The Pleasures of Death Metal
Death Metal and the Reorientation of Listening
If popular scholarship over the past four decades has been dominated by the notion that certain musical texts, practices, and genres contribute to more desirable political outcomes than others, this has least benefitted heavy and extreme metal, which have frequently been marginalized in popular music studies as genres that are conservative, hierarchical, exclusionary, and politically reactionary. Progressive critics have been frequently disappointed by the genres’ lack of political engagement. Metal has been understood as a response to the social conditions of its audience, but one lacking in a commitment to positive social change. Adherents’ practices of reflexive anti-reflexivity are seen as resulting in a refusal to acknowledge the political implications of extreme lyrics, imagery, and discourses within the metal scene. When viewed from these perspectives, it is perhaps not unexpected that aspects of the metal scene might be considered troublingly nihilistic. However, the focus on the political implications and effects of metal music and culture has circumscribed opportunities for a more nuanced understanding of the music’s pleasures. What might these pleasures look like, when they are considered outside of the currently dominant frameworks of political criticism? What might metal look like when political questions are no longer foregrounded? The chapters in part 2 begin the work of exploring metal music in general and death metal in particular, at the limits of political criticism.
Death metal offers a productive starting point for such analysis, because an approach better attuned to the specificity of death metal will help to expand the critical vocabulary through which musical pleasure is talked about and understood. This is because death metal represents such a radical departure from the mainstream of popular music, and from the genres that have typically been the focus of popular music studies, a different understanding of musical meaning and pleasure is needed. The chapters in part 2 explore death metal’s specificity in detail, focusing on the history, influential artists, and musical and lyrical conventions of the genre; as such, part 2 represents a significant shift in tone and focus from part 1. While part 1 provided an overview of popular music studies as a whole, part 2 considers the dimensions of musical pleasure that may have been overlooked because of the discipline’s overriding focus on political questions and concerns. This is done not to suggest that popular music studies abandon its political outlooks and agendas; rather, it is a temporary suspension of them in order to explore the aspects of death metal music which may have evaded capture within prevailing analytical frameworks. In order to do this, Chapter 5 will focus on death metal music, Chapter 6 on death metal’s lyrical conventions, and Chapters 7 and 8 on case studies of two of death metal’s most influential artists. In each case, what is offered is not “the” meaning of death metal, but an interpretation of it based on the listening pleasures and experiences invited by the genre’s musical and lyrical conventions; individual listeners may or may not interpret—or experience—death metal in the same way that I do.
In exploring pleasures that are at the limits of—and “beyond”—political criticism, part 2 seeks to reveal aspects of the genre unavailable to, or ignored by, previous approaches. This chapter begins by exploring the modes of listening invited by death metal’s musical conventions, with a particular focus on death metal’s use of the voice, song structure, and sonic extremity. It argues that death metal’s vocal style resists the identificatory logic of the singing voice in which a clear message or politics can be articulated, while its musical conventions reject the narrative structures that enable music to operate as a site for political investment. Combined, these effect a radical reorientation of listening that disrupts customary understandings of music’s meaning, pleasure, and politics. Taking death metal’s reorientation of listening as a starting point reveals the genre’s pleasures to be multiple and complex, rather than simply regressive and reactionary. This is a significant departure from the approaches to heavy and extreme metal that have dominated popular music studies to date.
Death metal’s vocal style offers an important starting point for rethinking the meaning and pleasures of the genre. This is in part because the voice is one of the defining features of death metal music—even for those otherwise unfamiliar with the genre. Death metal vocalists use the membranous folds above the vocal cords to exert pressure on the larynx to produce a deep, guttural growl that is virtually unused outside extreme metal music. Frontmen and women in the death metal scene are described not as “singers” but as vocalists, since their voices exhibit little of the melody or tunefulness that signifies “singing” as it is conventionally understood. Death metal, of course, is not the only musical style to deprioritize tuneful singing—punk also uses unconventional vocal styles (Laing 1985, 54–59)—but unlike in punk and other popular genres, the voice in death metal is used not to lend weight to political messages, offer a vehicle for emotional connection and identification, or provide clearly recognizable words or analyzable meanings. Instead, death metal’s utilization of “unpleasant” vocal sounds invites listeners to explore an aesthetics of shock in which the materiality of the voice and its obliteration of recognizable language are offered as sources of sonic affect. Rather than a site of meaning and identification, then, the death metal voice can be characterized as possessing a non-representational power that resists conventional evaluative and critical approaches to popular music. The pleasure of the voice is one of the surprising pleasures of this challenging, and sometimes confronting, musical style.
