"The Roots of Metal" Project

For the record, I don't think that "After Forever" is a metal song at all (i.e. it's more of a heavy psych/hard rock number in my opinion) but "Sweet Leaf" certainly is & it's predominantly centered around the modern-day understanding of the stoner metal sound as far as I can see.

This person's argument is completely invalid really. Stoner metal is not a scene. It's a subgenre. Only scenes or movements can be governed by limited time slots in history. For example, you could say that Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" isn't a NWOBHM release because it was released after 1983. If a song or album fits the technical requirements for it to be labelled as stoner metal then there should be no reason why people should feel shy about doing so. There are plenty of examples of new subgenre tags being created that encompass large chunks of historical releases. For example, we only recently admitted that there is justification for a dissonant death metal subgenre at the Academy but that doesn't mean that there were no releases that had that sound prior to that realization. In fact, it's impossible for a subgenre to become necessary if there's not already a reasonable scope for it to cover. The fact that this scope goes back so far in the metal journey is irrelevant really. It's my honest opinion that if half of the legitimate "heavy metal" from the early 1970's was released today then a large chunk of it would be labelled as stoner metal so it makes perfect sense to me that I should tag it as such.

 I was only referring to Sweet Leaf myself, Daniel. There are loads of examples of genres being backwards compatible. One example is Discharge weren't called D-beat when they started, they were termed Second Wave, like GBH and The Exploited. It wasn't until others started using the same drumming patterns that the D-beat genre name was coined. I'm also pretty sure that Cocteau Twins weren't termed Ethereal Wave and The Smiths weren't tagged as Jangle Pop until much later either. 

As most of the very early heavy metal came from the psychedelic scene, it had far more in common with what we now term stoner metal than the heavy metal of Maiden, Manowar or Mercyful Fate.

I would point out that every description I've seen of stoner rock and metal is that Black Sabbath is one of the primary influences. It's really not that silly that something that was an influence on a genre has a song in that genre. You could also say that Black Sabbath isn't Heavy Metal or Doom Metal either, considering that it took about a decade before those genres got going too.

(and I say this as someone who has absolutely applied strict time definitions to actual scenes like NWOBHM, it ain't the same thing)

This is like 30 pages late to the party but I'm revisiting the original post which poses two questions:

1. What percentage needs to be metal to qualify as a metal release?

2. What do you think is the ground zero release for metal?

My personal feelings:

Before I can answer that, we have to answer the endlessly debated question: What is Metal? 

I've thought about this a lot over 30ish years, and I personally believe it comes down to 2 components:

A) Does the band embrace the Heavy Metal community and accept the genre label?

B) Does the Heavy Metal community embrace the band as part of it's culture?

In other words, you must apply and be accepted. 

This is my point of view, but it leads to some common arguments as follows:

*Criteria A-Met, Criteria B-Not Met.
This situation describes bands like Ghost. The mainstream music scene wants to call them a heavy metal act, but for the most part they are often mocked in Metal circles. Many bands fall into this circumstance. Yes bands meeting criteria A have the technical label of being a metal act, but the community at large does not usually accept them.

*Criteria A-Not Met, Criteria B-Met.
Led Zepplin, and Deep Purple, are commonly considered along side Black Sabbath as foundational Heavy Metal. However, I know that Robert Plant and Ritchie Blackmore hated that label. Thus to me those bands are not metal, because they resented the genre-label. Robert said the term was silly, and Blackmore really hated it, he said it described noise and was listened to by knuckledragging morons I'm paraphrasing, but his quote was something very close to that. Therefore, in my book, Zepplin and Deep Purple are not Metal bands based on criteria A.
In similar fashion, Motorhead would not be a Metal band to me, despite the fact that I pretty much worship at the altar of Lemmy Kilmister. I play bass guitar, I have connected mutton chops, and I dress in a sort of heavy country-western fashion. However, for over 40 years the man himself was insistent "We are Motorhead, and we play Rock and Roll." I never dispute an artist as the ultimate authority of his own art.
ACDC is another example of this type of thing. They have some dark songs, they even talk about satan and hell, but for most people they fall solidly into the Hard Rock category, and they definitely look and feel more like a rock and roll outfit. 

*Both Criteria Met, but not all the time.
Metallica is a metal band, they accept the label 100%, and the metal community holds them in high esteem. However, Load, Re-Load, and St. Anger debatable are hard rock albums moreso than Metal albums.

So I acknowledge some holes in my own nomenclature, but I haven't found a better way yet. I'm open if you got something.

With that out of the way we can now move to the posed questions:

1. What percentage needs to be metal to qualify as a metal release?

Obviously for me it's got to be 100% as meeting both of my above criteria, and it has to be throughout the album too in image and feel. "She's so Heavy" and "Helter Skelter" are sometimes mentioned as early metal offerings, along with the heavier offerings from Cream, Iron Butterfly's "In a Godda Da Vida", and the band Blue Cheer. I've even seen cases made for old blues men like Howlin' Wolf and Screamin Jay Hawkins. Wolf's voice scared this shit out of people, and Hawkins would dress up in voodoo inspired costume and face paint as well as invoke smoke and fire heavily in his life performance. Neither man had access to the kind of electricity and distortion we come to associate with modern metal, but think of how blues influence Black Sabbath's Debut really was! Yet I wouldn't call any of this 100% devotion to metal, the blues men didn't have the electricity, and the hard rock bands didn't have the image. Image is important in heavy metal.

2. What do you think is the ground zero release for metal?

Basic bitch answer here, but it's going to be Black Sabbath's self titled debut album. That album cover, that ambience, that distortion, those subject matters. All of it undeniable 100% Heavy Metal. Every inch! It's true that at the time Black Sabbath called their music "Scary Rock and Roll", but when the term Heavy Metal was presented, it may have taken them a while to warm up to it, but they never expressed such distaste for it as Zepplin and Deep Purple members did. 

IF that doesn't satisfy you, and you insist that Black Sabbath preferred the Rock and Roll moniker then I would fast forward to...

Judas Priest "Sad Wings of Destiny" it meets all the criteria, and Rob Halford and the boys undeniably fully embraced the Heavy Metal label, and wore it proudly. 

I'm not going to go into what makes something metal or not as I spent years covering that on the Metal Academy podcast (the first few episodes which were predominantly about where metal originated from & what made it different) & have discussed it at length here on the website too but needless to say that it's got nothing to do with what a band says they are or whether the metal public embraces them. It's 100% about the musical techniques being employed & there are clear defining characteristics that relate to both rock & metal. For the "Roots of Metal" exercise, I used a benchmark of 40% metal being the absolute cut-off point which allowed a release to have just under half of its run time being classed as genuine metal. With that in mind, Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album is the first metal release but only if you take certain versions of it i.e. the US version or the Spotify version. This is because, if you examine each track in detail, you'll find that the only genuine metal songs on it are "Black Sabbath" (traditional doom metal), "N.I.B." (stoner metal) & "Wicked World" (stoner rock/metal) but they play a significant enough role in the way the album plays out for it to just sneak over the line for metal status by my criteria. "Wicked World" wasn't on all versions of the album which is why there are versions that meet the 40% criteria & those that don't.

Daniel, I love you brother, but we look at the genre in very different ways. The good news is there is room for both points of view.