Otohiko wrote:On the subject of Metal - I'd actually like to have some recommendations of metal that IS based on anger, for one...
This is heavily handled by the third of the three essays I mentioned above...guess I'll have to do up all three now.
This is the first one, which I got a running jump on last night, since it seems to be the most popular. It contains a lot of history and is godawful long, so anyone interested in stuff that's ontopic for the thread can scroll on past. Be warned, it takes a while, but you will eventually get to the end.
HEAVY METAL AS A DEAD TERM
AN EXPLORATION INTO THE DEVELOPMENT, STYLES, AND RELATIONSHIPS OF TOO MANY SUBGENRES
"Heavy metal", as an idea, has been around for at least 35 years. As a consequence, it has become devoid of real meaning, much as "rock" had become in the mid-'80s, when it also had been around for 35 years and spawned a plethora of substyles. Those who remember the mid-'80s will remember that in an environment with indie, new-wave, and hair-metal groups all being accurately described as "rock bands", in addition to those in rock subgenres that had existed before, it was impossible to get an idea of what a band sounded like by simply describing them as a "rock band". The spectrum had become too broad, and the term had lost effective meaning. The same is true for "heavy metal" today; if a band is described as a "metal band", no useful information is provided. From this description comes a sense of vague menace, and the notion that guitars are probably involved somewhere. The idea goes no further with accuracy.
Since the idea of "heavy metal" is useless as an accurate description, people who want to approach metal intelligently have to deal with a forest of subgenres that have sprung up over the last 35 years, some of which are vitally important and some of which do not actually exist. As with most things, the best way to understand this mess is to begin at the beginning.
Unfortunately, us metalheads will never agree on when precisely this was. Most people will go no further back than 1970, and Black Sabbath's self-titled debut, for the first metal album, but some will include Jimi Hendrix and Led Zepplin as early practitioners of heavy metal, and a few will cite the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" as the first metal song. Some will even go back to Robert Johnson and his supposed deal with the devil -- and provable emphasis on the dark and the diabolical -- as the entry point of the metal spirit. What we can all agree on is that metal did not come from nowhere, and Black Sabbath were the first to make a regular gig out of it: dark or mystical lyrical subjects, heavily riff-based song structures dominated by heavy, often down-tuned guitar, and a conscious opposition to prevailing norms, in this case the peace-and-flowers hippie mindset. In the first decade of its existence, metal was defined by its riff emphasis, and Deep Purple, Mountain, and Jethro Tull were legitimately considered metal, which was at the time this weird, heavy, and fairly stripped-down variant of hard rock. Even at this time, metal was drawing critical fire for being alternately too pompous or too numbskulled, a situation which has still not resolved -- is this music for D&D geeks or for burnouts? Arguments for bands appealing too heavily to one of these "reject" groups still appear every time metal gains prominence, and the question of why metal is critically "wrong" will probably not be resolved anytime soon.
The spirit of Black Sabbath lives on, sometimes annoyingly cloned, in today's doom metal and stoner metal bands. These are the closest to hard rock of the currently existing genres, and sound, intentionally, very close to vintage Sabbath. Queens of the Stone Age (and their precursor band Kyuss), Fu Manchu, and Spiritual Beggars present a good sample of the stoner sound, and current recordings from Cathedral and Candlemass will deliver a lot of the present sense of doom metal.
Meanwhile, back in the late 1970s, metal was evolving and beginning the explosive radiation that has continued basically unfettered to the present day. There are principally three bands of note here, starting from a roughly common point and developing in totally different directions: Iron Maiden, Motorhead, and Venom. All three of these bands belonged to a "movement" (more like the metal end of a general DIY music explosion in late-'70s/early-'80s Britain) called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a term coined by Malcom Dome of the metal magazine Kerrang! which will be borrowed from heavily in later citations. All three bands added punk influences to the earlier strain of metal as developed by Sabbath and Judas Priest, and all contributed to the coming emergence of thrash metal, but the way and degree that the punk influences were applied, and what
beyond thrash metal they laid the groundwork for were completely different.
