Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music (review)

The proliferation of scholarship on the heavy metal genre being produced by writers in numerous disciplines, academic or otherwise, has garnered significant interest over the last few decades. Andrew L. Cope begins his book Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music by stating: "This book is about music" (p. 1), and criticizing the majority of heavy metal scholarship for lacking serious investigation of the "actual musical sounds, timbres and structures that uniquely combine to generate the identifiable fingerprint that listeners recognize as the heavy metal sound" (p. 1). And, while one can think of a number of exceptions (most of them recent publications), Cope's assessment is for the most part accurate. As such, Cope intends to address this perceived gap in heavy metal scholarship throughout his book. In doing so, he also questions some generally accepted beliefs regarding the makeup of the heavy metal scene, particularly, which attributes define a band as being heavy metal. The most significant outcome of this line of Cope's research is the repositioning of Led Zeppelin as a defining hard rock band rather than heavy metal, as scholars have frequently categorized them in the past, and also suggesting that Black Sabbath was in fact the first band to display various codes that would become the foundation of the heavy metal scene. Interestingly, this central line of inquiry simultaneously results in some of Cope's most convincing, as well as his most problematic, arguments.

Following the "Introduction," which serves to illuminate the purpose of Cope's research, as well as the structure of his book, chapter 1 contextualizes Birmingham, England as the birthplace of both hard rock and heavy metal in the late 1960s/early 1970s. His approach is multifaceted and, in addition to Birmingham, involves examination of music scenes in Liverpool, Manchester, and London, the effect those scenes had on the burgeoning one in Birmingham, and why Birmingham is the only location that could have supported the development of hard rock and heavy metal. In doing so, Cope examines popular music scenes such as Merceybeat and Brumbeat of Liverpool, and the London blues revival of the 1960s, concluding that while hard rock continued to manipulate and adapt the prevalent blues and rock and roll styles of the surrounding musical scenes, heavy metal became known for its complete transgression of them. Notably, this theme has also been developed in other contemporary metal scholarship, such as Keith Kahn-Harris's Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). Discussing heavy metal in terms of the concept of music, space, and place, Cope extends Peter Webb's idea of "musical milieu" (where various influences of a particular geography at a particular time in history combine and influence the dominant musical output in that time) to explain how various attributes of Birmingham's geography (a working-class, industrial landscape situated between London and Liverpool) contributed to Black Sabbath's use of what would later become many of the musical signifiers of heavy metal—power-chords, down-tuned guitars, aggressive vocalization, and performativity.

In chapters 2 and 3, Cope further investigates these signifiers by situating Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in a binary opposition regarding the musical syntax (chap. 2) and aesthetics (chap. 3) of each band. By analyzing musical and sonic elements, Cope suggests that one will find a "dichotomy evident in the musical syntax of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin" (p. 43). Stating that these syntactical elements represent divergent levels of transgression of the musical language of the blues, Cope calls for a significant restructuring of which bands are considered heavy metal, situating Led Zeppelin as key progenitors of the hard rock genre, and Black Sabbath as that of heavy metal. Through a detailed comparative analysis of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath's music, Cope clearly displays how elements such as down-tuned guitars, angular, modal riffs...