Here's some cool stuff I dug up pertaining to this topic;
Metal historian Ian Christe describes what the components of the term mean in "hippiespeak": "heavy" is roughly synonymous with "potent" or "profound," and "metal" designates a certain type of mood, grinding and weighted as with metal. The word "heavy" in this sense was a basic element of beatnik and later countercultural slang, and references to "heavy music"—typically slower, more amplified variations of standard pop fare—were already common by the mid-1960s. Iron Butterfly's debut album, released in early 1968, was titled Heavy. The first recorded use of heavy metal is a reference to a motorcycle in the Steppenwolf song "Born to Be Wild," also released that year :"I like smoke and lightning/Heavy metal thunder/Racin' with the wind/And the feelin' that I'm under." A late, and disputed, claim about the source of the term was made by "Chas" Chandler, former manager of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In a 1995 interview on the PBS program Rock and Roll, he asserted that heavy metal "was a term originated in a New York Times article reviewing a Jimi Hendrix performance," in which the author likened the event to "listening to heavy metal falling from the sky." A source for Chandler's claim has never been found.
In addition to this, metal is responsible to the CORNA, or devil horns, This is the hand gesture(palms out, thumb, pointer, and pinky fingers extended, middle and ring fingers in palm) popularized by the greatest singer in the universe, Ronnie James Dio. But of course the universes biggest egomaniac, Gene Simmons of Kiss, claims to be the first to make the gesture in concert.
Long live metal!!, thank the spirits of the world that "glam rock" came and went rather fast. I am however seeing a reemergence of guys dressing up like women and singing like men in the eye liner make-up genre of EMO "music". To each their own but in 10 years most of these "Me-Too-Lou's" are gonna see pictures of themselves and say, "What in the heck was I thinking?........."
Give everything but up.