Iron Maiden took mainly tempo (and parts of Steve Harris' "lead bass" style) from punk, something that was fairly common in the NWOBHM. Here
the main distinction from earlier metal was that all this stuff was
fast, in a genre that had historically been very slow. Maiden's song lengths did not go down, though; they used effective fast solos and instrumental parts to maintain the normal metal song lengths of five to six minutes with material at least double the previously normal tempos. Due largely to superior playing and writing talent, they became the band that emerged from the NWOBHM, and through that exposure had an immeasurable influence on the later genre of power metal and the escape element of metal's appeal.
Motorhead, by contrast, did not so much put punk into metal as metal into punk. It's possible to see Motorhead as a punk precursor to hardcore, a NWOBHM precursor to thrash, or simply, as Lemmy stated the mission, the rock'n'roll band so dirty, nasty, and fuckin' loud that your lawn would die if they moved in next door. From a metal perspective, Motorhead integrated fairly technical solos with the punk attitude of rawness, and laid the foundations for the similarly fast, aggressive, and yet technical thrash metal movement to come. Motorhead has also kept the lines of communication (often strained by stupid drama) open between punks, metalheads and hardcore kids, resulting in crossover thrash and grindcore in the late '80s and the metalcore/NWOAHM fusion of the present day.
Venom's contribution was not technical (which they were fairly bad at) or in style (which Motorhead was already doing better). Venom launched a rebirth of Satanism in metal, making a statement that this form of music was permanently anti-authoritarian, even against the final authority: rebelling not to change the world to something better, but rebelling for the pure sake of doing so. The result was some fairly forgettable music, a lot of which did not have to do with Satan, and a deep influence on thrash metal that would only be broadened and deepened as death and black metal came into their own. Through Venom, the ideas of Satanism, dark or morbid subjects, opposition to all authority, and active evil that Black Sabbath had fairly shallowly treated in the previous decade became permanent in metal, and in some regards dominant.
On to the United States, in the early 1980s, as the NWOBHM was running out of steam and MTV was coming into being. The first left a void that was filled by thrash metal bands, particularly the Big Four, taking what had come before to another level, and the second guaranteed, through another form of metal deriving from the NWOBHM, that practically nobody would hear about the Big Four on the scale they deserved for almost another ten years.
Whether the process was adding more Aerosmith/Zepplin-style hard-rock tropes to NWOBHM to make it more accessible, or taking the street punk vibe of the local L.A. scene to make their glam rock more artistically respectable does not matter. What does matter is that Motley Crue and the hair metal acts that followed them were purpose-built for the nascent MTV and the excess of the '80s: big hair, big guitars, big productions on stage and on video, and no more depth than a line of coke scraped on a mirror. Very few hair metal bands ever did anything musically relevant, but they did serve as an introduction to metal for countless people who eventually moved on to something with more substance (as would the nu-metal bands of the mid- to late '90s), and sold a lot of records to people who were never going to listen to real metal. Those that, like Skid Row, actually got heavier after their pop debuts, may have paved the way for the mainstream emergence of the Big Four at the start of the '90s. Hair/glam metal still exists today, though given the great difficulty of artistic progression, most of it is either bands from the '80s playing through their back catalog, or newer bands like Crashdiet and Wig Wam that are doing it within the boundaries laid down in the '80s for nostalgia purposes.
Who were those Big Four again? That would be Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer, four bands that started basically within a year of each other, did an enormous amount to establish and develop thrash metal, put out their most essential record in or about 1986, and achieved mainstream recognition with a critically acclaimed disc in or about 1990. Metallica and Megadeth's histories and catlogs are well-known, so there is no need to plow over old ground; the bands of interest from the Big Four, for our whirlwind tour of subgenres, are Slayer and Anthrax.
