Martin Popoff Interview

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May 28, 2003

Martin Popoff is one of today's most prolific metal journalists. In addition to his duties at Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles magazine, he's written several books, is working on several more, and also writes for many other magazines and web sites.

Popoff's latest book is "The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs Of All Time", from ECW Press. It's a fascinating study of the results of a worldwide poll about people's favorite metal songs, including quotes from the musicians and others about nearly every song. Popoff has an MBA and started as an employee of the Xerox corporation, but the life-long metal fan began writing about the music he loved and eventually was able to quit the corporate world. I've read nearly all his books, and looked forward to interviewing him. He did not disappoint.

Chad Bowar: How did the book "The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs Of All Time" come about?

Martin Popoff: I thought it would kind of be a neat idea. I'm a list guy like everybody else. I love lists and I love polls. So we decided to do a big Heavy Metal poll and get people's songs. So what we did it is we polled people through magazines and web sites all over the world. I interview rock stars all the time so I'd ask them for their list and some of those lists are printed in the book. I just thought it would be an interesting idea to write reviews of songs, something I've never done before. We've got artist quotes for probably about 460 or 470 of the 500 songs in this book.

What surprised you most about the results?

Probably the extent that there is quite a bit of thrash in there that did well: Megadeth, Slayer, Testament, Overkill. There is a fair bit of New Wave of British Heavy Metal in there as well. In terms of surprises, one thing perhaps is that there weren't as many big 70s artists in there that I thought would be. I think the demographic of the people voting is probably in the mid '20s or younger, so you get a lot of people really big on '80s metal of every type. Another big surprise is that I was happy that people didn't vote for things that were flavor of the month. Most of the stuff in here is indeed of all-time.

Is the popularity of heavy metal making a comeback in North America?