PIECES OF MIND: The Intellectual Tradition Of Iron Maiden

Iron Maiden’s particular innovation comes not only in the form of musical adaptation but also in an open exhibition of intellectual interests. While heavy metal to this point certainly based its lyrics and its ethos on the sources that influenced the artists’ thinking, Iron Maiden, as often as not, explicitly cites these sources, paying homage to the larger, predominantly Western, intellectual tradition, borrowing freely from literature, history, cinema, and philosophy in the same way they have extracted musical elements from the bands that preceded them. Like curious college students on tangents inspired by the core curriculum, much of Iron Maiden’s lyrical output interrogates the ideas that precede it. Rather than taking an idea and fashioning a song from it, they share the idea itself, a public service to an audience they obviously believe both deserves the truth and will understand it. Iron Maiden takes its fans as seriously as its enterprise, inviting all “that hath understanding” to reckon the source of the song they have offered.