re: The 25 Best Metal Bands of All-Time

I think the genre lines drawn around the different distinctions of loud guitar based music are often absolutely idiotic. I love to bring up to "metal purists" that I own a Creem magazine from the late 70s that has a rundown of the then-current crop of "heavy metal" bands and brief flippant comments about each band. Included in the list: Boston, Heart, REO Speedwagon, Status Quo, Queen, etc. If I'm lying, I'm dying.

The upshot is that "heavy metal" as it came to be defined in later years bears almost no resemblance to the original idea of that kind of music and it has always been VERY blurry where one type of music becomes something else merely by the aspects of silly things like vocal delivery, frequency and complexity of guitar solos, whether one or more of the guitars used has a pointed headstock... all that stultifying kind of crap.

It's best to only refer to certain bands that typify a genre as being in that genre, but sorting out the ones that fall in between as belonging in one specific box or the other (and the life-draining argument over those distinctions) is a complete waste of time and thought.

IMO, of course.