a mainstream audience as well and so does songs about demons. Metal has testosterone appeal like action movies are more male and "chick flicks" has less appeal to a "macho" audience. Remember it was the rock & metal fans who started the "disco sucks" campaign. With today's Top 40 audience, I don't even see hair metal having much appeal.

Guns, how old are you?

duccichucka said:

Guns, how old are you?

23.

MickyDolenz said:

No, not a regular metal group. "Hair Metal" was more female friendly as it has a pop element to it, that's why it crossed over to the Top 40. But many regular metal fans did not like hair metal and put it down, especially the makeup and fashions and that it appealed to women. The audience for straight metal & thrash has a more male audience. An act cannot have big Top 40 hits without appealing to a large female audience or a multi-ethnic one. It doesn't help that metalheads are usually white males who talk about how one guitar player can play an arpeggio faster than another. In pop the focus is the singer and metal the guitar player. How many female fronted metal bands do you see? Not many, and ones that are all female is even less and they're not given the same attention. The "Dungeon & Dragons" & Nordic type lyrics have limited appeal to a mainstream audience as well and so does songs about demons. Metal has testosterone appeal like action movies are more male and "chick flicks" has less appeal to a "macho" audience. Remember it was the rock & metal fans who started the "disco sucks" campaign. With today's Top 40 audience, I don't even see hair metal having much appeal.

I always saw Hair Metal as just 80's glam rock. The songs were never that heavy... in my personal opinion anyways.

Metallica managed to get some top 40 hits... while still being heavy. I'm still trying ot figure out how that happened. Sandman was their first top 40 hit... and it's pretty heavy! the ballads i can understand.

Gunsnhalen said:

The songs were never that heavy... in my personal opinion anyways.

Metallica managed to get some top 40 hits... while still being heavy. I'm still trying ot figure out how that happened. Sandman was their first top 40 hit... and it's pretty heavy! the ballads i can understand.

This is why hair metal got pop airplay. The heavier music had less mainstream or female appeal. Some of the harder rock got airplay on the old AOR format, which had a larger male audience. It's like punk rock was not popular in the US and didn't get Top 40 airplay as it had little in common with the disco, light rock, and arena rock that was big at the time. After disco "died", there was a lot of Christopher Cross/Melissa Manchester type music on Top 40. So metal wouldn't fit with that. Hair metal is a pop version of metal like Billy Ocean & Lionel Richie were a pop version of R&B.

.

MTV is really what helped hair metal get on the Top 40 playlists, just like it helped synth pop like Human League & Duran Duran and the soft rock & adult contemporary acts like Air Supply lost popularity around 1983. MTV didn't play that much regular metal. Sheena Easton was doing AC at the beginning, then changed to a more dancable sound in the mid 80s. With rap, Young MC, MC Hammer, Tone Loc, & Vanilla Ice got pop airplay but EPMD & Ice T didn't. "Smooth jazz" has a broader appeal than plain jazz. The earlier Black Eyed Peas stuff with Kim Hill was not really Top 40 friendly, but with the later stuff with Fergie, they became really popular. With Metallica, I remember the metalheads were saying they "sold out" with the Black Album. So it must have been less heavy than the earlier stuff. The stuff that is more watered down is generally what becomes a hit on Top 40. That's why this is called "crossover". It has to appeal to a mainstream audience, not a niche one.

Angst rock will never be mainstream without a pop element to soften it.. Most people just don't want to hear some guy screaming on the mic. Its not pleasant or appealing. In order to have a pop-level successful career, YOU HAVE TO SING AND SING MELODICALLY. That's why Metallica is successful but bands like Cannibal Corpse stay niche. Only certain people want to hear that type of..."emoting", if you will.

80s metal was popular for the reasons MickeyDolenz described. Add to that, inconsistent beats and tempo changes make it hard to find a groove to. That's why hybrid bands like NIN have found success. Trent Reznor caught on early to the fact that rhythm and danceability made songs more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Reznor is still doing arena tours because of this.

In the 80s, bands like The Scorpions rode the line between almost crossing over and still being acceptable metal. Nowadays, metal has so many labels, if a metal band were to cross over, they would be separated into a "pop meta" category and would be deemed "no longer metal" because so many rockers want to be anti-establishment and come off as rebels that the mere suggestion of pop success makes their blood boil. Metal is niche music because it wants to be in the way that a lot of jazz and classical music is niche because they believe the music is "higher mind" music and most people can't understand it.

[Edited 7/10/14 7:50am]

The new Mastodon "Once More 'Round the Sun" is fucking brilliant. I think with the proper exposure it could be a mainstream success.

