The song that coined the term “heavy metal”
The etymology of words is a fascinating thing. Especially when it comes to attempting to find one word to explain a musical phenomenon, trying to capture a unique energy or vibe with a short and fitting label, it feels like it would be an impossible task. But in the case of heavy metal, the genre descriptor was plucked from a song that seemed to capture it best.
When searching Google to uncover what heavy metal actually means, the answer comes back as “a type of highly amplified harsh-sounding rock music with a strong beat, characteristically using violent or fantastic imagery”. Of course, it also states metal as a material of “relatively high density, or of high relative atomic weight”.
Those two meanings alone seem to make perfect sense of why the phrase stuck. In the physical form, a heavy metal is dense and weighty. In the sonic sense, the sound is too as the genre is characterised by loud instrumentation building to a dense wall of music that if it was to be given an imagined physicality, would definitely be something heavy and tough.
But how did that link ever come to be? Much like the origin story of the words ‘rock’ or ‘pop’, it’s a strange thing to dive into as these terms are second nature to the world now. ‘Rock’ makes sense because it’s been heard in context for decades upon decades. But when you pause to think about it, the word for a chunky pebble or stone really had nothing to do with music. Neither does the sound of a bursting bubble.
It’s the same story for heavy metal. But now, it’s a phrase we don’t question or think too much about, just like how no one ever questions why a banana is called a banana or a chair is called a chair; it simply is. Yet the origin of the genre label is much more simple than expected, as it was plucked directly from a song.
“I like smoke and lightnin’ / Heavy metal thunder / Racing with the wind / And the feeling that I’m under,” Steppenwolf sing on ‘Born To Be Wild’. Released in 1967, it was the first recorded use of the term heavy metal in a musical context. The song itself feels like a perfect first step into that world. Rock and roll seemed to be giving way to something more raucous that would turn into heavy metal by the 1970s and onwards. With louder, bolder guitar riffs, ‘Born To Be Wild’ could be seen as the opening remarks for a new musical era, giving a name to it too as “heavy metal thunder” was picked out as a perfect piece of imagery to explain the new, thunderous and thrilling sound.
However, it also has a more literary context. Outside of music, it was the iconic Beat writer William S. Burroughs who coined the term in his novel The Soft Machine. He used the term “the Heavy Metal Kid” to describe one of his characters. He said of the phrase, “I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there’s something actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so much vegetable as mineral.”
With that idea of something solidifying into something heavy and brutal, paired with Steppenwolf’s rock context, heavy metal appeared as the perfect phrase to describe a new era as rock and roll seemed to harden into something tougher.
