Retro Rock and Heavy History

The history of heavy metal is problematic on multiple levels; from its naming, ancestry and originators to its subsequent stylistic revivals, fractures and ‘new’ waves. This chapter approaches the genre’s history, and fans, academics, journalists and musicians active involvement with it, not as a linear unfolding family tree, but as a complex multi-layered palimpsest that allows erasure, inscription and re-inscription of styles and influences. By exploring the genre’s narrative as a bottomless writing over writing, with no agreed point of origin, a model of retro-progressive and bohemian nostalgic practice can be suggested. This engagement allows for different, contradictory and chronologically disparate points of return – be they musical, historical, filmic or cultural. For the heavy metal community of fans, writers and musicians, exploration and revival of these historical touch points allows for authentic growth in the genre and subgenres. The chapter utilizes Foucault’s ideas of genealogy to investigate this historical activity and the cultural memory of heavy metal in contrast to traditional narratives. These approaches are further explored through the engagement and re-engagement with the occult boom in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies and cases of their appearance in more contemporary heavy metal outputs.