Anthrax are an odd duck among thrash metal bands in the amount that they have changed over their career; their debut is pure NWOBHM, the Belladonna material can be seen as a prescursor to the brief funk-metal scene at the start of the '90s (funk + thrash metal; Living Colour are a great example as well as a good listen), and the Bush material is very similar to, but more thrashy than, the sort of "post thrash" that Metallica has been practicing since the release of the Black Album. They also did rap metal first and arguably best, working with Public Enemy to bridge the racial divide between the gangsta-rap and thrash-metal sides of the "urban blight music" (Peter Steele's words, more about him later on) of the 1980s, and probably laying the foundations for Cypress Hill's metal turnings and Ice Cube's Body Count project as well as Korn et al's pretensions at being rappers. Perhaps because of Anthrax's variability, or perhaps because the forces pushing metal and rap in their respective developments were too strong for a merger to be sustained or particularly interesting, Anthrax's legacy is principally one of what might have been.
Slayer, by contrast, have the legacy of what has become: to the extent that the underground is ruled by the extreme, which it is, to the extent that abrasive thrash riffing is the name of the game, which it is almost in every case, to the extent that lyrical direction is occupied by morbidity, violence, and/or evil, which it so often is, the world of metal looks back to Slayer as a starting point. Often mistaken for a death metal band, Slayer are thoroughly thrash, from Tom Araya's screamed vocals to Kerry and Jeff's tightly-wound riffing to the up-tempo (but not blastbeat) barrage from Dave Lombardo and Paul Bostaph. Metallica and Megadeth both had significant influences on the mainstream of metal, and also great importance to the underground, but the bands that emerge now often sound much more like Slayer than any of the other Big Four.
Reign in Blood and
South of Heaven are both essential, and will shed a lot of light on the musical origins of basically everyone who emerged from the underground in the nineties.
The Big Four defined thrash metal in 1986 (with Anthrax a year later with
State of Euphoria), with
Master of Puppets,
Peace Sells, and
Reign In Blood, but already in that year the seeds of what was to come were being sown. Two bands, one in California and one in Sweden, released records that would open new stages, and in Florida a young guitarist had fired his whole lineup and was frantically searching the North American continent for people who could keep up with him in skill and brutality. In Germany, a bunch of teenagers with a jack-o-lantern mascot were preparing a revolution that was anything but brutal, and a four-man troupe out of New York, including the former guitarist of the punk band the Dictators and a fromer Black Sabbath roadie, were about to make a statement.
Spinal Tap first articulated the idea that there is a fine line between genius and stupid. With
Kings of Metal, Manowar planted their flag on that line, stuck out their oiled, musclebound chests, and dared all comers to challenge them. It is entirely legitimate to say that Manowar are largely made of cheese, rather than steel, and that their music, when it's technical and interesting, is chiefly technical for the sake of showing off rather than for the sake of moving the song somewhere. But it is also impossible to deny how important Manowar are as ideologues for the concept of heavy metal as a culture and a musical idea; even those who work more with the catharsis aspect and say "we're dealing with real issues, we're not cheese merchants like Manowar" still actually believe in the ideas that Manowar stand for: the idea of metalheads being a self-selecting breed apart, that this music gives us a common identity and a collective purpose, and that by devoting oneself to heavy metal, you can better withstand the challenges and frustrations of modern society. When I first got
Kings of Metal, I was already steeped in the underground and listening to more underproduced eastern-European kvlt black metal bands than most metalheads know exist. I was still so struck by "Heart of Steel" that I copied out the chorus, which is still in my wallet to this day. Words to live by, even if the delivery on the record is pure cheese.
Manowar practice what they call "true metal", the strand of heavy but melodic metal that goes back from them through Priest to Sabbath, and which can be safely extended to cover the earlier American school of power metal, which includes stuff like Savatage, Queensryche before they went on Mission Alienate The Fans, a lot of the old New Renaissance Records catalog, Anvil, and Sanctuary (before they became Nevermore), and is what people mean when they say that real power metal isn't all this happy happy Euro crap. Unfortunately, history is against them; much as metal has been redefined by thrash (nobody would consider Jethro Tull a metal band today, though they were considered as such 30 years ago), power metal has been redefined by the movement spreading out from Helloween, those German kids with the pumpkin mentioned above.