The origins of death vocals can be traced to the early 1980s and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), with bands such as Motörhead and Venom placing relatively less importance on conventional markers of vocal melody and tunefulness. Neither Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister nor Venom’s Chronos had classically “good” voices and so, influenced partly by the musical amateurism of punk, eschewed the almost operatic singing style popular in heavy metal at the time in favor of harsher and more gravelly vocal timbres. As the NWOBHM merged into thrash, and the commercial popularity of thrash increased in the mid- to late-1980s, aggressive vocal styles became increasingly dominant in the metal scene, with the gruff roars and strident shouts of vocalists like Metallica’s James Hetfield and Slayer’s Tom Araya much-imitated during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
This trajectory of increasingly abrasive vocal styles is taken to its ultimate conclusion in death metal. While thrash had employed gruff vocal sounds as a reaction to the widespread popularity and accessibility of heavy metal, thrash’s own unexpected commercial success contributed to death metal’s pursuit of even greater extremity and inaccessibility. The earliest versions of death vocals, appearing in the mid- to late-1980s, were clearly indebted to thrash vocal styles: the register was lowered and the lyrics delivered at increased speed, but the vocals were still primarily shouted or barked. The initial pioneers of this style—Chuck Schuldiner of Death, Jeff Becerra of Possessed, and Nic Bullen of Napalm Death—adopted styles of vocal delivery that comprised staccato barks and longer roars. The vocals of this period are best described as “proto-death metal” in nature, as (with the exception of Bullen’s vocal style) they still feature the reasonably clear articulation of words and phrases.
By 1990, with the release of Cannibal Corpse’s Eaten Back to Life, death vocals had evolved into the “Cookie Monster” style that has become the hallmark of the genre—the deep, undulating growls named after the deep-voiced Sesame Street character. While Cookie Monster vocals appeared as early as 1987 on some of the tracks of Napalm Death’s Scum, it was a style popularized largely by Cannibal Corpse and its frontman Chris Barnes. Unlike proto-death metal styles, Cookie Monster vocals are characterized by lyrics that are almost incomprehensible without the aid of a lyric sheet—and indeed, some Cookie Monster vocalists produce sounds that are barely recognizable as language. This evolution of metal vocals from clean singing to Cookie Monster growling is one involving the pursuit of increasingly heavy and intense vocal timbres. The progressive elimination of recognizable signifiers of vocal melody and clarity is a key element of death metal’s deliberately oppositional approach to “mainstream” musical conventions.
As a consequence of this, the voice is important in death metal, but death metal is not what Middleton would call a “voice music” (1990, 261). For Middleton, voice musics are those in which the pleasures of singing—of listening to singers—are the primary listening pleasures on offer. In much of the most popular music of the past five decades, including pop, rock, and heavy metal, the voice is typically the aural and emotional focus of the music: it is foregrounded on recordings, carries the melody of the song, and is thought to represent the individual personality of the singer and offer a stable point of identification for audiences. This is because, as Fast argues, “the sound of a specific voice . . . is one of the ways we come to know something intimate about a person” (2001, 74, emphasis added). This identification is crucial to the way that the politics of popular music are conventionally articulated: it is through the singing voice that audiences are thought to see their own attitudes, emotions, and experiences reflected, and hence use music to engage with, and protest against, the material realities of their lives.
The expectation that the voice operates as an authentic reflection of the lives of both artist and audience has been described by Gilbert and Pearson, following Derrida, as an ideology of “phonologocentrism” (1999, 57). A combination of the prefixes phono- (meaning “sound” or “voice”) and logo- (meaning “words”), “phonologocentrism” designates the privileged status of the voice (especially speech) in Western philosophy and culture. This is because, they argue, modes of thought and experience which occur in the medium of verbal language are believed to offer more clearly identifiable and analyzable meanings than other, more ambiguous forms of cultural expression (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 57).