BlaqueKnight said:

Angst rock will never be mainstream without a pop element to soften it.. Most people just don't want to hear some guy screaming on the mic. Its not pleasant or appealing. In order to have a pop-level successful career, YOU HAVE TO SING AND SING MELODICALLY. That's why Metallica is successful but bands like Cannibal Corpse stay niche. Only certain people want to hear that type of..."emoting", if you will.

80s metal was popular for the reasons MickeyDolenz described. Add to that, inconsistent beats and tempo changes make it hard to find a groove to. That's why hybrid bands like NIN have found success. Trent Reznor caught on early to the fact that rhythm and danceability made songs more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Reznor is still doing arena tours because of this.

In the 80s, bands like The Scorpions rode the line between almost crossing over and still being acceptable metal. Nowadays, metal has so many labels, if a metal band were to cross over, they would be separated into a "pop meta" category and would be deemed "no longer metal" because so many rockers want to be anti-establishment and come off as rebels that the mere suggestion of pop success makes their blood boil. Metal is niche music because it wants to be in the way that a lot of jazz and classical music is niche because they believe the music is "higher mind" music and most people can't understand it.

[Edited 7/10/14 7:50am]

Granted, when I was growing up, Led Zeppelin was considered metal, but then again a lot of bands we would consider hard rock were listed as metal bands. Judas Priest and Iron Maiden were classic metal bands of their time, but so were Kiss, AC/DC, Van Halen, and Def Leppard. Metal itself didn't branch out into subgenres until the mid-1980's, when you had hair metal, speedier metal like Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, etc., and death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse and Deicide. Even then you had bands like Ministry and Rammstein which fused metal with electronic music which Trent Reznor/NIN sort of perfected. Then again, rock music has been so watered down these days that anything remotely hard and edgy might be classified as hard rock or metal.

[Edited 7/11/14 17:08pm]

BlaqueKnight said:

Angst rock will never be mainstream without a pop element to soften it.. Most people just don't want to hear some guy screaming on the mic. Its not pleasant or appealing. In order to have a pop-level successful career, YOU HAVE TO SING AND SING MELODICALLY. That's why Metallica is successful but bands like Cannibal Corpse stay niche. Only certain people want to hear that type of..."emoting", if you will.

80s metal was popular for the reasons MickeyDolenz described. Add to that, inconsistent beats and tempo changes make it hard to find a groove to. That's why hybrid bands like NIN have found success. Trent Reznor caught on early to the fact that rhythm and danceability made songs more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Reznor is still doing arena tours because of this.

In the 80s, bands like The Scorpions rode the line between almost crossing over and still being acceptable metal. Nowadays, metal has so many labels, if a metal band were to cross over, they would be separated into a "pop meta" category and would be deemed "no longer metal" because so many rockers want to be anti-establishment and come off as rebels that the mere suggestion of pop success makes their blood boil. Metal is niche music because it wants to be in the way that a lot of jazz and classical music is niche because they believe the music is "higher mind" music and most people can't understand it.

[Edited 7/10/14 7:50am]

This is pretty true actually. I never noticed... but jazz was never ''top 40 mainstream'' either huh? i mean it was known! and there have been songs with jazz influence on the radio. But... like Davis and Coltrane were never on the top 40 or anything. I never thought about that...

Gunsnhalen said:

This is pretty true actually. I never noticed... but jazz was never ''top 40 mainstream'' either huh? i mean it was known! and there have been songs with jazz influence on the radio. But... like Davis and Coltrane were never on the top 40 or anything. I never thought about that...

Jazz was pop music during the big band swing jazz era. People danced to it. Louis Armstrong was one of the first "pop stars". Jazz bands would appear in Hollywood movies of the time like Count Basie. But when bop came around not so much. Can't dance to it. Jazz vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Day, etc were popular in the 1940s to maybe the early 1960's. There were a few exceptions later on like Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass, George Benson, & Kenny G. But George didn't really get pop airplay until he started singing regularly, it wasn't for his instrumentals so much. They could be considered more "smooth jazz" though. George's earlier stuff was straight jazz though. The smooth jazz/soul jazz didn't really get that much pop airplay, as Top 40 tends to avoid instrumental music, but some like Grover Washington Jr., The Blackbyrds, & The Crusaders did get airplay on R&B stations as they had some funk in their music.

You could maybe have a revival of pop-metal after a few more years of this synthetic/ autotune thing becoming oppressive, people will want a break from that. It would probably resemble Def Leppard more than Cannibal Corpse. But I think it's possible.

