Heavy Metal or Hard Rock?

[Mike]

I have been researching this for a while.

Some people can just "SAY" *this* is HM and *that* is HR. But it's not quite that simple.

It's much more like you say tom"A"to, I say tom"ah"to.

Sure there are so called "rules" or "measurements" that are applied to loud, driving, riff-laden, bold music too powerful to simply be labeled "rock and roll".

Now the glam metal is a subsection of heavy metal, and heavy metal will be clearly associatied with Metallica, and Queensrÿche for instance and Led Zeppelin would not be clasified as HM but rather Hard Rock.

Hard Rock, could Judas Priest be HR, and HM? Dokken is afavorite of mine, I consider them HR, mut why couldn't they be metal too?

[MindCrime]

To me metal is Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Pantera, Megadeth, Tool, etc.

More recent bands like Shinedown, Three Days Grace, System of a Down, Godsmack, & Seether could be defined into either.

Dokken is afavorite of mine, I consider them HR, mut why couldn't they be metal too?

I consider them hard rock for the most part (with their ballad style), but they do have a few songs that are borderline metal. (Into the Fire, Dream Warriors).

Dokken & Queensryche still stand as my 2 favorites of the 80's rock era.

[Shawna]

my standards are: if I can understand the words, it's hard rock. If they're screaming into the mic so loud that the words are indecipherable and it makes me want to do a face plant through a plate glass window, it's heavy metal.

[TheLizard]

I'd say that heavy metal is a sub-genre of hard rock. And Shawna, what you're describing as heavy metal is actually death metal, a sub-genre of heavy metal. Don't hate all of metal just because most death metal sucks.