Surely several people here have seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot, right? It's easy to note how dismissive metalheads of the 80s were towards punk, something that might throw people off today.

I know it's a controversial series, but I distinctly remember Sam Dunn's Metal Evolution series bringing up a few mentions of how punks and metalheads got along in the 70s and 80s (read: poorly)— if you ask me, an episode covering that divide and what makes those two different would've been more interesting than faffing about post-grunge. Out of all that came out of that series which basically amounted to "a Motley Crue/Metallica fan's history of metal," only this aspect and the pre-metal bits were genuinely interesting, and I still remember the mention of metal and punk crossover shows being advertised as a "crosscultural event."

Going deeper, being close to various punks means I'm immersed in the world of those who hold the Buzzcocks, the Dicks, Fugazi, and Sham 69 in far higher regard than any metal album from Judas Priest to Behemoth. And yet not always. It's been known to me for a good long time that loads of punks are also fans of Black Sabbath, even going back to the 1970s. They could do without some of Sabbath's more "rockish" elements (and by that, I mean their indulgence in "wicked woman" tracks, guitar wankery as far as they ever did it, softer prog and melodic tracks, and whatever the hell they were doing for Technical Ecstasy— and barely anything after that even counts as Sabbath. Henry Rollins famously said "all you need are the first six Sabbath albums" and Soundgarden mentioned their whole intention was to play "every part of Sabbath that didn't suck."

But it obviously didn't end there, and despite how infamous the divide between punk and metal was, it wasn't like there was never any crossover. Far from it; various metal and some punk subgenres were borne from each other! And we're at a point of such ridiculous crossover that it can sometimes be hard to delineate where metal ends and punk begins, and vice versa.

I once heard a theory that metal and punk music are closer evolutionarily to each other than they traditionally like to admit, and that the primary difference really comes down to culture. Metal has always been more theatrical, more "theistic"— it was always about countercultural machismo. It's old outlaw biker movies like Satan's Sadists and Psychomania put onto a record, of a bunch of longhairs doomed to a boring working class or middle class life deciding to freak people out by invoking Satan and playing as loud as possible and one-upping each other. Punk was always anticultural anarchism and activism in musical form, hence "here's three chords, now form a band." It always hated the encroachment of society, hence why it kept getting more extreme and more stripped down to prevent being commodified. However, it's always been more atheistic and focused on reality and real issues without analogy; no need to make big mythological references about being disillusioned with society when you could just scream "I'm disillusioned with society." Of course, when Satan became a joke thanks to science and people realized that internal demons were far darker— and far more "existing"— than infernal demons, that's coincidentally when we saw metal and punk coalesce. This is still a coincidence if you ask me since the two genres were fusing for well over a decade, but I don't think it's a coincidence that "metal" started being taken seriously when artists started delving into the world of mental issues and worldly struggles while remaining countercultural in lyrical matter. Not that the most notable trend that exploited this circa 1996-2003 was all that good (and goddamn did punks like it even less than metalheads), but the secularization of the world made metal's old stomping grounds too goofy to take seriously compared to the much more conservative 1960s and '70s where even just saying "Satan" or "the Devil" got you labeled an emissary thereof.

That said, musically, the two could be a lot closer than their fans wanted to admit, and despite metal adoring more escapist elements and punk adoring political and social matters, you could easily go from listening to Minor Threat to Overkill or Discharged to Napalm Death. Likewise, we all know Black Flag under Henry Rollins took up heavy inspiration from Black Sabbath, and the aforementioned Discharged was heavily inspired by Motörhead. And then, of course, you get crossover thrash and sludge metal, which could all but be called "punk-metal" in different ways. Hell, sludge and grunge rock (itself an offshoot of a mixture of punk rock and heavy metal) are borderline sister genres.

A Reddit thread I found recently brought this back to mind, even down to using those very terms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/ ... ed_to_one/

And I'm inclined to agree.

Musically, I sometimes wonder how far back the mixture and common root between the two goes. Whenever we talk about punk-inspired heavy metal, we typically mean thrash metal, metalcore, sludge metal, alternative metal, and so on. Yet listening to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal quite a bit, it sounds to me that some early metal artists literally could have been considered "punk" or even "alternative" if not for the aesthetic they used. Almost like a pseudo-fusion.

Just listen to Holocaust


Or maybe Overdrive!

That's a very "punky" song to my ears, if I disengage my mind from preconceived notions of genre.

Here's a track from a little-known band called Wolf that, when I first heard it, I had to doublecheck that they were a heavy metal band because it just sounded too post-punk to me.



