Songfacts®:

• Written and sung by Styx guitarist James "JY" Young, this song has two layers of meaning. "Heavy metal" can relate to music, making it a send-up of authority figures who believe those head-banging songs are poisoning the minds of the youth. But the song also takes a jab at our tendency to look for pharmaceutical drugs for a quick fix:
  
  Get the lead out go for broke
  Pop your pills and drink and smoke
  Shoot those chemicals into your vein
  Anything to ease the pain
• Heavy metal poisoning is a real and very dangerous condition caused by exposure to metals like mercury and lead. James Young came across the term when he was studying engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
  
  "If there's too much heavy metal in your diet, that can mess with your blood cells and ultimately lead to heavy metal poisoning," he said in a Songfacts interview. "But it just seemed like a great title to work with. I am actually a heavy metal music fan, maybe the only one in Styx, so it just seemed like it was the perfect title."
• The song is part of the Styx concept album Kilroy Was Here, which envisions a future when an authoritarian regime takes over, bans rock and roll, and uses a robot army to keep the citizens in line. James Young plays the part of Dr. Righteous, who heads the Majority For Musical Morality (the MMM). In this song, the Dr. Righteous character rails against the evils of rock and roll, insisting it will destroy the young.
• Styx put some backward messages in this song to mock the idea that bands were using "backmasking" to embed hidden messages in songs, encouraging anything from suicide to satanism in an effort to corrupt American's youth. Led Zeppelin was famously rumored to have used backmasking on "Stairway To Heaven" (they didn't), and a church in Iowa was making news for burning albums they thought were doing the Devil's bidding.
  
  The Kilroy Was Here album is a warning of what could happen if groups like this get their way.
  
  "Heavy Metal Poisoning" opens with a deep, processed voice saying something unintelligible, an obvious mockery of backmasking. After some opening guitar, the first line in the lyric is "What the devil's goin' on?" again making the satire clear.
  
  That opening message when reversed and sped up is revealed to be Latin:
  
  Annuit coeptis, novus ordo seclorum
  
  This means "He has favored our undertakings, a new order of the ages," with "He" meaning "God."
  
  The phrase is printed on the Great Seal of the United States, which you can see on the back of the $1 bill surrounding the pyramid. So the new world order portrayed in the album could be... The United States!
  
  Around the 2:55 mark there's another backward message, this one in English: "Satan holds the secrets." Again poking fun at those who are convinced there is a connection between rock music and the Devil.
  
  Note that the album was released in 1983, two years before the the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) pushed to get stickers on albums they deemed explicit.
• Styx didn't release this song as a single but they did make a music video for it that helped bring together the album's concept. It was directed by Brian Gibson, who shot a short film that was shown at the beginning of the Kilroy Was Here tour and formed the basis of the music videos made for the album. In the "Heavy Metal Poisoning" video we get a good look at James Young playing the part of Dr. Righteous. He battles Tommy Shaw's character, who fights him with rock and roll.
• Kilroy Was Here was a polarizing album for Styx. It was the brainchild of their keyboard player, Dennis DeYoung, who went all-in on the concept. The subsequent tour was essentially a stage production of the album, with the different band members acting their roles. For DeYoung, who loved this stuff, it was right in his strike zone, but Tommy Shaw and James Young weren't into it.
  
  The lead single was "Mr. Roboto," a huge hit that got lots of airplay on MTV. Shaw and Young wanted nothing to do with it, and Styx didn't play "Mr. Roboto" (or any other songs from the album) again until 2018.
• The song took on new meaning for James Young when his wife Susan developed a debilitating medical condition. "My wife had a rare illness she was born with and it took a while to diagnose it," he explained to Songfacts. "One of the things the doctors thought might have been wrong with her was heavy metal poisoning. But it turned out it was something very different having to do with the heme biosynthetic pathway, called acute intermittent porphyria, which in theory runs in some of the royal families in Europe. That's kind of a genetic malfunction – your body doesn't create the heme molecule in the same way that would be ideal, so you can have a shortage of the molecule heme, which is at the center of hemoglobin."
  
  Susan died in 2022.