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The Movie Heavy Metal and How it Made the Genre Known in the 80s

  • Writer: Tristan Forbis
    Tristan Forbis
  • Sep 6, 2021
  • 2 min read

If you grew up in the late 70s to early 80s you may remember a movie that helped define a new place in the music industry that nobody else was aware of at the time. The artists that come to mind are people like Ozzy Osborne and bands like Metallica and Judas Priest who during the early 80s were acts just starting out and trying to build an audience base. This movie was released in 1981 as mostly a musical that helped people get to know this new range of hard rock that defined where we were headed in regards to the future of the rock music scene as a whole. The film is for an adult audience but it’s made into a cartoon and the soundtrack is available on streaming, vinyl and cd format where you can listen to all of the songs on the hour long album. Most recently I listened to this album on a YouTube stream and I’ll be honest some songs were familiar while other songs I had never even heard before. The main idea behind the album and movie is that they are together in a way with a choice between audio and video because some people like visuals and other people like just hearing what this new generation had to offer at the time.


In the mid 80s people were getting more familiar with how the guitar riffs and everything in between sounded with this style of music so gradually as time went on the rise of the metal genre became more evident and the audience continued to grow with albums being bought more often and this art of the music scene eventually became mainstream. You would begin to hear more singles in this genre played on the radio by DJs by the late 80s which was the start of a new age in listening. Judas Priest would come along and the way people heard and perceived rock music changed forever. I wonder what I would do if I was around to see the birth of this type of music take effect and how many albums of these artists would be in my collection. In these years when the public was just being introduced to something new you had to think that in an era before streaming lines at record stores were packed on a release date so I’m sure artists made a lot of money.

Curiosity comes when you think about how this album and movie could influence future generations relating to this type of music, if I have kids of my own someday I may pull this up on Youtube and see how they react hearing it when they are older. This movie may still be memorable a decade from now since the influence of it can also reach other artists of same or close genre. Being a listener sometimes it is clear that the sound is an art that is crafted by these artists that brings them to selling albums by the dozen and in turn creating revenue that helps with other concerts among other things.



Maybe we will see a sequel sometime in the future. Until then we will wait and see if that comes true.

-Tristan


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