Throughout modern history, there have been few things in popular culture as stigmatised as heavy metal music. Coated in all forms of macabre imagery and dealing with dark and provocative themes - metal has always sought to test the limits of what is socially acceptable. 

 In this episode, we’ll be telling many tragic stories about people who’ve suffered the ultimate loss and wound up putting their grief into the wrong places.  We’ll examine how this stigma affected heavy metal as a music genre, its fans, and even the connections between metal music and our patron saint Billy Joel himself.

Here to help us tell this story is our guest, co-founder of the International Institute of Metal Studies Brian Hickham. First he explains what is actually covered by the term “heavy metal.”