A song like Metallica’s “Fade to Black,” for instance, actually helps you escape your personal darkness rather than encouraging it. Where less cultured ears hear only noise and rage, metalheads recognize nuance. Amid the deafening drums and growling vocals, the ideal metal tune relates power, resilience, and even hope. What millions of fans around the world have realized is that a good metal song transports you. Over time, heavy metal has topped the pop charts, served as the basis of hit movies, saved the day in TV shows, and even signaled prosperity around the world. Years removed from its initial rumbles, metal is now a cultural force. To be a metalhead, you’re rejecting normalcy, you’re willing to believe in yourself and visit your dark side because you know the eardrum-slaughtering decibels and aggressive lyrics are the crucible in which you feel something new and unique. In those five-plus decades, fans of metal have embraced the genre’s songs as intense declarations of individuality.

At the same time, its true believers have created extreme global offshoots like death metal, doom metal, and black metal. Judas Priest tuned into Sabbath’s darkly jagged melodies to create their own intricate, law-breaking mini-epics, Metallica revved up Priest’s tempos to give headbangers cases of whiplash, hair bands like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot spruced up the music for MTV, and nu-metal mutants like Korn and Slipknot gave it a bleak post-alt-rock and hip-hop edge. In 1970, Black Sabbath convincingly evoked the true essence of evil with the lumbering, three-chord opening guitar riff to the song “Black Sabbath,” consecrating the first pure heavy-metal crusher, and the ripples have been spreading virulently ever since.

Thousands of years after the Bronze and Iron Ages, the true Metal Age dawned half a century ago.

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