Applying this idea to popular music, Gilbert and Pearson suggest that the pleasures of many popular genres rely on a phonologocentric structuring of the singing voice. The voice is imbued with a representational power: lyrics are understood as an expression of emotional truth, while “cracked” timbres, moans, and yelps are seen as signifiers of emotional intensity and authenticity (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 68). In mainstream heavy metal music, emotionality is conveyed through the use of soaring notes, heavy vibrato, and gruff intonations. Some of the most admired singers in this genre—such as Ozzy Osbourne, Bruce Dickinson, and Rob Halford—use their voices to cultivate a broad emotional vocabulary, ranging from pain and despair to defiance, anger, and excitement. Scholars of heavy metal often point to the way that these vocal styles “speak to” listeners, who in turn see their own needs, values, and emotions reflected. For example, in his analysis of David Lee Roth’s vocal style on the Van Halen song “Running with the Devil,” Walser argues that the chorus effect on the voice enlarges Roth’s statements about freedom and empowerment, offering a feeling of wider social participation in the messages expressed. These chorus vocals, he argues, “virtually demand that the listener feel included in the collective affirmation of what is presented” (Walser 1993, 46).
In an influential early study on music listening, Cubitt describes popular song as a narrative form, and argues that identification with the singing voice is an essential precondition for listening pleasure: only through identification do songs make sense. Using Chuck Berry’s song “Maybelline” as an example, he argues:
Without identification, the narrative dissolves into noise, as sometimes occurs with radio plays when the voices of two or more characters are too similar. That kind of confusion debars us from the truth of the narrative: we need to identify with the detective to get to the truth, or with the hero to discover the emotional authenticity of an action story. [Likewise] we have to identify with Chuck Berry in order to grasp the power of ‘Maybelline.’ (Cubitt 1984, 210–11)
The phonologocentric structuring of the singing voice, then, can be seen as means of stabilizing and focusing listening: we need to identify with the voice and feel as if the singer is speaking directly to us in order to fully comprehend the “story” of a song. As Walser also argued of heavy metal music, this identificatory connection to the voice is essential for listeners to feel affirmed by, and included in, music’s messages.
Given these understandings of the role of the voice, it is unsurprising that death metal should be so often judged as nihilistic. If the death metal voice is seen as a site for identification, then the listener is offered identification only with sounds that are aggressive, relentless, and often, unvarying. These hardly lend themselves to an understanding of death metal as a positive affirmation of its audience in the way that Walser suggests of David Lee Roth’s vocal performance. However, it is precisely death metal’s relentlessness and repetitiveness that resists the phonologocentric structuring of the singing voice. The excessive distortion and limited modulation of the death metal voice restricts opportunities for the expression of emotional truth, and as a result, the voice rarely signifies emotions in a clearly identifiable way. Moreover, because the voice is not always recognizable as language, this circumscribes its opportunity to “speak to” listeners in the way that some critics suggest. Song lyrics may indicate a range of emotions, attitudes, and experiences, but these are rarely conveyed through the sound or tone of the voice.
For example, Cannibal Corpse’s song “The Undead Will Feast” (1990) is a story of a zombie attack. The first half of the song describes the protagonist’s attempts to escape the attack, while the second half details his attacks on others after he has become a zombie himself. The lyrics suggest a range of emotions, beginning first with fear, then anger, then finally ending in pleasure as he comes to enjoy feasting on the bodies of others. Yet none of these emotions are conveyed in the vocal style; at no point does the voice change to convey or correspond with the lyrical narrative. In fact, Chris Barnes’ vocal style on this track is more or less interchangeable with his vocal approach on most of the other songs on the album. The sound of the voice is not connected to the emotion of the subject matter in any kind of obvious way. Rather than expressing specific emotions, the death metal voice typically lends a more generalized sense of brutality to the music—something that Overell notes as being one of the genre’s key aesthetic values (2010, 84). Indeed, death metal is such a radical departure from the norms of popular vocality that its anti-melodic, non-natural treatment of the voice is often an initial barrier to enjoyment for listeners attuned to more conventionally melodic singing styles (York 2004). Becoming a death metal aficionado, then, often entails learning to reinterpret and revalue sounds initially heard as unpleasant as sources of pleasure and enjoyment.
