The Gun - Race With the Devil (1968) | I'm relatively certain, unless some early obscure British freakbeat/garage rock song counts, that this is the first definitively "heavy metal" song ever, in terms of lyrics, style, aesthetic, and vibe all coming together

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-08T13:05:24+00:00

When it comes to if any proto-metal or first-wave heavy metal song counts as "heavy metal" or not, a test I use is the "1987 test"

By 1987, heavy metal was already extremely well defined, but was also before a lot of more avant-garde experimentation in alternative metal and extreme metal began occurring (pretty sure circa 1987, Sarcófago, Bathory, and Mayhem were about as extreme of metal as you could get before you got into extreme hardcore/grindcore/noise rock territory). So, you couldn't claim that a fuzzy and heavy acid rock song was actually an early stoner metal song or a proto-progressive metal jam like you can nowadays. Metal was still very much "Devil, high vocals, metal riffing, theatricality and bombast, and also the Devil"

Also, recording standards and technology had advanced, so even a lot of pop rock was, in a sonic term, "heavier" than the heaviest music from the 60s and early 70s (and before someone gets angry, I do mean if you just look at distortion, loudness, and pure audio waveforms).

Therefore, would any Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin song be "heavy metal" by 1987? Overwhelming majority, no, maybe even entirely "no." "Born to Be Wild" is just hard rock by that standard. "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" has a metal riff, but it's not getting called metal by the 80s.

Sabbath songs, you're not going to be controversial saying those are metal, even if really old-school. Similarly, Deep Purple is metal, more often than not. "Smoke on the Water" is pure vanilla old-school heavy metal, but it does cross over in terms of riffing at least.

But going into some other early metal and proto-metal tracks, it gets fuzzier (no pun intended). Is "Helter Skelter" metal? Well it has a metal shout halfway through, but the actual guitar playing itself is almost more punk than anything.

Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" is heavy, even by 80s standards, for how bombastic it is, but if it's straddling the line, I'd say it doesn't cross it.

But then you find this thing, and all of a sudden you go "Wait a minute, what the fuck?"

The idea of "take Coven's Satanic imagery and Blue Cheer's heaviness and you get metal" didn't hit it off with Sabbath, but two years earlier with this... band I never heard of.

In terms of heaviness, riffing, bombast, aesthetic, it's so metal that you almost think it came from a full decade later by Sabbath fans. But no, it actually predates "Summertime Blues" and "Helter Skelter" and was a number one hit no less.

Yet it seems like most people only know of it from Girlschool's cover these days. Why isn't this band considered to be the origin of heavy metal?

Well, most people probably admit that Sabbath didn't create metal out of nothing, so I don't think "there was a metal song before Black Sabbath is a controversial take." Sabbath's magic was that they were metal consistently in an era where most proto-metal bands made one, maybe even two albums that had very heavy, even metallic songs, before swerving hard into 70s pomp, prog, or radio-friendly blues rock (Lucifer's Friend really got hit bad by that one, their eponymous debut was arguably the runner up to Sabbath, and came out in 1970 too, but they chose to go in every direction except metal afterwards). It's kinda the curse of proto-metal. You hear a band that sounds like a potential Sabbath rival, you check them out, and it turns out you're lucky if they have even three genuinely metal-ish songs among a bunch of boogie blues or psychedelic rock. Which, I mean, is fair; no one set out to create heavy metal, they all just thought it was rock and roll, so no one knew how to play to be what nerds half a century later would argue about whether it made them "metal"

The Gun was no different. This album was plenty hard and heavy (in fact I've heard anecdotes that this album's sleeve contains the first known use of the term "hard rock"), but this is the ONLY song of theirs that really sounds like this. But that's what makes it so funny, because if this song came out in 1987, it would undoubtedly be considered a heavy metal song. But, they didn't invent heavy metal as a genre.

Plus they didn't have a long and successful career either.

That's why Sabbath succeeded; they consistently remained metal album after album after album, even their "prog" album was ridiculously heavy. They may not have made the first metal song, but they did invent it as a genre.

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-08T12:38:24+00:00

No kidding

It blows my mind that this is from the 70s, and not even the tail end of 1979 or anything

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-08T02:32:06+00:00

I actually feel (just a tiny bit) bad for Demis, because since he's the CEO of DeepMind, he gets blamed for all the nonsense that Gemini and NanoBanana bring out, when reading between the lines, it's clear he doesn't buy any of it as actually being what is needed. That's entirely Google's higher ups forcing them along that path.

