What is the difference between hard rock and heavy metal? What makes a particular song heavy metal?
The terms are fuzzy and it’s common to find two people who are in disagreement as to whether certain songs or bands are one or the other genre. Adding to this is the fact that heavy metal can refer to the group of genres that make up all of metal including Extreme metal, Sludge metal, and so forth, or it can refer only to one subtype of metal generally related to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWoBHM) in the early eighties (for a time Heavy Metal could be associated with slow, distorted blues-based rock iconised by Black Sabbath, but this seems to have morphed into the meaning of the overall metal genre I first mentioned, and Black Sabbath is closer to what we now call Doom Metal). The most reasonable deliniation I can come up with is to consider the primary genres of influence: Hard Rock is based on Blues and other “folk” genres, where Heavy Metal is heavily influenced by classical music (especially by Wagner ethos) and virtuistic concepts, heavily tempered by a pro-masculine (b