Yet another one. The riffwork is clearly metal, but take away the hammer-ons and you have a punk track. Hell, even the vocals vaguely remind me of the Offspring a bit


And probably my favorite example of metal and punk being sonically similar dates back to when punk and metal alike were still deep in their first generation:

Is it punk? Is it metal? I dunno! Considering it's '76, it could even be described as a punk song with metal lyrics. That's what I'd use to describe a lot of NWOBHM tracks. You had the more classical-esque side of it championed by Iron Maiden and their acolytes, but deeper in the underground, there was definitely a culture of bands that could easily have been punk just by changing their lyrical matter and nothing else.

And I know that people will often say that punk is different because it has no guitar solos.
Well what's this?

Heck, I hear guitar solos more often than not in punk rock. They're just not as technically proficient or overwrought as you might find in metal.
Sometimes, like with GG Allin, it'd have been better to just not do one at all, but it's not like punk was against them on principle.



So what am I getting at with all this?

The overarching gist I'm getting at is that, once upon a time, metal and punk were two very similar but very different cultures and it usually wasn't a good idea for the two to meet. At least not in public. But even though metalheads took more and more from punk musically, it wasn't until the 90s that the two became so thoroughly mixed and then the 2000s when distorted music as a whole started becoming a giant pool of common sounds and interests that this divide fell away. It's like two hotheaded kids who constantly beat each other up at school, and then 40 years later, they're just two mildly grumpy old chums who still riff on each other (sometimes literally). Heck, many kids can listen to a punk album and will call it "metal" because they don't know any better.

If you're paying attention to structure, riff style, and subject matter, you can clearly tell the difference, but if you're not paying attention, it can definitely throw you off. And post-80s, even that might not help because we've long since seen metal bands with deeply political lyrics and a more simplified style as well as punk bands singing of demons and Satan and mythological things. Between this and the sheer noise and anti-mainstream style found in extreme metal and various noise/punks' interest in old-school/proto/stoner metal (I'm thinking of Buzz Osborne and Steve Albini at the moment but that's just the tip), there's virtually no border between the two and whatever clash once existed is a forgotten memory of a much different time.

Any thoughts or dissenting opinions?

As much as metal culture cringes me out, punk is infinitely worse

What I remember from a person who was "There" in the 80's was, there was a lot of respect toward the punk scene from the metal scene. But the respect wasn't mutual. A lot of thrashers, and even a few glam bands, liked punk- the thrashers liked the more raw, fast, noisy stuff like Discharge, Anti-Cimex, MDC, Dead Kennedys, Misfits, whereas the glam people liked a lot of the late 70's stuff- Sex Pistols, Ramones, etc. Punk rock guys were typically welcome at metal shows and were accepted, as there was a lot of respect for those bands- heck you'd even see a lot of metal guys wearing punk shirts.

But on the other hand, if you had long hair and looked "metal," for some reason you were NOT welcome at punk clubs. They just didn't like metal fans. You'd either get fucked with, or basically ostracized; I and a few of my friends experienced this a couple times going to see bands like MDC and HellNation (late 80's Sacramento hardcore band) at the 924 Gilman warehouse, which was an almost exclusively punk club in Oakland. This was how it was on the west coast, on the East Coast I'm not sure if there was the same kind of animosity.

The musical connections between the two genres was pretty obvious in thrash, but even some of the glam bands took influence from some of the lighter/poppier sounding punk e.g. The Descendents and the Ramones.

Before I even read this thread I was thinking that punk was probably more inclusive than metal in the old days and suspected almost exactly what you were going to say, even not being alive at the time, i've always thought that metalheads had more respect for punk than punks had for metalheads.

I've always liked punk too despite being primarily a metalhead and trying to get more into it. I really always have felt that the 2 are just long lost brothers with a lot more in common than they have differently. Of course metal is more about the music with lyrics often taking a backseat and being often more fantastical in nature whereas punk lets musicianship take a back seat with lyrics and attitude coming first, but the raw energy and aggression comes from much the same place.

I really don't get why punk is so much more elitist.

Me personally, i've been exploring more old punk whenever i get the chance from a bunch of genres like crust, d-beat, fastcore, powerviolence etc.

Recently i bought albums by old california hardcore bands like Dr.Know, D.I., T.S.O.L., Circle Jerks, etc as well as bands like GBH. I haven't listened to those yet as i'm putting them on a playlist but i know some of it I already like.

Great thread by the way O.P.

It got my attention right away and had to read the whole thing lol.

