Credit Where Credit Is Due

They get it right, for once:

Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid. Then John Kay of Steppenwolf sang the phrase "heavy metal thunder" in 1968's Born to Be Wild. But it first reached print as a synonym for hard rock via Mike Saunders (later Metal Mike Saunders, singer for early-80s punks the Angry Samoans), in a review of Humble Pie's As Safe As Yesterday in Rolling Stone from 1970, describing the album as "more of the same 27th-rate heavy metal crap".

The same year, punk rock was coined [in Rolling] Stone's Detroit rival, Creem, via Dave Marsh, who used it in a ? & the Mysterians live review ("Needless to say, it was impossible to pass up such a landmark explosion of punk rock, even after two nights running of Tina Turner"). Punk magazine came along a few years later.

Two origins we did not know:

But sometimes an artist assigns a title that becomes something else. Power-pop was coined by Pete Townshend in 1967 to define the Who, but wound up being what Eric Carmen of prime power-pop practitioners the Raspberries described as "groups that came out in the 70s that played kind of melodic songs with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming". Not to mention the endless acolytes who mimicked them.

Often, technology drives musical changes, so equipment plays its role, too. Acid, noted above, is one example. So is dub, short for the "dubplate" (duplicate platter) Jamaican sound system operator Ruddy Redwood ordered in late 1967 from Duke Reid's pressing plant. The recording was On the Beach by the Paragons, and the engineer, Byron Smith, accidentally wiped the vocal. Reid played it alongside the vocal version; the response was so strong he began putting instrumentals on the B-sides. Eventually, creative engineers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry would take the dub side into whole new areas of bass-heavy abstraction.