RECORDS

On paper, the basic concept of hardrock/heavy metal looks just dandy: everything you always liked about rock ’n’ roll, only more of it. That’s the ideal anyway. The cruel reality, as you may have noticed, is something else entirely. Because the genre’s natural audience is teenage kids (a demographic group to which you, the reader, may well belong) who supposedly don’t know any better, it’s all too easy for the music industry’s powers-that-be to channel hard-rock’s more threatening—i.e., too nasty or too serious—impulses into easilymarketable packages that do little to threaten the musical or social status quo, and, as such, are hardly recognizable as the spiritual descendents of, say, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Stooges.