As someone that was into punk before metal (still a big fan of the genre and it informed most of the social/political views I still hold to this day!), some punks thought metalheads exhibited too much overly macho "jock" behavior. After I started getting into metal though, I noticed a lot of metalheads (at least at the high school I went to) were pretty fucking nerdy and that this particular stereotype was pretty much bullshit. Keep in mind I wasn't there at the beginning though - I'm mostly remembering experiences from when I was a teen in the mid 00s. lol

I'm glad this has largely died out. In fact, when I was getting into metal in the mid-90s, the divide already seemed like a relic of the 70s and the 80s. You could still hear a dismissive comment here and there from either side, but such people were usually considered clueless cranks.

I started reading the Metal Archives when it first appeared (yeah, this is not my first profile) and UltraBoris was, of course, a huge presence at the time. What immediately put me off his reviews was this kind of attitude toward punk. It lined up all too perfectly with the opinions of these over-the-hill guys I knew at the time, who thought that, whatever, Black Flag, for example was "weak shit" or smth like that. Thing is, it was easy to figure out that UltraBoris was only a couple of years older than me and that he had no legitimate claim to actually having been there when the metal vs punk thing was relevant. He was merely playing the role he thought he was supposed to be playing in order to establish his true metal credentials at the turn of the century when such things were important to some people.

The point is that I always find it pathetic when people roughly my age attempt to pretend that it's still 1977 or 1983 or 1989 or whatever and choose sides between metal and punk. I'm not talking about preferring one to the other or even disliking one and liking the other, which is fine. I'm talking about trying to overlay this kind of preference with some kind of an ideology. It always seems fake.

I was born in 1984. By the time I was getting seriously into music, metal vs punk was a non-factor, largely thanks to the bands that merged the two and were huge at the time (mid-90s). Some of the biggest bands, like Slayer, Sepultura and Metallica, had obviously listened to a ton of punk, it was also the peak era of metalpunk hybrids like Faith No More, Nirvana and Soundgarden, and even the pop-punk bands like the Offspring used metal guitar tones. It was a non-issue.

So when I see a person of my age or younger playing the metal vs. punk game, I get very suspicious. In theory, their view may be legitimate, but my first thought is that it is the result of reading one too many scanned zines from before they were born.

Yeah, I was born in 1980 and first started listening to metal around 1994, so the true metal vs punk thing had ended by then, but there does still remain I think somewhat of mild fracture between the two sub-cultures, not really the kind of thing there used to be, but more just fans that are into their own style and don't really branch out and explore the other.

I remember having a friend in highschool in the 90s though and he was more of a punk who liked crust and some grind, and I liked metal and a little punk and we introduced eacother to a lot of shit.

The biggest commonalities between us was a love of Motorhead, who, when i went to visit him in NYC (I was from the suburbs) I saw was WORSHIPPED by punks there, and that makes sense, and I also already loved Venom which some of the crust punks in his area liked, and we both liked Suicidal Tendencies, Biohazard, Black Flag, etc.

We both also loved Napalm Death, which also makes sense. He introduced me to early D-beat, Crust and stuff like Discharge, Aus-Rotten, Amebix, Siege, Destroy, Dystopia, Drop Dead, Assuck, and a bunch of punk bands, while I introduced him to thrash bands like Dark Angel and lots of different death and some black metal bands of all sorts, everything from Amorphis and In Flames to Grotesque, Gwar, Emperor and a million other bands.

For me it was partly personal at first. The kids who picked on me in my early teens tended to be punk fans, and made fun of the glam metal and hard rock I was into at the time. The ones I got along with more tended to be fans of progressive rock and classical (one of them introduced me to Rush, which started redirecting me down a more "nerdy" path in high school). So this was probably a holdover for a while that soured me on the whole punk scene. I did occasionally find the occasional pop-punk tune kind of cool in spite of myself, songs like "Basket Case" and "The Kids Aren't Alright", for example. And eventually I managed to separate my experiences from the music itself, though it did (and sometimes probably still does) take some effort.

The other thing is that I was increasingly interested in musicianship, and revered skill and precision in playing, derived from my interest in the aforementioned progressive rock, classical, and glam metal, as well as jazz. Reading interviews with people like Billie Joe Armstrong where he said something like "mistakes are part of our sound" pissed me off at the time. I viewed the sloppiness of other bands like the Ramones to be part of what had historically been wrong with aspects of the music scene.

Eventually in the interest of broadening my musical horizons I kept coming across more punk artists that I liked, such as Bad Religion, Pennywise, and The Clash. I wasn't even really cognizant of it at the time, but I eventually recognized that a lot of the third wave ska bands I'd listened to in early high school are fairly punk-derived. Of course I gradually got into a lot of gothic rock and offshoots. In exploring that I also got increasingly into industrial culture, so educating myself about those meant a fair amount of wrangling with the differences in how punks view the function of music. A lot of my favorite death metal tends to have a fair amount of influence and parallels with crust and D-beat, so I eventually explored more of that as well.

