They have some heavy songs such as The Knife, but most fo their stuff is relatively soft. They are far off from metal i would say or hard rock for that matter.

I reckon it was much earlier than that - the riffing and heaviness is evident in the Kinks and the Who respectively, and the "amps up to 11" thing is almost completely inherent in the music of Blue Cheer - who are at the root of grunge as well, IMO.

Next under consideration are the Cream, Spooky Tooth, Bakerloo, High Tide, May Blitz and a swathe of heavy blues bands around in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Next to these heavyweights, Genesis are very much at the lighter end as a generalism - but there's no disputing that Prog Rock absorbed influences from ALL genres, and Genesis at their heaviest wrote some stonking riffs.

Also, consider that Metal and Prog Rock can have a lot more in common than hardcore fans of either genre would really like to admit.

King Crimson, Led Zeppelin and Rush were some

The very first metal bands. Not Genesis.

First there gothic and now there metal. Whats next, Genesis are Punk?

ProgsCerebrum wrote: I have been thinking about this for a long time...early genesis was often dark/gothic and the guitar parts occasionally got really heavy...not to mention hacketts finger-tapping.  Of course its been said that bands like Sabbath, King Crimson, Led Zepplin, etc. made up the foundation of what we know as metal today.  But in my opinion, Genesis belongs in that group, even if they dont have that blatant "metal" sound...people tend to overlook their heaviness.  Just my two cents.

You're high

The Letter M wrote: Rush was more Metal than Genesis in the 70s. Listen to songs like By-Tor & The Snowdog, The Necromancer, Bastille Day, and even some of 2112 are more metal than Genesis was, IMO. -Marc.

Hey... the discussion is about the foundations of metal sound, and RUSH was very late to be mentioned here. They are from the middle of the seventies, and the hard approach of them was not innovative and very influenced by LED ZEPPELIN sound...

But i agree with the most people here, GENESIS didn't influenced primordial heavy metal pioneers like others great prog and hard bands that have really made it... like ZEPPELIN, CRIMSON, SABBATH

Heavy metal was forged with the first three notes of Black Sabbath's first album.

Nothing before that was even remotely metal, IMO.

Er, don't take this the wrong way, but were you repeatedly dropped on your head as an infant, perchance?

genesis a gothic or metal band!!!!!!

Heavy Metal starts with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the fabulous album released by Iron Butterfly in 1968!

This is their second release. Their first it's not a case it's titled "Heavy"!

Genesis metal??? Get some rewax

I have never considered them in any way 'metal' related, although I know they were an influence on numerous metal bands, like Iron Maiden and Van Halen (apparently Eddie Van Halen's style was very influenced by Hackets 'tapping')

I think their 'heavier' moments were really just that; moments. These heavy sections sat alongside predominantly light or symphonic passages of music.

I never thought of Genesis as a heavy band. In early seventies they were an adventurous band, messing with various musical styles, but they're definitely not heavy. Cannot judge a band by some elements or a few songs. If you only listen to "Long Gone Geek", you'd probably call Procol Harum as a metal band...

IMO, "You Really Got Me" (The Kinks) was the first metal song!! This was released in 1965... Believe me or not, The Rolling Stones version to "She Said Yeah" (check out for "Out of Our Heads - UK version" - the one with the same cover of "December's CHildren") was another heavy 1965 song...

Then of course, there's Helter Skelter by the Beatles. That was probably the first metal song...

Well, I can see his point but I wouldn't say they're the "first" metal band. The Knife, The Musical Box, Hogweed, Moonlit Night all have some quite heavy elements to them (especially the versions on the first Genesis Live LP). It's riff based material over a persistent beat - the basic formula of what many people identify as "metal."

Yes, there are other bands who qualify more readily with the "metal" sound (esp Rush, Purple, Zepplin) but these early tracks of Genesis simply have a metal element. AFAIC, the early stuff up until the time Gabriel left, are far more accessible to a broader audience than anything that came later.

While we're at it - what was "Whodunnit?" Sometimes (when I can bear to listen to it) I think it just might have been a response to Punk ... ?

MPA

troy wrote: ProgsCerebrum wrote: I have been thinking about this for a long time...early genesis was often dark/gothic and the guitar parts occasionally got really heavy...not to mention hacketts finger-tapping.  Of course its been said that bands like Sabbath, King Crimson, Led Zepplin, etc. made up the foundation of what we know as metal today.  But in my opinion, Genesis belongs in that group, even if they dont have that blatant "metal" sound...people tend to overlook their heaviness.  Just my two cents. You're high

Just my thinking!!!

Andrea Cortese wrote: Heavy Metal starts with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the fabulous album released by Iron Butterfly in 1968!