In his study of punk, Laing describes how music which disrupts the customary expectations and pleasures of listening produces “shock-effects” that are enjoyable for fans attuned to such conventions (1985, 78). Given the dominance of the melodic singing voice in mainstream popular music, shock-effects are markedly intensified by music which displaces the voice from aural focus, or which deprives listeners of the conventional beauties of singing. Laing offers the example of the song “Love Like Anthrax” by the punk band Gang of Four, which includes sequences in which two vocalists simultaneously deliver different sets of lyrics. He argues that this produces an experience of disequilibrium and disorientation that prevents the establishment of an identificatory “center” and hence “force[s] the listener into a different way of listening” (Laing 1985, 79). While his notion of shock-effects is ultimately recuperated within frameworks of political criticism and phonologocentrism—for example, Laing argues that excluding the musicality of singing prevents contamination of punk’s political message (see 1985, 54)—it nonetheless contributes to an alternative understanding of musical experience in which initially repellent or confusing sounds offer a reorientation of conventional listening practices.
If death metal can similarly be seen as a source of shock-effects, its shock-effects at the level of vocal sound distance the voice from its customary representational and identificatory roles. Death metal’s growls, grunts, barks, and roars require the voice to be overdriven with an excess of materiality that can be seen as an example of what Barthes (1977) calls the “grain of the voice.” In Barthes’s work, “grain” is used as a designation for the timbral qualities of vocal sound in which the materiality of the voice—the “voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers” (Barthes 1977, 182)—interrupts or exceeds meaning: the moments in which meaning and signification are overwhelmed by music’s jouissance (i.e., the moments in which ordinary pleasure becomes a deconstructive bliss). The concept of vocal grain is useful for understanding the pleasures on offer when it is the materiality of the voice, rather than the clarity of its expression, that is foregrounded. In death metal, these are the moments in which the voice is ambiguous in its emotional expression, where vocal sound is offered as a percussive accent, or where comprehensible language is completely obliterated.
Of course, vocal grain in the form of “dirty” or cracked timbres is used extensively in rock and other popular music to convey precisely the kind of emotional expression and meaning that this chapter is suggesting that death metal disrupts (see Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 68). However, in death metal, the vocals are so distorted and overdriven that they denaturalize the voice’s expressive function. Instead of offering the foreground identification of the singing voice, death vocals provide “broadly affective, percussive reinforcement of accents and phrases . . . fus[ing] vocal noises with the instrumental sounds [to] create semi-human, semi-machine, blocks of sound” (Bogue 2004b, 107). This is achieved in two main ways: the structural subordination of the voice in the recording mix, and the dominance of percussive vocal timbres.
On some early death metal albums, the structural subordination of the voice was an unintended consequence of the recording process. The initial dearth of specialized sound engineers with sufficient familiarity either with the music of death metal, or with the requisite studio techniques to record the music with clarity and precision, meant that on some early albums, such as Carcass’s Reek of Putrefaction (1988), the vocals were so poorly recorded that the voice frequently “disappears” into the mix. The vocals are noticeably muffled, indistinct, or “buried” by the instrumentation on many of the tracks, essentially displacing the voice from aural focus. However, unintentionally poor production was more of a problem for death metal bands in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Many of the early American death metal bands were fortunate to record with one of the few specialist death metal engineers of the time, Scott Burns at Morrisound Studios in Florida. Although the voice is foregrounded on some Morrisound recordings (such as Cannibal Corpse’s 1990 debut Eaten Back to Life), the aural focus of many of Burns’ albums is directed towards the instrumentation as a deliberate aesthetic choice. In such cases, vocalists function primarily as percussionists and/or instrumentalists rather than as singers.
For example, on Obituary’s first two albums, Slowly We Rot (1989) and Cause of Death (1990), the voice plays an almost explicitly percussive role. Obituary was one of the heaviest bands of its era, and vocalist John Tardy’s bellows possess a wrenching quality that makes his one of most distinctive of the early death metal voices. Lyrics in Obituary’s music are famously limited or nonexistent. In much of the band’s music, Tardy’s lyrics are tantamount to nonsense sounds, with the frontman once claiming that, “if I couldn’t come up with words to go along with the song, I’d just kinda make something up and just fill in something that wasn’t maybe a word, but it sounded good and fit in the song” (qtd. in Mudrian 2004, 144). On songs like “Internal Bleeding” (1989) and “Memories Remain” (1990), wordless bellows mark transitions between riff sections, while on songs like “Til Death,” they rhythmically punctuate key riffs.
