| View Larger Image | Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal | Paperbackby Ian Christe (Author)
| List Price: | $14.99 | | Price: | $10.19 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | It Books | | Page Count: | 416 Pages | | Publication Date: | February 01, 2004 | | Sales Rank: | 17,923th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780380811274
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In this first-ever atlas of the heavy metal phenomenon, Ian Christe delivers a bird's-eye view of this dark and forbidden music. The ultimate headbanger history, Sound of the Beast reveals tales of concert hysteria, courtroom drama, and musical triumph with: Interviews with Black Sabbath, Metallica, Morbid Angel, Megadeth, Twisted Sister, Kiss, Slipknot, and many others Genre boxes explaining black metal, power metal, thrash metal, nu metal, and more More than a hundred rare and unpublished photos A thirty-year graphic timeline of metal milestones, hilarious metal lists, and the twenty-five most original recordings of all time |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 58 reviews)
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A Good Primer, Slightly Metallica Heavy by Old T.B. (Cheyenne, Wy USA)  4 Stars
November 18, 2009
Covering 35 years of heavy metal history in one book less than 400 pages long is an admirable and daunting task. I give Ian Christe all the credit in the world for taking it on. I, for one, discovered Cradle of Filth and Sleep through reading this book, and my life is better for it.
Yes, there are issues. I'm sure that many readers will want to see their favorite metal genres get more in-depth treatment; I was hoping for more on Norwegian Black Metal. But, once again, this book is covering a lot of ground, so deep explorations just aren't possible. This book is a great primer for the burgeoning metal fan or a fan wishing to get a glimpse of other metal genres and recommendations of bands and albums. As a metal music overview, it is an enjoyable read.
Then, there is the Metallica issue. I will admit that, at times, this book begins to read more like a Metallica biography than an all-inclusive metal history. But, I have to stand with Christe (for the most part) on this. Just as an author writing a history of Sixties rock would have to give much coverage to the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan due to their massive influence on that scene, so Christe has to give heavy time to Metallica. I don't fault him for that, but I do believe that he went a little heavy on the Metallica parts here and there. It's a minor complaint; however, a serious hater of Metallica may wish to avoid this book.
Overall, I am glad I purchased this book, and I do recommend it.
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Flawed, but still probably the best overall book out there by Privacy, Please (Maryland, USA)  3 Stars
October 31, 2009
If you're looking for a good overall book that hits the highlights of heavy metal and gives at least a shout-out to most, if not all, of its genres, this one is probably your best bet. Some of the other books I've read that purported to be histories of Heavy Metal were hardly comprehensive and instead focused on one scene, for example the 80s California "hair bands" and their infighting and gossip. Others make no bones about being an exploration of one genre such as glam metal or Swedish black metal or whatever. Bottom line, this book comes closest to being what it says it is: the history of Heavy Metal.
Now, that's not to say there isn't room for improvement. Quite a bit of improvement, actually. As others have noted, the book tends to devote inordinate space to a couple of bands (Judas Priest and especially, Metallica) at the expense of other bands getting about a page apiece or worse yet, a paragraph. Pioneers Blue Cheer are not even mentioned until about 100 pages into the book and then it's only about four lines to note that an album of theirs released by the same guy who released Metallica had little commercial success. Frankly, whether Blue Cheer sold a million copies of that album or not is immaterial to the influence they had on a lot of musicians - a fact that this author doesn't seem to quite grasp. Rather, he seems to be very focused on bands that were big commercial successes, including Def Leppard and Van Halen - both of whom morphed into more hard rock, even pop bands as they gained acclaim (something the author, to his credit, does note) - and of course, the omnipresent Metallica. Metallica were a great band and an important part of metal history, I'll grant, but they pop up on about every other page and it just gets tired after a while. It would have been better if the author had simply devoted one discrete chapter apiece to the bands he thinks most important and covered other bands in the other chapters, rather than constantly returning to what a particular band was doing at X point in time. And, Metallica, while it inspired a legion of fans and imitators, is hardly the be-all and end-all of heaviness in everybody's book (especially since their debatable opinions on file sharing and their rather silly documentary appearance) I see by the reviews that other people noticed this besides me. I also agree with the comments that said the discussion of early metal origins was overly focused on Sabbath, giving the erroneous impression that Sabbath was the one and only heavy band for a decade and essentially existed and evolved in a vacuum.