As with Sabbath and the idea of metal in 1970, Helloween did not come from nowhere. The groundwork for their success had been laid by Accept, and, indeed, the whole of the German rock continuum, which was a lot more accepting of the zany than that in Britain or the US. In retrospect, it seems simple to take the speed of thrash metal and put it together with Iron Maiden's melodic leads, stir in a few radio ballads, and top it off with Englisch lyrics, but it was certainly revolutionary at the time, and it didn't hurt that the two
Keeper of the Seven Keys records were very good discs, with fun, whacko liner notes/art (all of which has been lost on the CD releases; I was fortunate enough to play both these records on vinyl, with the full notes, when I was at the college radio station). Power metal basically grew from there; Kai Hansen left Helloween a few years later to form Gamma Ray, and also did some guest work with Blind Guardian as they evolved from a fairly pure thrash band towards the power metal act that they are today, and the ball that would roll forward to produce HammerFall, Freedom Call, Iron Fire, and a host of other happy, heavily melodic German and Scandinavian bands that people on this forum like and I don't care about was set in motion.
But if the forces of Good and happiness were on the move, so were the forces of....
EVIL. A guy under the name of Quorthon in Sweden released a record on Combat about the same time, and was faced with the dilemma of incredible success (for an underground disc), but no way of touring behind it, because there was nobody else in Sweden willing to play music this extreme. Thus the pattern of one-man-bands, "warnames", and stumbling blocks to commercial success that would define black metal in the future was already in place, from the first Bathory album on.
Bathory, also, did not come out of nowhere. The stripped-down, very rough, underproduced, DIY take on Venom-influenced thrash metal that is the
Bathory album had precursors in Sarcofago and Celtic Frost (and the previous incarnation of that band, Hellhammer), but Bathory drove the idea forward steadily, and with a grim focus, on
In The Sign Of The Horns and subsequent records, and were an enormous influence on the Scandinavian metal scene, which was going to go from "backwater with, like, King Diamond and maybe Europe except they suck" to world prominence in the 1990s, largely on the back of bands in Bathory's heritage. Quorthon did not start black metal by any means, but he made black metal Scandinavian, and gave the Norwegian and Swedish scenes the pole that they would hang their hats on in later years.
Finally, back in California, Possessed put out that
Seven Churches record alluded to above, and illuminated a change that was happening in the scene which would come into full focus the next year. In 1987, Kreator released
Extreme Aggression and Death gave the world
Scream Bloody Gore. If you play these records back to back to back, you'll notice little musical discontinuity: raw vocals, extreme riff-driven thrash, blasting tempos, subjects of evil and violence. But Kreator is a thrash metal band, Death is a death metal act, and Possessed sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle. There is a continuity between death and thrash metal, and the line, especially in those early records of the late '80s when the style was crystalizing, is difficult to find.
Death metal, for a proper treatment, merits an essay of its own, covering the subtle differences between Florida, New York, Birmingham, and Stockholm, and that's before we even encounter At The Gates and the movement they spawned. This aside, death metal grew organically and internationally in the late '80s and early '90s, moving forward by turns in various locales. The basics of guttural "Cookie Monster" vocals, heavy double-bass drumming, and dense, extremely complicated and technical guitar riffage solidified early, with different bands adding different variations on the theme. Chuck Schuldiner (the Floridian who had to go to Toronto and San Francisco in search of bandmates) finally found a sequence of musicians who were up to his musical vision, and made death metal progressive, melodic, intellectual, and brutal at once, a path that was also followed by Atheist and Cynic; Morbid Angel, Deicide, and Vital Remains emphasized the evil, Satanic, and anti-Christian conceptual aspects. In New York, Suffocation and Immolation compacted the riffage even tighter and with more deviant sounds; Napalm Death in England crossed death metal with crust punk to yield grindcore, and in Stockholm Entombed and Dismember began building songs around grooves rather than riffs, an idea that would be continued by Six Feet Under and Babylon Whores. With so much diversity, it's legitimate to look at death metal's relation to metal in the same way as hardcore's relation to punk, or metal's relation to rock: the substream most likely to become self-sufficient on its own internal influences, and move forward with only a loose connection to the movement that spawned it.
