How did I discover metal? Well, it's kind of a long story. I lived in California for four years and the majority of the kids listened to rap, said kids were also the most popular guys and got the girls. I figured listening to rap would help me be popular and fit in.
My sister had albums like Aerosmith, Bette Midler, Live, and Nirvana. I would listen to them sometimes but never really got into it. It wasn't until I was up one night watching wrestling and Hulk Hogan's theme song was Voodoo Child(Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix. I had NEVER heard a guitar sound like that before and I kept on rewinding the tape over and over again, my mind was just sucked in by the sound of the guitar and I made it a mission to find EVERY Hendrix album.
Eventually I discovered Van Halen(my dad was a Van Halen fan when David Lee Roth first joined). However, I was in school one day and my teacher had this HUGE Led Zeppelin box set behind her desk and I asked her about it. I had heard of Led Zeppelin being the pioneer's of heavy metal and everything, so I asked her about their song Stairway to Heaven and she replied, "I take it you want to listen to it?"
So I got my cd player and put in the Zoso album and went to Stairway To Heaven. At first I was like "what the hell is this?" and she said "Just listen." I sat there and listened becoming more and more interested, then when the famous Jimmy Page solo came on and Robert Plant's high vocals came in? That was it for me. I was hooked on metal every since and I have never returned to the rap crap. Eventually my collection became ALL metal and it's a MASSIVE collection I have too. Everything from Deicide, Opeth, Iron Maiden, Kamelot, Trivium, Metallica, Judas Priest, Helloween, Queensryche, Iced Earth, Death, Black Sabbath, Nevermore, Blind Guardian, Nightwish, Symphony X, W.A.S.P., God Forbid, Shadows Fall, and etc are all there in my collection.
So Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen were my introduction to the metal genre.
but I have always wondered about the next step for many genres of Metal like Black, Death, and Speed Metal. The stuff of today brought back to say something like the 50's would be a total mind-() I don't want to call it evolution because each type of metal even glam, has its merits. I like all metal,and I'm not trying to knock metal, but in terms of how the lyrics are so extreme these days compared to earlier groups it skews my conception of what metal is. Some bands I've heard talk about the most profane things imaginable. It makes me wonder how you go past something like this line from Dimmu Borgir