Kurdt Vanderhoof of Metal Church keeps repeating the story of how he was originally a prog rock fan, then realised how pompous the scene had become, began to play in a punk band, and then realised he wanted to marry the energy of punk and "being able to actually play". Which turned out fine in the end... but his side "prog" project is so by-the-numbers I wonder if that's what the lyrics for the eponymous recent Metal Church song were inspired by LOL

My generation (born in the mid-80s) in Russia is in general "either/or" - simply two different scenes, kinda like what Ill-Starred Son describes above. But there are "crossovers", like, one of my punk friends from the university once sang in a power metal band

From what I remember, we all got along fine by the 90's. What helped was the rising popularity of electronic dance music and I think fans of rock-oriented music banded together over a shared dislike of (hardcore) techno. Nirvana's Nevermind album was also important as everybody seemed to love that. The guitars and drums were heavy enough for metal fans while the song structures and attitude were still punk. At open air festivals, you saw metal heads, punks and hardcore kids all watching the same bands and having fun. I never thought twice about it.

Not sure if it was a regional thing, but back in the 80's punk and metalheads never got along where I grew up. It was fairly common to see street fights of such groups, even at clubs.

Metal was largely an "upper class" movement back then and the incipient metal scene was comprised mostly by rich mofos. Punks were in the opposite side of the socioeconomic spectrum, so they hated each other; metalheads always mocked punks for being filthy/dirty/drunken hobos and punks hated them for being wannabe rebels that had everything handled to them without any sort of effort.

Always interesting to see different perspectives - Where I grew up punk had been a middle class thing (lots of art / grammar school types), and metal was (and is) very much the opposite - kids on borrowed / shared kit working the circuit around working men's clubs, pubs, battle of the bands nights, etc.

Great story. It especially makes sense to talk about goth and industrial. To me, those lined up perfectly with metal, though I later learned many disagreed.

I went through my own period of prejudice against punk, but it had nothing to do with metal. It had to do with hippies. I was fascinated with hippies, stories about Woodstock, Janis, Hendrix, the Doors, Pink Floyd, the Beatles... I listened to some hard rock already, but even those bands all looked like hippies - Sabbath, Purple, Zeppelin, Heep... I was very much into that whole look, 40 minute solos, the whole lot. This led me to hate punk. I detested the story of how the Sex Pistols came around to wipe out all my favorite bands. This is 1994/95. I'm 10-11 years old, and the media is also full of people like the Black Crowes and Soundgarden, looking for all intents and purposes like the 60s/70s bands anyway, which only convinced me that THAT was the look and THAT was the sound.

When I got into metal, somehow all these differences melted away and I no longer cared. Hearing Metallica for the first time rearranged those things in my brain. I could see how Floyd, Zep, Jefferson Airplane, the Pistols, Metallica, Guns N' Roses, the Doors and Nirvana all occupied the same portion of the universe.

I still love to get my hippie on, of course. Luckily, along the way, I discovered bands like Cathedral, where a lot of these things blend very nicely.

Funny story about goth music and its relationship to metal. Considering metal is now considered to be closely joined at the hip to goth and especially edgelord culture, it came as a shock to me to learn that back in the '70s and '80s, goths hated metal probably even more than milquetoast punks did and especially hated the gloomy and infernal elements being confused for metal (and vice veresa). Metal, even punk-infused metal, was far too macho, aggressive, and obsessed with power fantasies for what old-school goths were going for. And that might even be why metal's intrusion into goth culture had to happen through doom metal— no one could listen to Saint Vitus's "Dying Inside" and think "wow, what hypermasculine emotionless jocks." Even to this day, some of the more trad-goths sneer at metal, though more for the groups the commoditize the gothic look without going all in on the sound.

Actually, it's very interesting to note that even in the 80s, a lot of punks and alternative kids seemed to like what would eventually become doom metal. Well, certain notable punks did once punk's elitist desire for speed and opposition to metal started grating on people (because that first instance of punk slowing down wasn't exactly accepted universally). I suppose a style of metal that didn't do what metal was "supposed" to do appealed to those left of the dial. One thing led to another, and we got grunge and sludge and noise.