Even as death metal was making this worldwide radiation, it was also taking a conscious turn away from itself in a fairly small local scene, where the musicians got sick of guys in tracksuits bellowing about evil, but not actually doing anything about it. Oystein Aarseth and Kristian Vikernes, among a handful of other Norwegians, decided that metal needed more rigor in its attitudes toward evil, and less polish and commercialism.
Of course, few people have heard of them under these names. But the names of Euronymous and Varg, as well as the exploits of the Norwegian Black Circle are common knowledge among modern metalheads, partly because of how important their contribution, true black metal, has been, and partly because the story around it (not repeated here), full of cannibalism, murder, pigs' heads on stakes, mutilation, dead raven huffing, church burning, and complete and total insanity is as perfect a mythology of heavy metal as ever could be desired. Between about 1989 and 1993, a handful of musicians and fans in a backwater country went absolutely batshit insane, and in amidst the stupidity and criminality was also the release of a lot of music that changed the way people looked at metal and rocketed Norway to the first rank of metal countries.
True black metal begins, like death metal, with the vocals, screamed or shrieked to the far edge of the human vocal cords and of intelligibility. The guitars and bass come in, trebled out, overdistorted, through budget or damaged amplifiers for extra hiss and crumple, playing riffs either hypnotic or ear-slicing. And then there are the drums; the proper Nordic blastbeat is not that difficult to do once, but physically draining to do continuously, in time, for several minutes without mechanical assistance, because triggers, like proper production and working amplifiers, are not
true. Of course, it's not as unilaterally simple as this, and Emperor, Immortal, and Burzum made their fame adding conventional musicality back on top of the "true" base, but the place in the spiritual cold dark northern forest that Mayhem and Darkthrone's first works come from is the place that all black metal can go back to for a creative shot in the arm, the absolute unfettered expression of abstract evil in musical form. Black metal as it is still builds on the legacy of Bathory, but the second, Norwegian, generation has given it much deeper and stronger roots than it had before.
While all this was going on, there was a band in the university town of Gothenburg, Sweden, that was taking black metal concepts but
not going totally nutso as a result of them. What they were doing was working with ideas from death metal, black metal, hardcore, and thrash metal to create something that was still death metal, but a different sort of death metal than had existed to this point. With death metal in the creative flowering that it was going through in the early '90s, At The Gates were still strongly within that continuum. When they released
Slaughter of the Soul in 1994, it was immediately recognized as an epochal record, but what was not realized at its release was how much influence they had over other bands in their area.
In Flames and Dark Tranquillity both broke in 1995 (
Jester Race and
The Gallery, respectively). Hypocrisy, a Stockholm band previously more in line with the Florida tradition, detonated a Gothenburg-influenced bombshell in 1996 with
Abducted (though 1994's
The Fourth Dimension has many of the same elements, in a slightly less mature form, it doesn't have a hit as big as "Roswell-47"). You more or less couldn't throw a rock in certain parts of Sweden without hitting someone who was in a band playing death-derived metal with black-metal-influenced vocals, melodic guitar leads, and rhythmic structures derived from a mishmosh of hardcore, black metal, and thrash. The Gothenburg or NWOSDM (New Wave of Swedish Death Metal, referencing the earlier Entombed/Dismember/Grave/Hypocrisy scene as the first wave and the NWOBHM acronym of a decade earlier) wave came and went, taking with it At The Gates (who broke up to yield The Haunted and Tomas Lindberg's Project Of The Week), but the original and musically self-sufficient bands continued on, and inspired others who took up the cause in the time from the late '90s to the present.