In the songs with identifiable lyrics, there are recurring motifs of rotting, hell, evil, violence, and death, but largely in the form of evocative words and short phrases rather than comprehensible lyrical narratives. In some songs, lyrics are only a few lines long, such as “Words of Evil” on Slowly We Rot (“Words of evil/ Words of evil/ Evil/ Lie Alone”); in such cases, lyrics become a relatively unimportant element of songwriting that foregrounds the music’s instrumental elements. In other cases, words and phrases are exploited for their affective sound quality alone. For example, on ‘Godly Beings’ (1989), Tardy’s vocals are pitchshifted during the phrase “rotting your soul” to give the voice a deep, gurgling quality. While the lyrics on songs like “Gates to Hell” (1989) and “Chopped in Half” (1990) are more comprehensible than on most of Obituary’s other tracks, Tardy’s exaggerated vocal inflections inhibit the clarity of many of the words, inviting the listener to refocus on the affective qualities of vocal sound rather than on the message of the lyrics.
Death metal’s deprioritization of lyrics and the communicative function of the voice is evident even in the work of death metal bands that otherwise emphasize the importance of lyrical meanings. For instance, the lyrics of Birmingham band Napalm Death include a strong element of progressive social commentary. Songs like “Success?” and “Instinct of Survival” from the band’s 1987 debut album Scum reject capitalist greed and exploitation by multinational corporations; songs like “Cock-Rock Alienation” and “It’s a M.A.N.S. World!” on 1988’s From Enslavement to Obliteration attack the sexism of the metal and punk scenes, as well as that of mainstream culture. However, despite the clear political lyrical message in all four songs, the vocals performed by Nic Bullen on “Instinct of Survival” and Lee Dorrian on the remaining three tracks are barely recognizable as language: the rapid grunts and screeches offer little more than a blur of sound that both complements and adds to the chaos of the music. Even with the aid of a lyric sheet, the vocal lines are difficult to follow, as the speed and imprecision of the vocal performances means that Bullen and Dorrian often vocalize the lyrics faster than they can be read. Despite the explicit politics, then, the clarity of the actual lyrical message is obscured by a vocal approach which rejects the clear articulation of words and phrases in favor of an emphasis on the chaos of vocal sound. This offers listeners the opportunity to enjoy the vocal sound as sound, without necessarily viewing it as a site of clearly analyzable meanings or messages.
This departure from dominant modes of popular vocality is an example of how the voice can be used to access experiences which, in Barthes’s terms, “escape the tyranny of meaning” (1977, 185). If death metal offers the opportunity to savor the affective qualities of vocal sound without privileging the voice as a necessary site for representation or identification, this could partly explain the music’s (and participants’) resistance to politicization. That is, if the affective dimensions of sonic texts can become disengaged from their representational properties, then the production of stable and identificatory listening experiences can also become disrupted. But unlike the punk voice, which also rejects conventionally identificatory mechanisms, the death metal voice does not do this in order to better establish dialogue with, and agreement on the part of, the listener (see Davies 1996, 21). Instead, death metal’s rejection of the conventions through which a clear message or politics can be articulated provides an opportunity to explore other dimensions of listening experience; rather than a site for meaning and communication, the death metal voice offers the pleasures of vocal sound as sound.
If death metal’s vocal performance displaces the communicative function of the voice to explore the pleasures and affects of vocal grain, death metal’s music disrupts many of the conventions of popular songwriting to invite appreciation of the music’s technical features. In his encyclopedia of extreme metal, McIver notes—only half jokingly—that “when your non-metal friends refer to metal as ‘noise,’ it’s death metal they’re thinking of” (2000, 14). Death metal music is characterized by an aesthetics of sonic extremity that disrupts the patterns of musical narrative typically thought to make music comprehensible and pleasurable. Rather than conceiving the music as an expression of politics or as a response to socio-economic subordination, we can see in death metal’s aural excess an invitation to listeners to adopt more “technical” forms of appreciation that allow them to hear sounds typically heard as “noise” as both complex and pleasurably nuanced.