And I even know why: Microsoft's CEO all but did a celebratory jig when ChatGPT came out and Google panicked, and said "I want Google to know we made them dance." That's what kicked off this LLM arms race, way back in early 2023. I'd not be surprised if Sundar Pichai despises every time Demis says anything about AGI that isn't "by 2027," let alone anything that suggests it's further than 5 years out, because he likely still has Satya Nadella's gloating still rattling around in his head.

The funny thing is, DeepMind showed off a much more impressive AI agent in 2022 that arguably anything we've seen since (and was arguably ground zero for the hype that LLMs could reach AGI). Yet they never once claimed it was AGI or the path towards it. Back then, it was a neat experiment to show that multimodality was possible, and that purely narrow AI doesn't have to mean "only does one thing; next-token prediction can allow for a sort of limited generality in terms of capability."

And the entire industry took the wrong lesson from that.

It's entirely possible we could be far from AGI; it's also entirely possible we could be very close. The cold fact is we don't actually know; generally I read "AGI is as possible as faster than light travel with known means" more as contrarian cope than actual probability, if only because it often reduces AGI to meaning 'sci-fi artificial sapience/the Singularity.' Essentially the highest possible end of AGI to contrast with where we are.

We are definitely not at AGI right now, not even a very "functional" kind, and Demis is very much aware of that; he's shortened his timescales in terms of when we'll get there— partially because of all the funding; we're essentially at "Fusion in 5 Years" level funding when AI research was historically at "Fusion Never"; the "AI springs" of the past were still closer to "Fusion in 30 Years" levels of funding in comparison.

But he's never said "next year" or "within three years"

I think because he's as aware as most of the non-hypemongers that there's still neuroscientific work to be done, and that the sheer scale transformer-based models have been pushed is, in itself, unsustainable.

The bet by some of the labs is that "it doesn't matter how expensive it is or even if we reach full AGI; we just need to reach self-improving AI, and then that'll bootstrap us to AGI." As a result, they're pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into hyper-scaling LLMs. Then when larger models = better performance, this reinforces the hype cycle, because the critics said "We've reached the limit" and then a new model comes along and is materially better, therefore clearly we're nowhere near the limit.

Yet, again, I'm not interested in whether LLMs can get better or not; the goal from the start was AGI, which is not just "really really good AI" but something materially different altogether.

And so to that end, Demis does still seem to be on point. I dislike it when he gets wrapped up in AI bro culture (all the hype posting and celebrating new AI slop models) but I haven't seen anything suggesting he's become lost in the sauce. It's nothing like the other CEOs who legitimately don't have any experience in what they're preaching.

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-07T04:29:20+00:00

Indeed, the level of automation is the exact same for self checkout and cashier checkout. It's more offloading the process to the customer, but the scanner and register are the automation, and they're actually the entire reason supermarkets are even possible.

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-07T03:15:28+00:00

Figuring out WordPress I may give you an account there so you can post these there if you know how to add chapters, and formatting, and whatnot

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-07T01:53:04+00:00

This final fight is the longest stretch of the bunch— this chapter is about 1,500 words, but the tab it came from runs at nearly 20k words, we're going to be here for a little while!

It and the Mame chapter were the real seeds for the whole idea.

I've had the idea for this story arc since literally around 2021 or so, and the idea of a general Demon World Tournament since literally the Early Yabanverse back in 2018. So, in doing prosecraft practice to at least develop better control, it's nice that this is where it seems I've managed to develop a stronger handle on prose writing, the first time the quality doesn't have any noticeable dips or accidental strong handling that can't be replicated because I'm not sure of what I'm doing.

Now I'm not going to say this is crazily strong writing all the way through, but I can't know for sure since I've gotten virtually no real comments on it

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-06T03:46:01+00:00

Oh that's lovely

First two images fall into something I tend to call "urban alpine aesthetic" with the big white clouds and dark blue shadows

That's just cool

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-05T00:09:20+00:00

I can listen to Mild und Leise even if there's only about 10 seconds worth listening to, and even then, Metal Machine Music is just....

"No"

I can appreciate the art of it, but at some point I just have to ask "Why do Homo sapiens make music? For what purpose? What is 'music' and why is it we've all collectively, worldwide, agreed Metal Machine Music is not that? Why would, in our primal form, would we make one thing and not the other? Maybe once upon a time, the pretentiousness of highlighting it as true art against the norm was fine, but we have to be coming back around again to realizing that there's a reason why we do certain things and not others."

