Bruce Dickinson doesn’t care about the metal subgenres.
In a new interview with ATMósferas Magazine, the Iron Maiden frontman was asked about the ‘combination’ of the genres to create an entirely new metal genre. He explained the flexibility of metal:
“Metal is not a completely pure, definable form of music. I mean it’s got all kinds of different facets to it. So, now, what’s heavy metal to one person is, like, ‘No, that’s not heavy metal. That’s classic rock,’ and all this kind of stuff. They have all these categories, and I absolutely have no f*cking interest in any of them at all… All I listen to is, ‘Hey, is that a cool track?’ It doesn’t matter if it’s, for an example, if it’s Sepultura or whether it’s the Scorpions or whether it’s Cinderella or whether it’s Uli John Roth, I don’t give a sh*t. All I think is, ‘Hey, is this a cool piece of music?’ That’s it.”
The rocker then explained what caused him to think that way:
“And that’s what I was like when I was growing up, because nobody had all these ridiculous categories, like 150 different types of metal. I mean, it’s, like, how many different varieties of the herpes virus are there? There’s just as many bloody different types of music. And it’s insane. So, I just listen and think, ‘Does that piece of music move me in some way?’ That’s it. It’s as simple as that.”
Dickinson Gave Up Trying To Define Heavy Metal
Iron Maiden has been around since 1975, and they invented the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Although they have been defined as the founders of ‘heavy metal,’ Dickinson himself gave up on trying to define the genre. He explained during an episode of ‘Charlie Rose’:
“I’ve given up. There’s no point in even trying to define it. It’s defined more by other people than it’s defined by me. ‘Cause when I started out listening to music, there was no such thing as heavy metal. Metal came out of something that was called heavy rock. Heavy rock was simply an offshoot of blues rock — you know, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and things like that, and Free, and all those bands. They weren’t heavy metal, but they kind of came into the heavy metal orbit, and then the whole world of music became polarized. It became very niche; everybody was put in their little silos.”
You can watch the interview below.