Heavy metal music engages a variety of topics, from sex and alcohol to death and suicide. A journalist for Observer, Bryan Reesman argues: “In recent years, however, despite many newer chart-topping acts, the spotlight has dimmed”. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, rap and hip-hop overtook metal’s rebel attitude, leading to the introduction of a hybridized nu metal genre. In the 90s, even as thrash metal groups such as Metallica and Pantera achieved mainstream success, they could not eclipse groups like Nirvana who featured the newly popular grunge sound. Glam groups co-opted metal’s imagery for pop sounds. Once metal became mainstream in the 1980s, the genre started to lose its edge. Metallica brought heavy metal to the forefront of popular culture, producing 3 number one albums in their 30+ year career. Even as every member had the huge, teased out hair prevalent in hair/glam metal, Metallica is a thrash metal group, embodying the opposite of hair metal. Perhaps the largest group to come out of this area in the 1980s was Metallica. Heavy metal began to disseminate globally, and from the west coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco especially) we got our first instances of hair metal, a genre defined by musical simplicity and showmanship (Pearlin 2014). Deep Purple introduced speed metal with their 1969 hit Speed King, Iron Maiden brought soaring ballads and power metal, and Judas Priest brought lots and lots of leather. Metal music has gone through many phases in its history and many sub-genres have developed.
Commodification, Diffusion, and Defusion.