Why am I passionate about this?
My new book, I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven, is among other things, a love letter to heavy metal. I am a lifelong music obsessive: a record collector, concertgoer, maker of mixtapes, sewer of patch jackets. When I’m not writing or reading I’m playing guitar with the amp turned all the way up. And I have the tinnitus to prove it. Some of the books on this list are about metal, others are simply imbued with its rebellious dionysian spirit. But every damn one of them goes to 11, I can assure you of that. Enjoy!
Christopher's book list on for headbangers
Why did Christopher love this book?
If you don’t know Poppoff, you should. He’s a genial Canuck Youtuber who also happens to be the world’s most prolific music reviewer.
An inveterate headbanger with an unquenchable thirst for loudness. In this—the book for which he’ll surely be remembered—Poppoff turns his eye on the whole prehistory of heavy metal, breaking the music down into component parts, and tracing those components backwards through time.
From psychedelia to early rock n roll, blues, jazz, classical music, all the way back to the Vikings, the Ancient Greeks, and the Battle of Jericho in 1250 BC. If there’s a better researched, more thorough, or more sweeping book about loud music on the planet Earth, I ain’t aware of it.
1 author picked Who Invented Heavy Metal? as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
It's one of the great debates in musicology and the answer is as complicated as it is hotly contested. Popoff's Who Invented Heavy Metal? provides the most detailed, well argued, reasonable, ridiculously complete, and most lively and readable telling of the early history of heavy metal yet, arming the argumentative headbanger with all the facts and figures one needs on hand to win those bar room bets around this provocative question.
Ultimately, Who Invented Heavy Metal? aims to be a book that doesn't limit itself to heavy metal fans. The book provides wide instructional scope of teachable moments through unfolding,…
- Coming soon!