Death metal’s emergence in the late 1980s as a radicalization and intensification of thrash has resulted in the genre’s ongoing pursuit of increasing heaviness, intensity, and complexity. Death metal features the heaviest guitar timbres of all metal genres, adding to metal’s ubiquitous power chords and downtuned guitars, “scooped” guitar tones, and the greater use of playing techniques such as palm muting.[1] Combined, these intensify both the lower frequencies and the upper harmonics of the sound envelope and produce a distinctly percussive distortion timbre. Death metal also rarely adopts the standard verse-chorus-bridge structure of popular song, and as such, avoids many of the emotional spikes or climaxes that usually occur as music moves from verse to chorus. While thrash and heavy metal also departed from mainstream rock and pop insofar as the music is primarily riff-driven (rather than driven by melody), songwriting in these two genres is still largely structured within a verse-chorus format. As part of its pursuit of maximum extremity, death metal takes thrash and heavy metal’s focus on the riff to a new level: rather than a structuring rhythmic device used within an otherwise conventionally recognizable song form, the riff is death metal’s primary unit of songwriting.
Death metal songs are typically structured as a series of riff sections, each section simply added on to the next (Bogue 2004a, 94). In their rejection of conventional song forms, the Florida death metal bands in particular developed a technical style of playing in which different riffs are juxtaposed in jarring succession. For example, on “Deadly Intentions” (1989), Obituary shifts between six different riff sections played at normal time, double time, and half time. Although some of the riff sections are repeated and reworked during the song, without an identifiable verse-chorus framework to provide structure to the shifts, listeners have little opportunity to anticipate the song’s moments of sectional transition or to predict the character and tempo of the next riff section. In fact, because the band plays five different riff sections before any one section is repeated (and these five sections comprise the majority of the song), the music does not set up any expectation that repetition will occur at all. Instead, the song is structured through a logic of alternating acceleration and deceleration. This is similarly the case for Morbid Angel’s “Maze of Torment” (1989), which intersperses muscular, “headbanging” riffs with sections of extended blast beats that throw off the music’s rhythmic center and create similar feelings of acceleration and deceleration.
The intensity of death metal’s riff sections means that they often lack musical “space,” with vocals, drums, guitars, bass, and voice interlocking as a single unit of sound. This is something quite uncommon in other popular music styles. In an interview for the DVD Centuries of Torment: The First 20 Years (2008), Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster describes this from his perspective as a bass player: “[In] traditional bass playing, you’ve got your chord that’s being played for a couple of measures—you can play . . . some notes based around that. With death metal, you’ve got these weird atonal lines, and you pretty much have to follow them as a unison, or you’re creating even more dissonance if you go outside that.” This is partly why it is so difficult to predict the transitions on songs like “Deadly Intentions”: because the song comprises sudden shifts in the blocks of ensemble sound, there is little foreshadowing of moments of sectional transition.
This often gives songs a sense of linearity that disrupts customary expectations of musical structure. Cubitt argues that because most popular song is diegetic, without narrative coherence “the subject hears ‘just a lot of noise.’ The expected pleasures are not produced, only a bafflement” (1984, 209). Pisters, following Deleuze and Guattari, suggests that such coherence is produced through a refrain that offers listeners a stable and stabilizing center: a reassuring “home” around which enjoyable experiences of listening can be structured (2003, 189). Much like the identificatory logic of vocal performance in which listeners are hailed by the singing voice, the refrain offers a coherent framework through which popular music is understood as both pleasurable and meaningful. In the case of popular song, music’s refrain frequently comprises the structured and reassuringly predictable repetition of sonic motifs, such as in the form of regularly repeated verses and choruses.
In contrast, the linearity and unpredictability of death metal compositions means that neither the structure nor the reassurance of the refrain is available to death metal listeners. While some death metal bands, such as Obituary and Morbid Angel, structure their songs as a series of riff sections, others appear to deconstruct the song form altogether. For example, on Scum (1987), Napalm Death speeds through 28 tracks in just over 33 minutes; on From Enslavement to Obliteration (1988), the band performs 27 songs in a little more than 34 minutes. The song “Dead” (1988) lasts for only two seconds, and consists of just a one-bar riff and blast beat. “You Suffer” (1987) is a one-second burst of ensemble sound which earned the band a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s shortest song.