Steven Hyden at Grantland did an essay about the death of pop-metal and one thing that gets brought up is, the metal community is more resistant to pop influence now, it's the music of the "enemy". So pop metal bands are not likely to get any support from true metalheads, where 80s crossover bands like Dokken were more accepted. Any band coming up from the underground that displays a pop influence is unlikely to be taken seriously. Whereas Van Halen was easy for metal people of the early 80s to like.

terrible, just terrible

we all know what happens when metal bands turn mainstream (Turbo-Judas Priest, Load/Reload-Metallica, Risk-Megadeth, ColdLake-Celtic Frost, etc, OR the entire late'80s glam/hair-metal shit that polluted the waves-and metal as a whole-for 4-5 nightmarish years...)

horrible results

the mainstream must adapt to metal, not the other way around; true classic albums of metal (Back in Black, Number of the Beast, And Justice for All, etc) got platinum status because of the quality, not the hooks or the video-singles

[Edited 7/11/14 16:07pm]

I don't agree. Voivod albums are just as high quality as AC/DC albums, maybe even higher. But they do not appeal to lots of people and never will.

I predict Babymetal will be the next pop-metal crossover act. At least, I hope so!

JoeTyler said:

terrible, just terrible

we all know what happens when metal bands turn mainstream (Turbo-Judas Priest, Load/Reload-Metallica, Risk-Megadeth, ColdLake-Celtic Frost, etc, OR the entire late'80s glam/hair-metal shit that polluted the waves-and metal as a whole-for 4-5 nightmarish years...)

horrible results

the mainstream must adapt to metal, not the other way around; true classic albums of metal (Back in Black, Number of the Beast, And Justice for All, etc) got platinum status because of the quality, not the hooks or the video-singles

[Edited 7/11/14 16:07pm]

I have to highly disagree with that Joe. You have to think of the larger scope of thos bands. Number of The Beast. Run To The Hills, Hells Bells, Shook Me All Night Long, Shoot To Thrill. VERY catchy choruses that many people now. Even people i know hwo hate metal like those songs. Shook Me is pretty much a pop song. A lot of Maiden, Priest, Metallica etc. Have some pretty catchy chrouses and helped them get bigger.

Plus Maiden was having top 20 hits in the UK and Europe.

Gunsnhalen said:

JoeTyler said:

terrible, just terrible

we all know what happens when metal bands turn mainstream (Turbo-Judas Priest, Load/Reload-Metallica, Risk-Megadeth, ColdLake-Celtic Frost, etc, OR the entire late'80s glam/hair-metal shit that polluted the waves-and metal as a whole-for 4-5 nightmarish years...)

horrible results

the mainstream must adapt to metal, not the other way around; true classic albums of metal (Back in Black, Number of the Beast, And Justice for All, etc) got platinum status because of the quality, not the hooks or the video-singles

[Edited 7/11/14 16:07pm]

I have to highly disagree with that Joe. You have to think of the larger scope of thos bands. Number of The Beast. Run To The Hills, Hells Bells, Shook Me All Night Long, Shoot To Thrill. VERY catchy choruses that many people now. Even people i know hwo hate metal like those songs. Shook Me is pretty much a pop song. A lot of Maiden, Priest, Metallica etc. Have some pretty catchy chrouses and helped them get bigger.

Plus Maiden was having top 20 hits in the UK and Europe.

well, metal has been crafting good choruses since Sabbath, so...

and, I don't necessarily think that "well crafted chorus = mainstream", I know I said "hook", but a hook can be more than just a chorus

for me, mainstream means "trendy sound at that time / minimal musical talent / bland-safe-mundane lyrics / promotional campaign overkill"

[Edited 7/11/14 19:12pm]

bobzilla77 said:

You could maybe have a revival of pop-metal after a few more years of this synthetic/ autotune thing becoming oppressive, people will want a break from that. It would probably resemble Def Leppard more than Cannibal Corpse. But I think it's possible.

Steven Hyden at Grantland did an essay about the death of pop-metal and one thing that gets brought up is, the metal community is more resistant to pop influence now, it's the music of the "enemy". So pop metal bands are not likely to get any support from true metalheads, where 80s crossover bands like Dokken were more accepted. Any band coming up from the underground that displays a pop influence is unlikely to be taken seriously. Whereas Van Halen was easy for metal people of the early 80s to like.

true

in my opinion Toni Iommi is probably THE only non-extreme metal musician who has always tried and/or downright managed to stay as far away from the mainstream as humanly possible, while always being successful to some degree, even during his mid'80s crisis...

this is probably the ONLY mainstream song he ever did (and yes, it does sound bad)

then Steve Harris/Dave Murray from Iron Maiden