Awesome post dude! I must admit that seeing Shinedown in the list threw me for a loop. I always kinda saw them as hard rock rather than metal, but I suppose it's relative to an individual's perception haha. And I do also have just one more piece of friendly input in regard to the list in the picture. I was a little confused on the addition of The Black Dahlia Murder being in said list. While I am a HUGE fan, I wonder if them being in this list is a bit of a stretch. When I look at this list, I see mainly "Metalcore" bands, whereas BDM are more of the "Technical Death Metal" variety. I do realize that this list may not necessarily be a specifically "Metalcore bands" list, but still, it did raise my eyebrows slightly lol. Anyway, awesome post brother! You always have so much perspective to go with these posts, and I ALWAYS enjoy reading them! Well done! \m/
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The Black Dahlia Murder was on the Original Metal Evolution chart. I didn't add them. :) I did add Shinedown and explained why in ther text. I am not sure what Criteria Sam Dunn used in defining this particular genre. Seemed from what I could see to be more based upon the year they released material (seemed 90s), and in the United States. It wasn't as obvious in other areas. Also some of these bands have been listed in other sub-genre posts as there is often a lot of Overlap.
Yesterday I did Swedish Extreme Metal which finally completes the Metal Evolution chart. I have a few more I want to do, but they'll be branches I provide that were not in this list. I'm even considering at one point a Folk Metal one and referencing your older posts.
I did manage to read and resteem your Swedish metal post, that was a great coverage of many bands I have come to look up to as a musician. Very well done indeed!
As far as Shinedown being metal. I think there are a lot of acts people call Rock that really are metal. The reason for choosing to still call themselves Rock seems to stem from the stigma some people still seem to have with metal. I started at the very beginning of this chart, and metal is a very broad set of sub-genres.
Yet if you were to do the same thing with Rock. What is often called Rock today sounds NOTHING like what was given that original title.
What I found in my studies is that labels like hard rock, acid rock, grunge rock, etc all skirted that edge between what made early metal and rock.
Yet they seemed to step over that edge into the metal side in terms of what makes something metal.
Metal's only real defining characteristic that is consistent is a high level of distortion used on guitars. It doesn't have to be done on every song, or everwhere in a song, but that seems to be the defining characteristic.
You could then say the drums definitely can define metal, but this is only true of some sub-genres and actually was not so much the case in the earlier examples.
You could then say the vocal stylings, but then this is really only true of some sub-genres. It turns out metal vocalists can literally be heard to sing almost any other vocal styling imaginable. It is true it tends to focus on the more gutteral, angry sounds in most of the sub-genres, but this is not true of them all.
I wrote about this in an early post that I knew a female vocalist in a local band. I actually went because my friend was guitarist, and backing vocalist in the band. I remember the first time I heard them she claimed to HATE METAL. She insisted they were a rock band. Yet what they were playing in their originals was metal. I told this to my friend that was in the band and he just nodded and said "Yeah, Dawn hates metal".
Within a few years she LOVED metal. Apparently somewhere along the way she had quit resisting the stigma associated with the label.
I see this as the case with many bands. For example AC/DC has never referred to themselves as Metal, but I think the qualify as metal for sure.
So I listened to some Shinedown and other than the Lynard Skynard (early inspiration for some metal) cover they seem to meet the very loose criteria that is metal.
That actually is a very good point. What I have also come to find, like yourself, is that there are very generally loose forms of criteria that determine what is and isn't metal, or what is metal and what is rock and what separates the two even though they are part of a similar musical family. Hell, I'm sure back in the day, Beethoven would have been considered metal compared to other composers at the time haha! But this all just brings it back to what I had said before, in that I suppose that how people define which genres from which is all relative, and has more to do with "truth of perception" rather than concrete criteria, guidelines, etc. But I certainly don't want you to take my input the wrong way, I genuinely and thoroughly enjoyed your post. I suppose I was just trying to make good conversation on the piece and see if I could get some outsiders' perspective, including your own. Always a pleasure to nerd out and talk music geek talk with a fellow music lover! :D
Agreed. I plan to do a branch on Neoclassical, and one on Djent, and I'm considering Folk and possibly Symphonic as well.