On an entirely separate note, I think this may be the first true "punk metal" album out there (if for whatever reason you're excluding Motörhead), and is one I've been listening to for a while now:

It's a beautifully pure crossover of punk and heavy metal (of the "heavy-metal" variety that has no subgenre because this was 1980, except I think I even hear a tiny bit of proto-doom/sludge on Sense My Boy??) Heck, half the songs are just straight punk rock. However, this is the band that eventually evolved into Mercyful Fate so you also get dual guitars. Another example of what I meant by how pre-Maiden NWOBHM was really more like "punk bands with metal lyricism."

I'd say it's not just oldschool trad goths, there's a lot of younger goths online who are quite anti-metal, too. I guess they're from those countries like the USA, where the mainstream crowd and media have very little understanding of all things subcultural (like, think of all those quora questions of the "don't goths listen to death metal?" kind). They would certainly get sick of that sort of thing.
Fun stuff: I had a penpal from the US of A whom I met on a board for hobbyist artists. He wasn't even fully mainstream, he was interested in punk rock actually. But when he learned I was a metalhead playing guitar and struggling with certain nerve damage issues, he was, like, "Don't give up, things are going to be fine, you should be able to play those Twisted Sister solos in no time!"
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

That's pretty cool. In fact, I met a lot of people who are more into punk rock, and they don't have a problem with me listening to metal. It just goes to show that the tensions between metalheads and punks have eased significantly since the 80s.

I enjoy both genres but prefer industrial and I dont mean NIN or kmfdm or rammstein.
But the divide between metalheads and punks is sadly still a thing on Pittsburgh. Some gatekeepers like to pretend it's the 80s still even though they are still in their 20s

Thanks for reminding me about the Brats, I've been meaning to listen to that album for ages.

Yeah, 80s goth rock is whole 'nother can of worms. They had a complex relation with post-punk (for example, PiL hating Siouxsie and the Banshees), which in turn had a complex relation with punk. There was a lot of mutual hatred between these groups and genres and that's before you even get to metal. And then, when you do get to metal, remember that, for the most part, when people are talking about punk vs metal in the 80s, "metal" is exclusively of the cock rock variety. I mean, I've read interviews with alt rock musicians where they're saying things like "yeah, anything that's anti-mainstream is good, Husker Du, Metallica, all that good stuff, none of this heavy metal bullshit". So, thrash was seen as something completely on the fringes of the whole thing. A member from Cirith Ungol talked in an interview how they felt strange that Metallica ended up together with them on the first Metal Massacre compilation. The band sounded like punk to them and thus "beneath" them. No one thinks about this stuff that way anymore. So when we're talking about these conflicts, sometimes even the terminology is tricky.

As for Saint Vitus, that's a special case. They were an SST band and pretty much associated with punks more than metalheads. It's also easy to forget how obscure any doom metal was at the time. Lee Dorrian keeps talking about this in interviews - you couldn't find a fellow doomhead within miles around.

So I think goth and industrial entered the metal world (and vice versa) on a large scale only in the 90s when death and black metal broke a lot of barriers and when those bands started experimenting. Think Samael going the way their went, or Tiamat, or Paradise Lost... then all bets were off. There's an obvious precedent in Celtic Frost, but by and large, this started in the 90s. This was the metal environment I encountered when I started getting interested in more extreme styles. It was all natural to me. I get why there was a rift in the 80s, but it's not my fight.

As a younger guy, I'd absolutely say the divide is gone. I know plenty of open metalheads who will gush for hours about their favourite punk releases and vice-versa. There's way more crossover between metal and punk than say, jazz and punk or metal and dub - it seems obvious to me that a fan of one genre would hold at least a couple releases from the other genre up among their favourites. I certainly do.

From my perspective, it seems silly that there was a "cultural divide" in the first place, if it was even really there in the first place. I don't even think a casual listener could tell you the difference between some of the more extreme offerings from both genres. Thrash metal, crossover thrash and thrashcore can all sound (at least in retrospect) kinda similar at times. Then you have genres like crust punk and grindcore that meld different elements of both punk and metal together or bands like GISM that had a confusing blend of different influences. Genres like black metal basically always had at least a small punk under-current; Venom basically were a punk band for fucks sake. The whole idea of there being a huge feud between the two genres just seems silly to me. Were there seriously people walking around in 1986 who would have beaten you up for listening to the Misfits and not Metallica, not realising Metallica fucking loved all of Glenn Danzig's projects?

Anyway, I'm excited to hear from oldheads about this.

I'm going to guess it's probably been an issue in most places, but it was (is?, these styles are much more underground at this point so it hardly even matters anymore) definitely pretty bad here. The 90s into the early 00s was probably where it really became a complete blur for outsiders. Anyone wearing dark clothes and looking a bit scary, whether they were into metal, punk, industrial, gothic, emo, etc., tended to be lumped into the same category. It was just assumed that they listened to aggressive, violent, probably satanic music. People buy into stereotypes too much. Heck, H.R. Giger, notorious for dressing almost exclusively in black, painted many of his hellscapes while listening to jazz.

