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R. Walser『Running with the devil power, gender, and madness in Heavy Metal Music』
から抜粋。「メタル」の定義と歴史について。

Outsiders' representations of heavy metal as monolithtic stand in stark contrast to the fans' views, which prize difference and specificity. Because the magazines present they apply the term more broadly than most fans can accept, the magazine itself becomes a site for contestation of the term. Writers of record reviews and articles fain credibility with their readers by arguing for distinctions that may contradict the inclusive stance of the magazine itself. But fans also contribute their perspectives directlythrough the letters columns that begin each issue. For example, one fan wrote to offer his canon of the best metal bands; his letter is emphatic about the importance of genre, and he sees "heavy metal" as a distinction of great value, something that can be attained and then lost:

Some other good groups are Accept, from Germany, and Exiter, Heaven, Twisted Sisters, Girls School, Wild Dogs and so many others. Van Halen was once Heavy Metal but they got stuck on themselves. Van Halen is now what we refer to as "Bubblegum" hard rock. Loverboy, ZZ Top and Zebra are all hard rock. There is a difference between hard rock and Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal is actually a "New Wave" music for the 80s.

Another fan addressed the controversial split between glam and speed metal, rebutting the many hostile letters that disparage one side or the other. She takes a liveral stance that retains the label "heavy metal" for her favorite band but acknowledfes the merit of its incompatible cousines: "Poinson and Metallica shouldn't even be compared really. Poison is heavy metal. Metallica is speed metal. Poison is good at what they do, and Metallica is good at what they do."
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The term "heavy metal" has been applied to popular music since the late 1960s, when it began to apear in the rock press as an adjective; in the early 1970s it became a noum and thus a genre. The spectacular increase in the popularity of heavy metal during the 1980s prompted many critics and scholars of popular music to begin to write metal's history.
（中略)
Histories typically begin with a problem most writes regard as essential: the question of the origin of the term "heavy metal." The first appearance of "heavy metal" in a song lyric is generally agreed to be in Steppenwolf'S "Born to Be Wild," a hit motorcycle anthem of 1968, celebrating the "heavy metal thunder" of life in the fast lane. But the term "heavy metal," we are usually told, had burst into popular consciousness in 1962, with the U.S. publication of William S. Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, a beat junkie's fantasies and confessions of drugs, sleaze, and violent sex. Burroughs is often credited with inventing the term and sometimes even with inspiring the genre. Some sources claim that Steppenwolf lifted the phrase directly from Burroughs's book, although no one has provided any evidence for that link.
This story of the origin of "heavy metal" appears in nearly every recounting of metal's history. It is, however, not only simplistic but wrong, since the phrase "heavy metal" does not actually appear anywhere in Naked Lunch (although a later novel by Burroughs, Nova Express (1964), introduces as charactes "The Heavy Metal Kid" and "Heavy Metal People of Uranus"). At some point this notion of origin got planted in rock jounalism, and the appeal of a clear point of origin led others to perpetuate the error. But as we are reminded by The Oxford English Dictionary, "heavy metal" enhoyed centuries of relevant usage as a term for ordnance and poisonous compounds. The longstanding use of the phrase as a technical term in chemistry, metallurgy, and discussions of pollution suggests that the term did not spring fullblown into public awareness from an avand-garde source. "Heavy metal poisoning" is a diagnosis that has long had greater cultural currency than Burroughs's book has had, and the scientific and medical uses uf the term "heavy metal" are even cognate, since they infuse the music with values of danger and weight, desirable characteristics in the eyes of late 1960s rock musicians. The evidence suggests that the term circulated long before Steppenwolf or even Burroughs and that its meaning is rich and associative rather than an arbitrary lavel invented at some moment. Eventually, "heavy metal" began to be used to refer specifically to popular music in the early 1970s, in the writings of Lester Bangs and Cave Marsh at Creem.
A heavy metal genealogy ought to trace the music back to African-American bluces, but this is seldom done. Just as histories of North America begin with the European invasion, the histories of musical genres such as rock and heavy metal commonly begin at the point of white dominance. But to emphasize Black Sabbath's contribution of occult concerns to rock is to forget Robert Johnson's struggles with the Devil and Howlin' Wolf's meditations on the problem of evil. To trace Howlin' Wolfvocal style to Led Zeppeline's Robert Plant is to forget James Brown's "Cold Sweat." To deify white rock guitarists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page is to forget the black American musicians they were trying to copy; to dwell on the prowess of these guitarists is to relegate Jimi Hendrix, the most virtuosic rock guitarist of the 1960s, to the fringes of music history. The debt of Cold Sweat to African-American music making has vanished from most accounts of the genre, just as black history as been suppressed in every other field.
Rock historians usually begin the history of heavy metal with the white (usually British) musicians who were copying urban blues styles. Mid-1960s groups like the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Jeff Beck Group combined the rock and roll style of Chuck Berry with the early blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Along with Jimi Hendrix, these British blues bands developed the sounds that would define metal: heavy drums and bass, virtuosic distorted guitaf, and a powerful vocal style that used screams and growls as signs of transgression and transcendence. The Kinks released the first hit song built around power chords in 1964, "You Really Got Me." Some credit Jimi Hendrix with the first real heavy metal hit, the heavily distorted, virtuosic "Purple Haze" of 1967. Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic band, extended the frontiers of loudness, distortion, and feedback (but not virtuosity) with their deriantly crude cover version of "Summetime Blues," a hit single in 1968, the same year Steppenwolf released "Born to Be Wild."
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