A fair bit of this was in the United States, thanks to the tail end of the tape-trading scene and the nascent Internet, which has basically destroyed the local isolation that used to keep metal bands from reaching audiences. However, the media was not on the same page, so that "eating At The Gates' lunch" was often reported as "sounds like Shadows Fall". Of late, there have been so many of these "American NWOSDM bands with an extra scoop of hardcore" that someone has actually coined the term NWOAHM, New Wave of American Heavy Metal, to describe it. I'm not certain the genre really exists. A listen to Still Remains, Shadows Fall, or Killswitch Engage shows more elements drawn from hardcore like breakdowns and clean vocals, but little that was not present in the NWOSDM at its heyday. They may be dodging the "death metal" label for PR reasons, but the riffs they're playing were not transmitted from Slayer directly, but filtered through Death and At The Gates.
This brings us up to date, but there is a bunch of stuff that exists but has not been covered. The question that this forum's metalheads will ask at this point on this subject is easy to predict: where is teh pr0g? The answer is simple; teh pr0g is everywhere, all around you, in every previously illustrated genre.
Prog metal is another dead term; you can make any existing genre of metal prog by stirring in influences from the progressive rock of the 1970s and other general weirdness. However, because prog is inherently original and unique when properly done, there is not much room for an evolving trend. When you do prog and stoner metal you get Led Zepplin; when you apply prog to NWOBHM, you get Iron Maiden's post-Blaze work. Add prog to thrash and you get anything from Nevermore to Meshuggah; prog and death metal yields Cynic, Opeth, Death's
Human record, and later Edge of Sanity. Mix prog and grindcore and you get the Dillinger Escape Plan, Candiria, and Cephalic Carnage; add prog to black metal and you could get anything from Sigh to Arcturus and late Borknagar. Add prog to a NWOSDM band like Dark Tranquillity, and you get....well...Dark Tranquillity. Bad example. Prog and power metal is the most common combination, though; virtually everything rubyeye likes falls under this caption.
Also omitted to this point is the stuff that I have an abiding interest in: weird genres that are probably dead ends in terms of metal's development. This includes stuff like Type O Negative (Peter Steele's band, from above), which is a meld of already developed concepts in metal and gothic music, and groups like Agalloch, Antimatter, and Scholomance, that are more metal by idea than by music at this point. The most major of the probable dead ends in viking metal, a subgenre that emerged from black metal, did its thing, and at this point has basically disappeared without leading anywhere.
Viking metal swapped Odin for Satan in the black metal cosmology, turned back the tempo a notch, and went in for more melodic leads, clean vocals, and competent production. As a mostly or entirely Scandinavian movement, it was interesting from an ethnohistorical perspective, and bands like Einherjer and Mithotyn made some good, kicking, metal. Unfortunately, both Einherjer and Mithotyn are gone now; bands like Borknagar, Primordial, and Enslaved have made their name on what they did to progress beyond viking metal, and what survives of the viking vibe is now carried forward by death metal bands like Ensiferum and Amon Amarth (not like this is a bad thing, as these acts are quite awesome). It came, it rocked, and it left, though it did leave behind some good records.
We are now at the end, at least for now. "Heavy metal" may be a dead term, but it is decidedly not a dead genre; the recognition of American NWOSDM as NWOAHM within the past year shows that there is still development going on, new subgenres emerging all the time, and it is not really possible to see where the next development is going to come from. It was thought that we knew the limits of power metal in the late '90s, but then DragonForce (at the time still called DragonHeart) put out their
Valley of the Damned demo, and people realized that power metal was somewhat different with the accelerator jammed all the way down through the damn floor. They haven't lead to anything yet, but they might; or they might not, and some band currently finishing their first demo tape might be the impetus for the next sea change in the scene. There's no way to tell, but I as an adherent of this huge and multifaceted continuum of heavy music can't wait to find out.
[Sweet! I didn't break the character limit!]
Still, 4900 words is pushing it for a forum post.