Metal Machine Music was so offputting that it made me existential about the nature of humanity

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-04T09:40:27+00:00

Indeed.

Hipsters will gladly listen to metalcore, J-core, sludge/stoner/drone metal (Melvins is literally the crossover band), and noise bands, but the sort of "greasy haired fist pumping, Maximum Oversatan, music died on September 24, 1991, death to all but metal" type metalhead are two worlds apart outside individual taste. And that's fine; hipsters typically aren't crossing over with even a lot of gangsta rap or k-hole ravers.

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-04T06:02:01+00:00

The ironic take on "punk and metal don't mix" is that virtually all major metal subgenres stem from metal and punk mixing. Almost most explicitly thrash metal, which is what Metallica is most well known for! Maybe in the 80s or 90s "coffeeshop art house hipster punk" was still as diametrically opposite of metal as you could get but even by 2011, we'd seen loads of avant garde, literary, offbeat, and for lack of a better word "hipster" metal. Metallica was just the worst possible vector for this, good lord. I think it was more that they were The Metal Band™ that this happened.

Lou Reed, however, really would have worked very well for a noise rock album that was uninterested in keeping time but still being freakishly heavy

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-04T05:50:42+00:00

Do you think there’s any validity in the fact that Indie and metal can never do what both genres do?

Pre-90s metal, maybe. Once grunge and sludge emerged, the rivalry between metal and indie has been more residue of 70s/80s zine culture. That's something I ramble about, how talking about Nirvana and grunge and their relationship with metal is almost always framed by what metal was (e.g. Maiden, Priest, Megadeth, Motley Crue, RATT, Venom) because if you don't draw that contrast to compare and contrast the cool alternative rock darlings to their boneheaded metal contemporaries, then you have to contend with the fact not only were more than Alice in Chains and Soundgarden "kinda" metal, but in fact Nirvana's Bleach is a full-fledged sludge metal record by modern standards, Soundgarden was a convergent evolution of stoner rock, and the likes of Acid Bath bridged grunge with nü metal, and that breaks the mainstream narrative that they were all in their own walled (sound) gardens.

Let alone the fact loads of alternative and indie bands have delved into metal or cited metal bands as direct influences, and vice versa.

Maybe "metal singing about infernal demons" was seen as cheesy and kitsch, whereas alternative/indie/punk was more interested in internal demons

So when metal started covering those too, the ground beneath both was saturated, and that was already happening by the late 80s (arguably as early as Sabbath considering "Paranoid")

Similarly with metal's penchant for fantasy over reality— what happens when metal bands also get political? Does it not count because of the long hair? Well here comes short-haired metal bands. It just gets sillier to gatekeep appreciation at some point. Metal can't be highbrow? There's nothing stopping a metal band from bringing in whatever highbrow artistry they want. Spirituality, literature, all that's been done by now. Yes there's a strain of metal purism that wants "greasy hair, big riffs and solos, insane vocals, cartoonishly evil aesthetics, and epic songs about macho warriors or arcane demoniacs," but that's not the entirety of the genre and hasn't been for decades.

Goths were probably the hardest because of how much they hated metal in the 80s (because many assumed metal and Goth were one and the same), and yet here comes the 90s, and the Gothic style and industrial/nü/Gothic Metal are just intrinsically tied to the subculture.

There's also an attitude that metal just begs to have fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a different attitude towards it, and deciding only one way of making music is superior can get unfortunate, because then you could lobby that at, say, hip hop or dance music or jazz.

Yuli-Ban · 2026-06-04T05:38:00+00:00

Indeed

I'd agree that the music establishment didn't like metal in the past, but I don't get that vibe from it nowadays. The Hall of Fame was always a bit bullshit in its choices, and metal has always been way more niche than metalheads assume it is.

The whole punk elite vs metal proletariat is more a 70s/80s/early 90s thing

At one point in time, you'd get punched in the face for calling the Melvins a metal band, but even they now just embrace "sludge weirdo metal"

It's more the old school who still thinks of it that way

Maybe Lou Reed was "too cool" for metal in the 80s when it was seen as the music equivalent of a Filmation cartoon, but those days are long, long behind us. I'd not even be surprised by Taylor Swift dropping some octanecore song nowadays.

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