For inexperienced listeners, death metal’s approach to songwriting may indeed be heard as baffling and incomprehensible, but one of the pleasures this deliberate inaccessibility offers its fans is the notion that the music can only be fully comprehended by those who have invested time, effort, and commitment in discerning the music’s nuances. Straw described heavy metal fans in the 1970s as anathema to “archivist or obscurantist forms of knowledge,” conceiving it as part of an unmasculine “nerd” culture (1983, 105), but Kahn-Harris argues that one of the pleasures of contemporary death metal is the acquisition of “mundane subcultural capital,” in the pursuit of which fans develop encyclopedic knowledge of death metal subgenres, bands, albums, and history (2007, 122). “Subcultural capital” is a term developed by Thornton in her work on club culture to describe systems of distinction within music scenes whereby participants that are “in the know” enjoy greater status and prestige than those that are not (1995, 11–12). Although Kahn-Harris’s concept of mundane subcultural capital is largely limited to such things as knowledge of detailed histories of the extreme metal scene and being familiar with the music of a vast number of bands and albums (2007, 122–24), it can equally be demonstrated by distinguishing nuances in sounds and styles heard by less skilled listeners as “sound[ing] the same from one song to the next” (Baddeley 1999, 170).
For those “in the know,” then, “Deadly Intentions” (1989) may no longer be heard as lacking a clear and identifiable structure, but as a succession of complex timing changes executed with ensemble precision. Similarly, “You Suffer” may no longer be heard as a meaningless burst of sound, but as the ultimate, and somewhat amusing, result of death metal’s relentless pursuit of sonic extremity. The pleasures of death metal’s inaccessibility can be linked to its contribution to the exclusivity of the death metal scene, and in particular, to a romance of the scene as being maintained and populated only by those truly dedicated to the music. Comments by death metal musician and DJ Matthew Medeiros are indicative of this:
In general, the metal subculture is able to drive away most of the mainstream audience just with heavy guitars and yelling. The Death Metal subculture seeks to take this ‘filtering’ even further by tuning low, playing fast, and singing in a virtually indecipherable growl. The Death Metal subculture is dedicated and elite more so than any mainstream culture in the world. It is only the interest and dedication of a select few worldwide that allows this music to survive and thrive. (qtd. in Purcell 2003, 112)
Weinstein notes similar values within the heavy metal scene, where fans construct themselves as “proud pariahs” who wear their marginalization from mainstream society and culture as a “badge of honor” that builds solidarity amongst members of the metal scene (2000, 137, 271).
For Weinstein, the grounds for this marginalization are primarily socio-economic, and related to the disenfranchisement of white working class young men in an era of deindustrialization; however, Medeiros’ remarks suggest that for some death metal fans at least, marginalization may also comprise an aesthetic dimension, which involves locating value and pleasure in sounds that would drive “ordinary” listeners away. Although, unlike heavy metal’s proud pariahs, death metal fans may understand their exclusion from the mainstream as primarily voluntary, this exclusion is still conceived as a “badge of honor” that symbolizes their dedication and commitment to the genre. Subcultural capital thus becomes for metal fans, as it does for Thornton’s dance music participants, the “linchpin of an alternative hierarchy” through which status and belonging are conferred in music scenes (Thornton 1995, 105).
The value placed on death metal’s elitism is perhaps unsurprising given that the music strives for intricacy and complexity that rewards close and repeated listening. In part because it lacks heavy metal’s extended solos and transcendent choruses, death metal appreciation often requires especially attentive and focused listening to find meaning and pleasure in the music. In heavy metal, the guitar solo functions as the genre’s privileged moment of virtuosity (Millard 2004, 169; Waksman 2001, 131; Walser 1993, 14). Although death metal solos can be technically impressive, they possess little of the “soaring” character that they do in heavy metal. The solos of some death metal bands, such as those of Death and Obituary, utilize some conventionally melodic figures (often blues-based) and sweep arpeggios that highlight their closer connections to earlier metal styles, but other bands employ feedback shrieks, string bends, pick squeals, and whammy bar dives to create “brief spates of upper-register, organized noise that blur tonality and provide little in the way of a discernible melodic contour” (Bogue 2004a, 95). For example, the guitar solo in Napalm Death’s song “Parasites” (1987) commences in E minor pentatonic but becomes progressively more atonal and frantic over the course of the solo, dissolving any sense of clear structure or organizing principle. Moreover, the solo is only seven seconds long—something unheard of in heavy metal, where solos are much longer and more developed.
