How Metallica Created Extreme Metal

Abstract Along with many other metal fans and metal bands in the early 1980s, Metallica helped create an “extreme metal” paradigm that has dominated how fans, musicians, and critics think and talk about metal and its history ever since. Metallica’s thrash metal style and their ideology of progression toward musical extremity emerged through their selection, imitation, and iteration of songs and styles from their closest predecessors, a scene in the United Kingdom known as the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM). To demonstrate how these shifts from the NWOBHM to thrash metal occurred, this chapter cross-references Metallica’s timbres, guitar techniques, cover songs, and original compositions with their discourse and actions as fans, collectors, and tastemakers. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s theory that performances involve “repertoires” and “acts of transfer” to create a new kind of synthesis between musical history and social history, this chapter shows how new genres emerge gradually and democratically from everyday discourse about genre distinctions and groupings, alongside artists’ original expression of new musical ideas.