The 2024 Martin Popoff short eBook about the pre-1970 songs that are crucial to the invention of heavy metal.

Welcome back to another Martin Popoff Top 20. The idea for this regular feature began strictly as a look at songs, and you can see that there are a bunch of those here at Zunior. But it’s expanded since that into a number of areas both more scholarly and more goofy. It’s been pretty satisfying constructing these because of the pleasant surprise that some of my most on-the-edge views and writing have been showing up regularly, not to mention picks and rankings that some of you might find completely out-to-lunch.

I’ve left these chronological so we can watch the narrative build. I mean, ranking wouldn’t make much sense. We could weight for heaviness, but that’s pretty much increasing year by year and we shouldn’t penalize a song just because it’s old. Importance is hard to define too, although one could base that on popularity, or the songs that rise above the radar when people think about this question. So yeah, I think it’s best to chuck out the notion of ranking this time. And yes, my book on the topic is a long one, at 120,000 words, and it ends in 1971. Obviously I went into a fair bit of detail there, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ve excerpted liberally from that book to create the below list. One final note, I suppose I did lean toward famous songs, with the rationale being that those are the tracks that would inspire the next generation. Anyway, let’s get to it.—Martin Popoff

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Bonus! - This short 11-page eBook is available here as a full high-resolution PDF to provide images at the highest quality. 

eBook File Size - PDF format – 1 MB