What is the difference between punk and metal?

Answer 1

Most people can tell the difference but I would suggest (as a very broad generalisation) punk tends to be faster and the lyrics more political whereas metal tends to be heavier and slower with more solos but like I say, some punk bands combine metal styles and some metal bands use punk drum beats/lyrical styling etc

Answer 2

The punk rock sound tends to be more rustic and primitive than the metal sound.

Iggy Pop = active since 1960

Ozzy Osbourne = active since 1968

The MC5 formed in 1964, labeled as a PUNK band by *Wikipedia* (seeing protopunk as a subgenre/genre of punk).

If you want to go further back, you can see that Garage Rock genre is sort of the same as Garage Punk Rock where sound and music is concerned. In fact, nowadays when people talk about "Garage" music, its hard to tell if they refer to garage rock or garage punk rock or garage punk/rock.

Garage rock: There are 5 derivative forms and subgenres of Garage Rock with the word Punk in them, only 1 derivative form and no subgenres with the word METAL

Heavy metal subgenres, there is no Garage Metal Genre per se, only Grunge.

The debate is somewhat pointless as as there is also a sugenre of both punk and metal called Punk Metal/Metal Punk, so they can both agree anywhere along the lines.

Also to consider, the word "PUNK" is more ambiguous than the word "METAL", creating a more broad spectrum from which to label something as "Punk", as it is also a music genre characterized by not wanting to be labeled and being hard to fit into a mold. I mean, really, what is punk? Joey Ramone himself said it was an attitude.

IMO, if we go very broad about it, Punk is just broader as it is more of an attitude not so much about music. We can even call cavemen with weird hair punks, but calling the "metal" sounds too high tech in my opinion. See what I mean? Besides, punk Haircuts about Indians and stuff, thats very primal stuf. Sure there is a Metal attitude, but mostly characterized by BEING HARD, not quite the same as pure rebelliousness and anti establishment; Metal has been a more mainstream music generally speaking. This makes pinning down what is actually Punk very difficult as they do not want to be seen in the big screen.

Metal is not so political or so much about "things not related to music" as all those crazy punks and their anarcho-punk, radical views, etc. There is no Anarcho-Metal. Punk is more about anarchism than metal IMO, making anything chaotic easy to chategorize as Punk, for metal its not so easy to call something Metal.

Semantics.