The slavish Metallica worship starts to get really out of hand in the middle of the book around the time of the "Black Album", where one would think, from the author's florid prose, that every single metal fan on the face of the planet was grovelling in Metallicamania similar to early Beatlemania. Um, no. There are plenty of metal fans who actually lost interest in Metallica about the time said band "went commercial" or just preferred other genres. If you read metal forums on a regular basis, you know this already, and the author's incredibly biased viewpoint just becomes that much more annoying. Fortunately, he did get on to death metal and other topics before I lost patience entirely and threw the book in the dumpster.
The author also includes some rather bizarre, out-of-place content at times, such as lists of the best "punk" and "hardcore" albums. I love both punk and hardcore and lived in a town with a big crossover scene between those genres and metal, but there are lots of good punk books already (and not so many good metal ones, sadly enough) and I would have rather had the pages in this book that talk about punk instead talk about mo' metal.
The book is at its best when describing the highly personal culture of metalheads that kept the genre alive through the early 80s in the good ol' DIY manner of tape trading and 'zines, and continues to love the music today. The same culture was also keeping whatever punk or post-punk ethos still existed alive at that point before it morphed into "indie". To Christe's credit, he also manages to mention most of the classic albums of metal at some point, and the lists of albums therein provide essential listening for anyone who's new to the genre or needs to fill in a few time gaps over the last 20 years. The writing style is decent enough and the author comes off like a likable fellow, not someone who's showing off or trying to be a "rock writer". It's a fast and fairly easy read despite being the size of a dictionary, and contains some cool pictures and graphics to boot.
This isn't the be-all and end-all of heavy metal books, and to be honest I'd love to see something written along the lines of "England's Dreaming" focusing thoughtfully on a few regional metal scenes that DIDN'T necessarily produce million-selling bands. (Anyone want to write the story of Maryland doom?) But this is a good general overview and probably the best thing in book form that's out there for now.
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bias! bias! bias! by Leandro S. Oliveira (Brazil) 3 Stars
June 16, 2009
I have read many of the reviews and decided to write my own. One of the things that cannot be said about Ian is that his writing is bad or boring or anything depreciative. Although sometimes too poetic for my taste, the overall feeling when reading this book is of fluidity. The information, although biased to the extreme, flows smoothly in a well constructed text structure. I have to agree with many of the reviewers in the claim that this is not about the history of heavy metal let alone "the complete" headbanging history of heavy metal. I have been buying specialized magazines for over three decades now and I can safely state, based on the numerous interviews with the majority of bands in the scene, that Metallica is not among the three to five bands most cited as big influences in their careers. Undoubtedly, the most influential bands in the metal scene are Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Slayer, in this order. However, aside from Black Sabbath, which gets a wide coverage in the book (but only in the Ozzy era), Iron Maiden and Slayer are treated as if they were cult bands with a short career span. As a fan of black metal, I also think that there was a biased view and bands which are as big as they can get in this genre were left out with a single paragraph mentioning their existence: Dimmu Borgir. In conclusion, I recommend this book for its richness but with a warning for people who's been living in the scene for long.
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The Title of this Book Qualifies as False Advertising by Oliverio Casas (Montevideo, Uruguay)  1 Stars
March 22, 2009
The biggest problem with this book is that is not about Heavy Metal, it's just an Ok-ish Metallica biography. I don't really mind the fan-boyish writing, since that's the way I'd probably write about any of my favorite bands. What really bothers me is that whatever happenned before Kill 'em All is only examined depending on the impact and influence it would eventually have in Metallica, and whatever happenned afterwards is discussed depending on how it affected the bands career.
I'm not a writer or a journalist, but i've been a rabid Heavy Metal follower and collector for more than 25 years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much the author left out and how unimportant artists like Slayer, Helloween, Venom, Death, Napalm Death, Bathory, Kreator and Celtic Frost seem to be, at least according to this book.
Ok Ian, I get it, you wanted to write a Metallica biography but your editor told you the book would appeal to a larger audience if it covered heavy metal in general. At least you could've been honest enough to title it something akin to "The History of Heavy Metal as Experienced by Metallica". I would've bought it anyway, and wouldn't be as pissed-off, since I actually expected a book about the history of my favourite genre.
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PMRC by Joseph Adams (Superior, WI USA) 3 Stars
February 20, 2009
This is a PMRC book condemning popular metal bands since 1969/1970. However, one of the only satanist bands was King Diamond, and he's a born again Christian. These are Christian bands who got their reputations tarnished. It's like Bob Larson. Be warned.
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