Every now and then I make thematic playlists based on the diverse and exciting world of my favorite types of music, hard rock, and heavy metal, and listen to them with great pleasure because there's no better way to release the stress and boost your morale and energy level than enjoying the music that you really love. As a part of these thematic journeys, I'm beginning a series of articles dedicated to the hard rock and metal songs I enjoy the most in each year from 1970 to the present day.
In my attempt to make a playlist for every year
I will follow two criteria:1. I'm going to choose twenty songs or ten in the case of the seventies(a period in which hard and heavy music was still in its early years, so there weren't too many bands to choose from) from studio albums released in a particular year.
2. For the sake of diversity, there will be one song per album, but there can only be two songs from a band in the rare instances in which a band has created two studio albums in the same year(Black Sabbath is the best example which comes to my mind, as their first two albums were released in 1970).
I have chosen 1992 as my starting point of my musical journey because it is the year in which I bought my first cassettes with heavy music, starting with Iron Maiden's "No Prayer for the Dying", but I have no pattern to follow, so I will probably choose the following year at random. Anyway, here comes my 1992 hard rock and metal playlist in alphabetical order:
1. Alice in Chains - The Rooster
2. Black Sabbath - T.V. Crimes
3. Danzig - How the Gods Kill
4. Def Leppard - Tonight
5. Dream Theater - Pull Me Under
6. Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
7. Helmet - Unsung
8. Iron Maiden
- Fear of the Dark
9. Joe Satriani - The Extremist
10. Manowar - Metal Warriors
11.Megadeth - Symphony of Destruction
12.Ministry - N.W.O.
13.Motorhead - Hellraiser
14.Obituary - The End Complete
15.Pantera - Mouth for War
16.Paradise Lost - Pity the Sadness
17.Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
18.Testament - Electric Crown
19.Tiamat - The Sleeping Beauty
20.Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You
As you can see, this is a diverse list, which embodies my desire to listen to different styles of rock with an open mind, so my playlist takes into account the popularity of grunge and alternative metal in the first half of the nineties, but it also contains plenty of traditional heavy metal songs. The were a few cases in which choosing only one song from an album was quite a hard decision to make(Pantera, for example, had an exceptional album, and almost every song could be chosen) and others in which the choice was obvious, such as Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction", a standout track of a good, but not fabulous album. I would also like to point the fact that there isn't much extreme metal on it(only Obituary falls under this umbrella), so it's very unlikely that a person who doesn't listen to metal regularly might have headaches after listening to my playlist.
Finally, after creating this playlist, it's time for me to enjoy it; back in 1992, if I had had such a compilation I would have pressed the "Play" button of my cassette player, but nowadays a simple click will do the job, so let's rock!