As a result, death metal solos rarely provide a pleasurable moment of escape from the oppressiveness and chaos of the music, but instead offer a more thorough immersion within it. The music’s intensity requires that different strategies of listening be employed if the music is to be heard as something other than relentless noise. One strategy is to focus listening on the drums, rather than on the guitar, as death metal’s virtuoso instrument. Skilled drummers earn a great deal of respect and prestige in the death metal scene, especially for their expertise in particular drumming techniques. For example, Gene Hoglan, former drummer for Dark Angel and a number of other bands, is an icon in the extreme metal scene, known for his creativity in drum arrangements and precision at high speed; his nickname is “the atomic clock.” The two main techniques that are characteristic of death metal, and that are rarely used outside of extreme metal, are double-kick drumming and blast beats. Pioneered by Dave Lombardo of Slayer, double-kick drumming is executed either by using two bass drums, or by using a double pedal for a single bass drum. The double-kick is one of the aspects of death metal music that lends the genre its intensity and uniqueness: at loud volumes, the bass drum is felt as a physical sensation, something which is intensified when the drums are played at great speed. Drummers known for their complex kick patterns include Hoglan, Morbid Angel’s Pete Sandoval, and Cynic’s Sean Reinert.
Blast beats are achieved through the rapid, cut-time alternation of snare and bass drum. The term “blast beat” was reputedly coined by Mick Harris of Napalm Death, although Ekeroth notes that the first known recording to feature blast beats was a 1982 demo by Swedish hardcore band Asocial (2006, 22). Other early proponents of blast beats include D.R.I. on its Dirty Rotten LP (1983), Sepultura on Morbid Visions (1986), and S.O.D. on Speak English or Die (1985). There are now a number of different styles of blast beat, each of varying degrees of difficulty and complexity. Carcass drummer Ken Owen and Napalm Death’s Mick Harris and Danny Herrera play in a more conventional “Euroblast” style, which involves playing simultaneous eighth notes on the ride cymbal and kick drum, plus alternate eighth notes on the snare (which essentially amounts to the drummers playing eighth notes with their feet and sixteenth notes with the combination of both hands). The “gravity blast,” used most famously by Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy and John Longstreth of Origin, involves playing a basic Euroblast pattern on the kick and cymbal, but hitting the snare in a one-handed roll technique that uses the snare’s rim to create what sounds like a two-handed drum roll. Cannibal Corpse drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz pioneered a distinctive style of blast beat known as the “Cannibal blast,” which involves playing a sixteenth note double-kick roll while hitting eighth notes on the snare. Suffocation drummer Mike Smith has developed the “Suffocation blast” where the snare and kick (and sometimes also the hi-hat) are hit in unison.
Both blast beats and use of fast double-kick contribute to death metal’s sense of speed and acceleration. The technical exactitude required to execute these drum techniques has created a market for instructional books and DVDs. For example, Mounier and former Hate Eternal drummer Derek Roddy both offer drum clinics and instructional books and DVDs for aspiring (and some established) death metal drummers. The success of these endeavors indicates both the great skill involved in death metal drumming and the high regard with which skilled drummers are held by other musicians and fans in the death metal scene. Again, this highlights the way that death metal fosters forms of listening where focused attention is placed on particular sonic properties of the music.
That sounds customarily heard as repellent and incomprehensible can become sources of pleasure suggests that death metal music is richer and more nuanced than its critics have acknowledged. The pleasures of vocal grain, shock-effects, technical appreciation, and the exercise of mundane subcultural capital are not readily available to an approach oriented primarily towards political evaluation. Death metal invites a reorientation of listening in which the sonic properties and construction of musical texts are offered as listeners’ primary focus. As a result, death metal’s reconfiguration of “noise” and sonic disruption and dissonance as sources of listening pleasure provide insight into the complexity and specificity of death metal as a musical genre. Before applying these insights to the work of individual death metal bands, the following chapter will offer a more detailed examination of death metal’s lyrical conventions in order to provide some further starting points for rethinking the pleasures of the genre.
1. “Scooped” tones are created by boosting the guitar’s extreme high and low overtones and sharply reducing the mid-range overtones, either by using the instrument’s onboard amplifier tone controls or an external equalizer (Berger 1999a, 176 n.2). Palm muting is achieved when the guitarist slightly muffles each note with the palm of his/her picking hand (Pillsbury 1996, 11).