Not sure about these particular examples and I wasn't there, but yeah, people have talked about getting into physical fights over the punk vs metal thing. When Henry Rollins met Wino, it was Wino who addressed Henry first. The shaved-head Henry was going to pass the long-haired Wino as quietly as possible, so as to not get beaten! When Wino said "hey, you", Henry thought he was as good as dead. Turns out he had noticed something on Henry, whether it was a tattoo or a shirt and it was something about metal, Sabbath or Motorhead or whatever. Wino only wanted to give him the thumbs up and start a conversation over a mutual interest. That's why Wino was so respected among the 80s punks. He understood their music and never gave them shit, whereas most people who looked like him would. This is all Henry's story from some interview. But yeah, that's only one example. People expected physical violence over this stuff. Seems insane from this perspective.

This is true. Where I'm from there was a name for it: 'alto' (from alternative). It started as mockery by the mainstream, but the name became a badge of honour of sorts.

I've also gotten more and more into old goth rock and industrial over the years, and that also made me wonder, was there a big divide between goth rock and industrial in the 80s, or did the 2 get along better together and see commonalities in their music?

I'm specifically talking about the 80s really more than the 90s, cause when I got into metal in the 90s I had a goth friend and she and other goths seemed to like Nine Inch Nails and bands like that (though some wouldn't consider NIN an example of TRUE industrial perhaps.

Industrial in general seemed to be a very underground scene in the early 80s especially before bands like Ministry and KMFDM started adding metal elements to it.

I've started sporadically collecting really old industrial albums over the years by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and obscure old "true" industrial before the metal elements like Portion Control, Nocturnal Emissions, etc, and that was a whole other scene in itself.

I've dealt with and seen more elitism and shunning from the goth and industrial crowds. The metal and punk scene has always been decent. I'm sure the goth and industrial crowd have had the same divide as the punk and metal.

It’s cool to see that the animosity toward the early- to mid-2000s metalcore scene has cooled considerably.

I was going to bring this up as a point of interest. I was at high school when metalcore / deathcore / "hardcore" etc really sprang up and it was an odd thing to be a part of. I was listening to Slayer, Morbid Angel, Opeth, Suffocation, Emperor with a bunch of friends that liked Blink-182, Nirvana, Green Day and the like. Those guys were extremely vocal about not liking what I was into (comments like "it's just noise, you can't even understand the lyrics, how can you listen to that shit etc"), but then got hard onto the -core train when it arrived. I heard heavy guitars, guttural vocals and breakdowns and though "Maybe they'd be interested in giving Suffocation a go now" - nope, somehow they were even more vocal in their disdain for metal. Strange times.

I also find the comments about the Goth scene interesting to read, especially the part about goths distancing themselves from metal. My partner is an old-school goth that enjoys metal, but then has a hard time with the way that modern goth culture seems to be distancing itself from music in general. She talks about it from the perspective of the aesthetic and image being driven directly by the music, but finds that is becoming far less relevant. Expresses frustration at the excitement of potential conversations about goth music turning into disappointment when the person she's trying to have the conversation with isn't interested in music at all.

Ultimately for both these examples, more power to people enjoying what they want to enjoy. But it can definitely be a fascinating thing to look at and understand.

A lot of those original industrial bands hated rock, period. Forget metal, they wanted to obliterate anything smacking of rock and anything related to it. If guitars are used, they're used mockingly. Obviously, some of these people relaxed their attitude with time, but the marriage of industrial and rock was definitely not an easy one, at least at the beginning. The "no wave" scene was similar. Today, we think of it as an offshoot of punk, but they hated punk and hated being associated with it. It was all a bit adolescent and trying to be as unmusical as possible in order to prove some point about how fucked up the world is and how rock, punk and metal included, is just a tool of mass hypnosis, music for sheep, you know the drill.

punk-metal divide is interesting nowadays. Punks will interpret their fave metal bands in a different way than metalheads interpret the same bands and vice versa.

There is however much more of a divide between the aforementioned and the modern "core" fan. Modern core fans often call themselves metalheads but very often don't listen to any metal maybe beyond some Slayer, Metallica and such. They often also even less likely to listen to classic punk/hardcore bands. Good luck finding a core kid who likes DooM or something.

The cultural divide between core, punk and metal is interesting too. Metalheads and punks often are like 2 different sides of the same coin nowadays. Metal culture ofc leaning on self empowerment and punk on changing the world. The core community is however much more insular, busy with their own self in terms of emotions, experiences and such. Lastly they are also much more "woke" where metal came from a traditionally labour leftist background for example.

