20th Century Rock and Roll: Heavy Metal [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Martin Popoff (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Not just a blanket discussion on metal, this book offers essays on the 50 heavy metal bands that had the biggest influence on building a scene that perplexes, thrives and provokes deep into the rock 2000's.

Author Martin Popoff (The Collector's Guide To Heavy Metal, Goldmine Heavy Metal Record Price Guide) offers persuasive and often argumentative and explosive essays on each act, ranked within the three separate decades of metal's existence: the 70's, the 80's and the 90's. In addition, each essay is peppered with fascinating and often lengthy and heartfelt direct quotes from the musicmakers themselves, as well as discographies of their work, just in case you want to run out and buy up what all the fuss is about!

Finally, Martin offers instructive appendices on the following:

-Influence By Genre — a list of close to 1000 bands qualified by style of metal.

-15 Amazing Bands Too Unique To Make The List — along with succinct descriptive write-ups on each

-25 "Almosts" — once more with arguments on their each's impact on the scene

-Heavy Metal's Top 100 Most Influential Albums Of All Time — the hallowed recorded works laid out in chronological order -The Pre-History Of Metal — an essay on metal's trace rumblings through the 50's and 60's

-The Top 15 Tribute Albums Of All Time — each offered with a short review

-The Future Five — a look at five bands who are taking metal to new places in the 2000's

An entertaining and provocative read for anybody who wants to learn more about the most creative and fearless of metal pioneers, 20th Century Rock And Roll: Heavy Metal is sure to spark metal debate long into the loud night. Hail!

From the Publisher
The 20th CENTURY ROCK AND ROLL Series from COLLECTOR’S GUIDE PUBLISHING presents the top artists of the last half century in an informative and entertaining format that will keep you iinterested from cover to cover.

The series features books on PSYCHEDELIA, ALTERNATIVE MUSIC, PROGRESSIVE ROCK, HEAVY METAL, POP, GLAM, PUNK and WOMEN IN ROCK, each with details about its top artists, their music, their records and their effects on music and society. Prepared by authors recognized in their fields and illustrated throughout, this is the collection you’ve been waiting for.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Collectors Guide Publishing Inc; illustrated edition edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1896522475
• ISBN-13: 978-1896522470
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,793,930 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent, highly useful hodgepodge of heavy metal info, December 17, 2001

By	ixion75 - See all my reviews

Martin Popoff established himself as a writer of acerbic wit and tremendous knowledge with his collector's guide to heavy metal. That book and its three-thousand-plus reviews is a mammoth testament to his energy as well as the genre's amazing invention and staying power.

For this outing, Popoff gives what I see as a survey course in Heavy Metal History, utilizing the more "objective" standpoint of artistic and historical influence in metal to discuss the music rather than the slightly shakier ground of a subjective album review.

Popoff divides the music into the decades of the 1970's, 80's, and 90's, and from there ranks (okay, so we still have a tiny bit of subjectivity) the bands and/or artists in terms of their importance and influence on metal as a whole. The result are 50 bands that Popoff sees as essential to the progression of metal. This is terribly intriguing as it introduces bands like Marilyn Manson, Nirvana, and even The New York Dolls into the list alongside undoubted legends like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. Along the way there are pleasant surprises like seeing Yngwie Malmsteem make the list as well as UFO, Bathory, and Alice In Chains. In an effort at being completist, Popoff nobly lists in a series of appendices bands too strange or unique to make the list, bands that almost made it, and his short list of the most influential metal records.

The drawbacks? Well for one the written pieces on each band are limited to around 2 pages each, so there is nothing deep or exploratory. There is also the issue of Popoff's biases, which show themselves rarely but sometimes humorously. Having said that, there is also much to like about this volume. It is a short, readable, entertaining ride through metal's high points as seen through biographies and key works of each artist. Where possible Popoff has included either in textboxes or sidebars snippets of interviews with the bands themselves. It also (like Popoff's collector's guide) demonstrates a keen sense of the history of the genre. The bottom line folks is that someone has to be setting this stuff down for posterity, and no matter whether you agree or disagree with Popoff's opinions he is plainly a huge fan of the music too!

This is a book that will spark debate and discussion to be sure, and it is overall quite worth a read by those wishing to acquire a sense of the history behind the power chords as well as those who want to revisit classic metal vibes. Rock on...

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, Perhaps Short Overview, July 21, 2001

By	Matthew J. Cerrato (Somerville, MA United States) - See all my reviews

I'm not a big fan of Popoff's writing style, but he does have a good ear for the metal scene. I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he wrote. Also, when he breaks down the bands by decade, it's pretty obvious that the metal world is in decline when Pantera is considered the most influential band of the 90's (although I dig their stuff).

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not very good..., February 10, 2003

By	Ryan King (Bonne Terre, Missouri) - See all my reviews

I am a fan of Martin Popoff, and I was expecting great things from this book, but it is unable to deliver, unfortunately. The book names the most influential metal acts of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, summing up their careers in two or three pages. Sounds great, but the whole system just proves to be extremely boring, and the book is not designed to be a straight through read as I thought it would be (this was acceptable, obviously, with another Popoff book 'The Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal'). The book overall leaves me feeling unsatisfied, exactly the opposite reaction I thought it would give. I must also mention that the book leaves out Husker Du, who I feel several of the grunge bands (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) are heavily indebted to.