Metal provides the rock to rock and roll.

Rock to Rock n Roll

. It’s kind of like saying the word “macho” or “manly”. You’re sure to trigger a snicker or somebody would laugh out loud. You cannot really say in the United States, Western Europe, or any other public place, “I love rock and roll!” People would just turn and say, “What the fuck?! This guy just stepped out of a time machine from the 1950’s.”

This really is too bad because rock and roll was a real thing. It was a thing back in the 50’s and 60’s but after 1967, it changed. It became rock. And then it just mutated from there because that “rock” had a lot of other things put in front of it – glam rock, punk rock, art rock, and hard rock. Eventually, it got blown away and replaced by hardcore metal, grindcore.

In the 80’s rock basically broke apart. We’re talking about the underground scene. In the commercial and corporate side of things, rock was still alive because back then, it was a staple. It had to be alive by edict of recording companies.

But when it comes to the actual music scene, which is made up of teenagers playing in garage bands, touring little towns and playing in crowds of as few as 20 people or what basically amounted to beer money, rock pretty much died. And what replaced it was really the notion of “core”, which is a derivation of hardcore as in hardcore punk. So now we have death core, metal core, skank core, etcetera, etcetera.

You have to look at metals relationship to rock and roll from this perspective because the “roll” part of rock and roll is pretty much dead. And if we look at the “rock” portion and we flip it around to hardcore or “core” for short, metal really provided a lot of inspirational DNA to this projection.

Because death metal is really big in Scandinavia, horror core or Satanist core is still quite a force to contend with in certain parts of the world. But there are many other local variations of this and it really all boils down to what is there to rock? Where is the sense of urgency coming from?

A glimmer of this came in the late 1960’s with Black Sabbath. It was about scaring the parents. It was about giving the old folks or conservatives a scare because when you talk about Black Sabbath, 666, and Satanic symbolism, that’s going to wake up people. People are going to sit up and pay attention.

Lez Zeppelin played with this as well. After all, their guitarist, Jimmy Page, bought the mansion of the father of modern-day Satanism, but that doesn’t translate to these people actually and fully believing in Satanic rights and doctrines. Most, if not all of it, was tongue-in-cheek. It was really to create a bad impression to produce a divide between the new and the old generation.

If you think this sounds familiar, it is. It happens every generation, whether we are talking about Miley Cyrus, Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, you name it. Even Madonna went through this. So viewed from that perspective, metal provides the rock to rock and roll. It provides the division in the new and old generations. It provides the shock value, and most importantly, like a rock hitting anything brittle, it also provides this fragmentary power.

Generally, when people think about fragmentation and disintegration, they often think in negative terms. This really is too bad because it actually made modern rock awesome. Now there is grind core, there is goth core, and there is emo core. It really is amazing because now, its so segmented that regardless of what you are into, you’re going to find a scene.

You will find your form of musical expression and the system is so well put together that if you come up with something new, you will automatically be given a new category. It’s kind of like cryptocurrencies. when you come up with your own coin, you’re automatically inserted into the exchange. Sure, you’re going to be a selling for $1,000 when you first start, but if you get enough following, you might be the next bitcoin. Not too shabby, right?