Dissertation based on the scores of the compositions, the dissertation analyzed the course of development of Heavy Metal from its formation in the late 1960s to 2018. Along with this, in order to better highlighting the elements of the corresponding development, the dissertation outlined successive musical influences that also played a significant role in the evolution of the respective genre.
The key similarities between the subgenres of heavy music are systematized, which in their sum demonstrate the system and integrity of Heavy Metal as a separate direction.
The development of Heavy Metal as a countercultural phenomenon not only in the music industry is analyzed, but also the sociocultural reflection of a part of society at that time, its rejection of the mainstream and the desire for a new creation, unlike the previous, more established models, for example, the hippie culture in the USA, the development of which occurred in the mid-1960s.
Along with this, the process of transformation of heavy music to the mainstream is described in several stages, at each of which one of the subgenres within Heavy Metal gained wide popularity, which is tracked by examples of broadcasts of compositions on radio and on television, in particular, the American channel MTV. Accordingly, at each of these stages, a new, more extreme subgenre appeared, which sought to shock listeners, or return heavy music back to the underground, considering this state as a kind of "Golden Time" of the genre.
An important place is the consideration of each separate subgenre at the same time as an element in the system of Heavy Metal music (its connections with previous subgenres, cultural borrowings from other areas of music or general culture) and as a separate bright aspect with its own characteristics and differences. Such consideration makes a more complete picture of the development of heavy music and especially clearly crystallizes the uniqueness of each of the subgenres within the Heavy Metal system.
Considerable attention is paid to the issue of the emergence of Heavy Metal, which contains several dimensions, in particular:
- Musical, which explains the compositional borrowings and influences on the basis of which the new genre was formed.
- Countercultural, which outlines the phenomenon of dark or whimsical themes in the lyrics and individual musical elements.
- The "dimension of chance", which, thanks to the music journalism of the time, played the role of naming the corresponding genre and without which the musical phenomenon called "Heavy Metal" either did not take place under the appropriate name, or did not take place at all.
The study, in addition to the countercultural dimension, analyzed the general cultural sphere, which is important when describing the development of heavy music in European countries, especially extreme subgenres, such as Black Metal in Norway and Sweden, which are rightly considered extreme manifestations of extreme music due to appeals in lyrics and corresponding actions, for example, the burning of churches in 1990s. Without understanding the general cultural dimension of the respective states at one or another historical time, the corresponding phenomena cannot be comprehensively explained. Along with this, other factors take their place, in particular geographical and climatic features, economic condition, development of communication technologies, etc.
For the convenience of research, the development of Heavy Metal is differentiated into two stages:
- pre-extreme, which describes the formation of a new genre at the end of 1960s as different from the already relatively popular rock music and its culture, the formation of the main differences from the corresponding culture during the heyday of rock music subgenres in 1970s, coming to the fore in the musical counterculture of Heavy Metal as a separate independent genre in the first two thirds of the 1980s. In this period, Heavy Metal is described primarily as a phenomenon of a long British musical tradition that reached its apogee in the early 1980s, creating a kind of "school" that entered historiography as the "New Wave British Heavy Metal". The influence of the British scene quickly spread to the USA, where in the mid-1980s a new subgenre emerged ‒ Thrash Metal, within which the most famous performers of heavy music such as Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax and others created. Competing with another popular subgenre in the US at the time, Glam Metal, the first phenomenon of conflict within heavy music took place, where one of the subgenres gained airtime on radio and television, while the other tried to return the genre to the underground, which began the transition to the next stage in the dissertation.
