The genres of metal music - from heavy metal's elemental blues origins to death metal's revival of classical traditions through the modern interpretation of free jazz - clearly define a progression of thought in the evolution of the most extreme counter-culture movement ever. As society has gradually come to recognize the corrupt of its understanding at levels increasingly close to basic perception, metal has evolved with more abstract and nihilistic structures that despite their fearsome aesthetic represent a vitality and consciousness to the chaos most humans anathematize.

Any study of metal should begin with the foundations of genre lines not as categorization of music but as understanding of artistic motive and historical evolution of the ideas behind the music. Death metal, for example, clearly cuts new ground away from rock 'n roll with elaborately atonal and dynamically tone-centered pieces often using chromatic intervals and nonscalar structures; this was misunderstood by many "experts" as being incompetence until someone in the mid-eighties pointed out its similarity to classical music, which, being composed on the basis of melody, relies on dynamic tone-center building and counterpoint for harmonic identity.

Similarly, black metal was considered random and broken music until its intepretation of harmolodic counterpoint could be isolated and studied by metal anthropologists, including those on this site. By the same token it would be ridiculous to slander heavy metal, a genre born in the jazz-blues-rock fusion of Black Sabbath (some say inspired by the abstract interpretation of the blues familiar to Jimi Hendrix), as a poor production of melody when in reality its focus is the cyclic incrementation of harmonic points of reflection within the sestina of a scale.