You are absolutely right! Way back in 1968 Iron Butterfly defied the conventional genre-classifications of the time. They were labeled as Psychedelic, but not the same way as Quicksilver Messenger Service was. IB, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin & others were the precursors of what is knows today as Heavy Metal.

Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were the precursors of heavy metal, not Genesis!

BaldFriede wrote: I always like to learn about new words; this one ("stonking") was in none of my dictionaries. A web search brought up this: STONKING [Q] From Peter Weinrich: “From time to time The Economist likes to indulge in a little verbal slumming, and does so this week (May 12–18). On p59 it refers to the prime minister who ‘may have a stonking lead in the polls’. The only meaning I ever knew for being stonked was being stoned, sloshed or otherwise drunk—does The Economist mean his lead is enough to get drunk on, or make him drunk with success? Either way it seems a new twist to an older word.” [A] The Economist isn’t actually slumming, but using an informal word in moderately common use in Britain. Stonk and its relatives are an interesting bunch: with all those strong consonants they’re thudding, active, strongly masculine words. And there may be two separate origins involved. According to the Macquarie Dictionary, stonkered in Australia can mean drunk, which is presumably the sense you know, though it also has associated ideas of being defeated, exhausted, done in, or lethargic, as after a large meal. This comes from the verb stonker, which at one time could mean to kill, but is now the action of outwitting or defeating somebody. It is generally said that this in turn comes from an old Scots term stonk, originally and oddly the stake in a game of marbles. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of it was in John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language in 1841, in which he said that stunk was “the stake put in by boys in a game, especially in that of marbles”. According to the Concise Scots Dictionary, this is now only local Scots dialect, and it suggests the Scots got it from local English dialect (do try to keep up), which might have originated in stock, a store, presumably the bag or other container the marbles or money were kept in. The Australian use seems to have come out of soldiering—at least, the first examples in the Australian National Dictionary (hang on a minute while I move some of these books out of the way) are from military publications at the end of the First World War, in 1918. That, you will probably feel, comprehensively deals with one sense of the word, but as yet it doesn’t help with the way that it turns up in The Economist piece. That meaning is well known in Britain, as I said earlier, where a stonker is something which is large or impressive of its kind. Hence stonking, a word of vague positive emphasis: “That’s a stonking good idea”, what Tony Thorne described in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang as “an all-purpose intensifying adjective”. It seems to have been especially in vogue around the end of the 1980s. The word was popularised widely in 1991 when the annual BBC charity telethon, Comic Relief, used the word in its catch phrase; there was even a song produced, The Stonk, by Hale and Pace and the Stonkers, which briefly reached the top of the UK charts (“Good evening, here is the six o’clock stonk, over the nation there’s a brand new craze, You see it going on wherever music plays, It’s funky and it’s punky and it’s impolite, You can do it by day but it’s better at night”; the word stonker has since become a slang term for an erection; to what extent the lyric of this song had anything to do with it is uncertain). Now it could well be that this sense of stonking came from the other—after all, there was plenty of opportunity for British and Australian soldiers to exchange slang during two world wars. But it seems more probable that the British sense comes from military jargon, in which a stonk is an intensive artillery bombardment. The OED has examples dating from 1944. It is sometimes said that the word in this sense is a mangled version of the formal description, Standard Regimental Concentration, which seems a terrible stretch. But the word was certainly in wide use among soldiers post-war and seems to have spread out from there. As a former professional translator I am always grateful for learning new words. Thanks a lot!

That's a STONKING definition, BF!!!

RoyalJelly wrote:      Hello, people, anybody remember a guy named Jimi Hendrix? He came to England in 67 and blew away all those British guitarists with his heavy sound, and they all started to go that way...Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, the Stones, the Who, you name it. Jimi invented that big guitar sound, and to give credit to others who emulated him is just a distortion of history. Let's not forget the Cream either, Clapton was very influenced by Hendrix.      But Gensis? Even Yes had heavier moments...some of Yessongs. Crimson of course was much, much heavier...

He did Purple Haze,Manic Depression etc. in 1966.

^ Certainly NOT Crimson. Others have pointed to Iron Butterfly (68), Purple (68), Zeppelin (69), Sabbath (70), etc.

This is relevant, too:

Steppenwolf  -- Born to be Wild (1968):

"I like smoke and lightning -- heavy metal thunder...."

sample SAT question (for the americans)

Genesis is to heavy metal

          as

Velvet Underground is to reggae.

genesis is my favorite band and i understand that some of their moments can be 'heavy' in the mental sense of the word but musically they're pretty far removed. 21st Century Schizoid Man, in '69, is far closer to 'metal' than anything genesis ever did.

unless you count We Can't Dance...