I always had a rather odd relationship with punk. I despised the pop punk that was big as a teenager in the mid-2000s but even when I tried out the classics, Misfits was the only one that resonated with me due to already being a Danzig fan. I'm on much better terms with the genre nowadays and there are plenty of albums that I enjoy from it, but it's not what I necessarily relate to. I definitely prefer elements of escapism and storytelling in my music, even when they're more implied than blatantly present, and punk generally seems adverse to both concepts. The gatekeeping certainly doesn't help either though that's also a valid argument to make with metal.

That said, it is really cool to see how punk and metal have developed and informed each other over time. In a way, it feels like they're integral for each other's continued existence as so many musicians start out in one before migrating to the other. Even in metal demographics where the music isn't directly influenced by punk, it's pretty common to see musicians from that background. I think I'm one of the only stoner doom musicians I know that never had any sort of punk/hardcore phase. It still bums me out that so much stuff still gets criticism for being "cheesy," but that talk comes from both sides of the aisle these days.

I can definitely relate to this-- in my pre-teen and early teenage years I was big into melodic/pop-punk stuff like Green Day, Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Dropkick Murphys, but very much left that stuff behind once I got to middle and high school and got more into hard rock and metal. The Misfits were pretty much the only punk band I got into in high school, largely because I was huge into Danzig's solo material. Ironically, 15 or so years later I find myself listening to a lot of melodic punk that I thought I had "outgrown" by the time I started listening to Sepultura and Bathory.

Even though now I would say there is less of a divide between punk and metal, especially in the hardcore scene, I can personally attest that there was a divide between metal fans and the Warped Tour, "scene" crowd around the time I was in high school (late '00s/early '10s), with pop-punk being very much lumped in with the -core and scene bands that were in vogue at the time, perhaps unfairly. I definitely neglected listening to Bad Religion for a long ass time as I always viewed them as a Hot Topic/Warped Tour band, only to now hold the correct opinion that No Control is one of the greatest punk albums of all time.

Of course I was far too young and thus not into either scene yet, but from everything I've read there was definitely a lot of tension that gradually eased over time as they got used to each other's music being played at club nights. In Assimilate Alex Reed notes that while there was some crossover in the 80s, it's by the 90s that they really started intermingling more, as a reaction to the rise of alternative music in the mainstream. "This consolidation and staking of subcultural territory brought to the surface those shared musical, visual, and social signs of goth and industrial practice...dance clubs increasingly specialized in crossover goth-industrial nights (often with respectively alternating DJs)...though some tension between hardline goths and industrialists quietly simmered, this communal state of affairs largely became the norm."



Yeah, I think I brought this up in one of the metalcore threads. I was a little mystified back in the mid and late 00s when people I knew got into metalcore and deathcore, but had no interest in exploring the melodic death and death metal that had inspired those scenes. Some people are only just interested in the current scene, they don't care about the historical development and connections.



Yeah, at some point (and sometimes it's from the very beginning, and other times it's much later on) certain scenes become more about certain facets of an image or maybe a lifestyle than about the music that spawned it. You can see this with certain celebrities appropriating metal t-shirts and other fashion and such when they otherwise never express any interest in the music itself.



It's a very curious thing from both camps. You see some of the more intense industrial acts despise the usage of guitars, thinking they're soft and lame. And then from the other side, you see some death metal bands shun synthesizers and electronics as weak and wimpy. They're both going for a brutal sonic aesthetic, but with the exact opposite tools and philosophy of instrumentation.

Speaking from an older person's perspectives, i was also into punk but the metalhead attitude was often anti-punk as they believe the narrative that punk killed off Heavy Metal in England in that 1976-78 period. Then the NWOBHM was a group of young bands who used the DIY underground methods and ethos of the punks to build a new wave of Heavy Metal. The metalhead attitude was in error because, for a few years (say 1973-76), older bands were becoming bloated and complacent and arrogant. Deep Purple Mark II and Mark III split up and then the band collapsed, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath too were going through periods of decline and stagnation. So the punks just took the advantage of a gap in the market.

Some 50-year-old metalheads today still live out that old anti-punk narrative - they speak out against old classic punk songs you play on the pub jukebox and then think they are very up-to-date by playing Five Finger Death Punch or "The Sound of Silence" (you know which version...) I think that left-wing lyrics of bands such as The Clash were too directly challenging for many metalheads in the British context, both back then and even now.

