alternatehistory.com

IOTL, Heavy Metal started evolve when musicians were doing a lot of musical experimenting, and technology had come far enough to create better amps, that were both louder and better suited for using feedback in a way that didn't suck. By the time all this was going on, rock was already a well established and popular genre, which had all sorts of interesting sub-genres, from which early metal pioneers drew inspiration from.

What I propose is pushing the technological aspects of the development of metal back 20 years, to the mid 40's. During the 40's, music amps existed, but they were crude things that weren't experimented with very much and for some reason were mostly used for steel guitars. And nobody had thought to use feedback in a musical way, that I know of.

In the 40's, rock didn't exist. Instead, Jazz was the main genre, although country, blues, and gospel were around, and all of these had various versions and sub-genres.

So what sort of music would we get if better amps started to become available during the mid 40's, amps that could handle heavy distortion without sounding awful, that were specifically made for solid-body electric guitars (which for the sake of this WI we'll assume see some actual use due to better amps), and could be experimented with easily without resorted to extremely crude tactics like deliberate damage.

For the record, I have no idea what this entails technologically speaking, so it might be ASB. But alternate music scenarios don't seem to get posted that much.
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