The Importance of Iron Maiden
This is a repost of an older article written in September 2015. As of this date, Iron Maiden still remains completely relevant and on top of their “game” with a new mobile app release! Read on:
With Iron Maiden’s new release “The Book of Souls” already out and this fresh new website ready to see the light of day (fans will get the reference in the domain name), I thought it would be a good time to talk about the importance of this quintessential British heavy metal band.
How could a singular metal band be “important”? Easily. First of all, it’s worth looking at the at the historical and sociological context of heavy metal. Deena Weinstein, in her central text “Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture” describes the genre as a prominently blue-collar movement that took shape in 1970s Great Britain as a response to 1960s counterculture (Is there anyone more blue collar than Tony Iommi, who lost fingertips to an industrial sheet metal machine before forming Black Sabbath?). This is noteworthy because metal provided a stylized release from the shackles of mainstream rock music, which spawned arena bands, top hits, and the threat (or, perhaps reality) of sonic homogenization. Punk also promised this release in the mid ’70s, but in a more bombastic and straightforward way. It was in these critical youthful moments of creativity where punk and metal collided that Iron Maiden was born. If you know anything about the history of Great Britain in this time period, it was exactly the right time for such a noisy birth.
Knowing all this gives you a sense of place for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that Iron Maiden became a key player in (one of the first reasons that Iron Maiden is important: historical significance). From the start, the band penned songs with epic titles befitting of heavy metal but wrote rougher riffs than some of their metal peers and fielded a vocally dynamic lead singer named Paul Di’Anno that could bridge punk styles. This was already a sign that the band had potential to reach a wider audience and could make a significant impact on more than just the kids attending their shows at Cart and Horses or the Ruskin Arms in London.
Internally, one of the favorite “sports” of hardcore Maiden fans is debating the value of the singer “trade” that resulted in Bruce Dickinson becoming the front man of the band. While Dickinson could have a rough edge to his voice, he was practically an opera singer compared to Di’Anno. This would naturally change the style of Maiden’s corpus musicorum going forward (I think I made that term up, by the way). Fans of early era Maiden see this as the exact moment that the band lost its liaison to the punk attitude and its “blue collar” nature. Was this a negative acquisition though? Most fans disagree.
If you want to look at this as a business, Steve Harris (the band’s bassist and leader) made a sound decision. Dickinson had the chops, marketability, and general good temperament to fit in with what he wanted the band to become. Those epic song titles we mentioned the band penning earlier? The production of these songs would double under new vocal stewardship. And this brings me to another reason that Iron Maiden is important: they helped raise the intellectual caliber of the genre and also exposed fans passively to history and poetry.
I remember listening to some of my first Iron Maiden albums that I borrowed from my cousin Mike and getting wrapped up in the words to songs like Alexander the Great and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Little did I know that in less than ten years I would be voluntarily taking college courses on both topics and eventually getting a Masters Degree in History. I know for a fact that there are others with the same story; I’m just a small voice in a larger chorus that praises the contributions that the band indirectly made to their intellectual lives. It’s also always a fun fact to drop on the uninitiated that Dickinson went on to receive an honorary doctorate in music and is a recognized polyglot. But I digress.
A business (or a band) has ups and downs, but Iron Maiden sustained itself through dedicated fans. Eventually Dickinson quit and was replaced by Blaze Bailey, and Adrian Smith left to be replaced by Janick Gers (both would end up returning, though). Any other band would have crumbled under huge lineup shifts, but the signature of Maiden was etched permanently on the minds of their fans due to the staying power of their brand (KISS is another example of this but there’s a lot of contentiousness about their “authenticity” to fans). This is another reason why Iron Maiden is so significant: from a music business standpoint, they were a low cost/high profit investment centered the band’s unique sound and perfect branding that spread by word of mouth. The Iron Maiden logo? One of the most recognizable typefaces from a metal band ever (I don’t know that much about graphic design but I do know it’s much more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of other metal band logos). Eddie? When I made the parallel to sports earlier, I wasn’t stretching far because that dead guy is one of the best mascots ever. Instantly recognizable. Even here in Seoul where I am living now (not a huge metal market), I can see Eddie on t-shirts being sold at niche shops. In Tokyo, I heard people pointing out my Iron Maiden shirt even though my Japanese is rusty. The brand has reach.
Speaking of branding, did you know that Iron Maiden was it’s own video game in 1999 named Ed Hunter? Yes, there were a few console titles and PC ports that featured other bands earlier, but Maiden’s shoot-em-up was probably one of the first for metal that managed to bridge new media with a small business mindset (Synthetic Dimensons, a UK based company, designed the game).
Without getting too long-winded and losing the point of this article entirely, there are probably a million other reasons that a fan could give for the importance of Iron Maiden. What about Iron Maiden’s influence on the hoard of bands than came after it? That galloping trot style is the inspiration for countless artists. However, the point of this article was to argue perhaps the less opinionated and taste-centered reasons for their worth. Even a non-metalhead could see the worth in a band lasting for almost 40 years with the global reach it has.
So, when you read an article about Lady Gaga professing her love for the band, don’t hate her for some perceived lack of true awareness. She’s just an Ed Head. She’s in love with the momentum of the band, which pulls with it a lineage that goes back decades to the grassroots incubator of styles in 1970s England and beyond. She loves a band that eventually “graduated” to an arena act that manages to keep an authentic brand and musical style that resonates with a diverse set of people born years after the band’s inception. Fathers and mothers are passing down the band to their kids, and those kids are spreading the word too. Even if they don’t all know the “factual” importance of Iron Maiden, now you do. And you can let them know.
Up the Irons.