Wasn't jazz considered evil and decadent originally? =D

Those outsider assumptions seem to be off target all over the world... Like, in my late teens/early twenties I didn't even wear black, just studded wristbands and dark eyeliner (I'm female, so no biggie IMO). No hair dye, no tattoos, no piercings, neutral clothes. No band shirts or any other prints or designs. And everyone assumed I was a "goth". I still have no idea why.

I also had a groupmate in the university who was looks-wise something like a "preppie" in US terms; always wore suits and ties to classes etc. And he was like, "I adore heavy music! Metal is awesome!" ...and he didn't know zilch about "heavy music" outside those then-radio bands like Slipknot and SoaD. But those, those he blasted to no end ))

Yeah, I know 1 or 2 of these modern deathcore fans (they are usually like 10-15 years younger than me, hence the divide) and while I haven't ever really talked to them about music, they kind of annoy me.

Like one in particular, one time I saw him posting on facebook and asking for suggestions of "metal" and all his friends suggested death-core that really had very little true metal in it with the one and only metal suggestion being Slayer.

I could have taken part and recommended some real metal but thought it wouldn't be welcome and just left them to their deathcore lol.

I'm not entirely averse to listening to any and all deathcore or metalcore either, it's just that I typically find I don't like most of it. For deathcore I like Rings of Saturn and Beneath the Remains is pretty good, and i used to occasionally listen to a little old metalcore like coalesce and converge but that's about it.

I don't really understand the tendency of some of these younger kids to just get into deathcore and ignore the roots of all the punk and metal music that came before it and yet act like what they are listening to is really metal, as I'm always interested in exploring the roots of the music I listen to.

I think these kids are just into their scene and not interested in exploring where any of it came from, but at least they could come to the understanding that a lot of what they are listening to is either not really metal, or at the very least has some metal in it but is standing on the shoulders of a lot of bands that came before it.

Well that might just be chalked up to the equivalent of some 80's thrashers finding Black Sabbath- or even earlier 60s rock like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, etc. to be dated and boring because it's "old." Hopefully most of these kids with musical tunnel-vision will grow out of it when their tastes develop and expand.

I, too, find most metalcore/deathcore to be really uninspiring but that is just my personal taste. To me, it tends to target a much younger crowd who are still into the teenage angst and tough guy posturing, while the riffs and the overall flow of the songs usually don't do a lot for me.

Regarding the old metal/punk divide, it seems like it was different depending on where you lived or what particular scene you were in. In the Bay Area, west coast, you had the guys in Metallica wearing punk shirts (Misfits, occasionally GBH, Discharge, and even Septic Death, which Kirk was into) plus guys like Kurdt from Metal Church who used to actually BE in a punk band. So, a lot of metal fans over there were more open to listening to punk, and a lot of punk bands became popular with a lot of thrash metal fans (like me, for example) who liked anything that was fast, abrasive and angry. You'd even have bands llke the Accused, DRI,Attitude, and the Cro Mags (to name a few) who would play with metal bands. But as I mentioned it was not a two way street- metal fans were far more welcoming of punk than the punks were of metalheads. This is how I remember it growing up in California in the late 80's, but of course there were other scenes where the metal fans were far less tolerant of punks, and the animosity was mutual.

While both genres hated, and still do, mainstream pop glamour, the idea that one is more meaningful or valid, based on the other being macho bullshit, is always a matter of cherry picked perspective.

Compare the range of emotions displayed on the debut Angel Witch album, to Black Flag’s Damaged. Henry Rollins is ranting at his abusers, and showing “vulnerability,” but it’s way more aggressive.

It’s worth remembering the origins of both genres, and the trends that influenced them. Punk came from anti authority hedonist garage rock, and metal from anti authority hedonist psychedelic rock. Metal had the head start, on being highbrow art. It was more connected to the prog tendencies(even the last Jimi Hendrix Experience album has a proto-prog song, and riffs like Black Sabbath). While Judas Priest was pushing boundaries, on Sad Wings of Destiny, early punk bands were getting attention with a style that was more like basic, really old school rock, but with more aggression and irreverence(which is why the “metal is tough guy music, and punk is sensitive” argument doesn’t make as much sense, if you compare the Sex Pistols to late 70s Sabbath).

I think the differences between individual bands are just way more valid, but, I can see why people in the 80s, who couldn’t find new music as easily as I can now, would believe these generalizations.

I think the “core kids” music is mostly “fair weather” fans. The Christian bodybuilder, who tried to hire an FBI agent to kill his wife, did actually still have fans, when he got out of prison, but I don’t see a lot of people really into that stuff anymore. People who had bad enough taste to think Attack Attack was good moved on to some other trend.