Post: #1

Hey everyone,

I know Metal in Europe is really big; but I don't get some aspects of it.

I enjoy old metal, and a lot of the new stuff (things along the line of Iron Maiden, with a great singer and clean playing). They never took their music seriously, in the sense of lyrics or higher meaning. They just had fun with it.

What I don't understand is the voices that sound like they're horking up something; like they can't sing so they try to sing as horrible sounding as possible. Is it because they think that's what 'evil' sounds like?

I also don't understand the scene, the makeup, the throwing the hair around, associated violence/evil (probably a tiny amount of it is here, but I've heard of some metal band members burning down a church, and worse).

Can someone give some insight into Metal and it's roots? Punk is a general uprising of social unrest at it's roots, with the idea that they are no better than others, and the punk players here would always hang out with the locals if they had the time. There are core ideas to the music, and the crappy singers in Punk know they're crappy but it's a set of ideas they follow (I think; some obviously do it for the money). I 'believe' they have some associated roots, but they've greatly diverged.

Post: #2

Ah, well the image and church-burnings you're thinking of are mainly associated with black metal: perhaps the oddest and darkest genre of them all (oldmandoom, please don't kill me!). I recently did a half-hour presentation on the history of metal, so here it is (in reduced form).

So you probably know roughly what happened up to the NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Iron Maiden and their ilk). But meanwhile, across the pond, in the USA, glam metal was the going thing, and in some areas it was felt that they weren't dealing with the real issues. Hell, it seemed as if they didn't even care. So in the Seattle Bay Area, a man called Lars Ulrich put out a classified ad to form a band. They met up, and decided to give themselves the name of Metallica. After a short while, their lead guitarist, Dave Mustaine was kicked out, who decided to form his own band, Megadeth (a corruption of 'megadeath', one million deaths, a term used when describing the projected casualties of a nuclear war). Both these bands were noticeably faster than earlier acts, and had a far 'darker' sound. They included far more punk elements than the NWOBHM had, but kept the complex harmonic structure and so on of heavy metal. Their lyrics were, and are, very confrontational, often dealing with social issues, expressing anti-war sentiment and so on. This is often delivered in something of a sarcastic or ironic style, which would go on to be used by many later bands. Slayer and Anthrax arose at about this time as well, with a similar sound, and all four bands are still some of the most commercially successful around.

However, what you were mainly asking about was the origins of the ultra-extreme metal bands. Death metal was, and is, in many ways the darker, more brutal version of Thrash. What you have to realise when listening to it is that the vast majority of bands are actually incredibly good musicians: they have to be in order to play some of the songs, which tend to be complex, with heavily varying time and key signatures. They are also played at breakneck speed. The sound tends to be very 'thick', and the lyrics, like Thrash, often deal with issues of all kinds, social, global and even environmental. The death growl reflects this, as well as adding a harsh edge to the music. What you have to understand with it is that, unlike in more 'conventional' genres, the voice is quite emphatically NOT the centre of the song. The guitars hold nearly all of the melody, whilst the growl is almost just an atmospheric instrument.

One mistake that people often make is assuming that the growl is easy to do. It is certainly easy to do badly, in a way which both sounds bad and damages your throat. To do it properly, in a way which does not damage your throat or hurt, is a heck of a lot harder-I'm a classically trained singer, capable of doing pretty much any part, and I still find growls by far the hardest part to do. A proper growl really should be reasonably clear, which many are not due to the singers cupping the microphone. My favourite example of a 'good' growl is Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy, (not just because she's a slim, reasonably attractive blonde!). Try this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxboYVglHsM . To do it properly, you need to vibrate your false vocal chords, which creates the guttural growling sound.

Why do they do it? Well, partially because they enjoy it, but they are also often dealing with those parts of life which pop music doesn't even understand about. The vast economic disparity between rich and poor (really, does a large number of low-quality pop stars singing 'everybody hurts' even come CLOSE to describing the pain felt by those dying of starvation, or natural disasters, or one of a thousand other things?), the stupid, selfish and populist decisions made by so many governments or, in the case of The Agonist (a band who are dangerously close to Metalcore, a genre who most death metalheads despise due to the far lower musicianship generally shown, but The Agonist do have some VERY good lyrics), our society's insane devotion to greed and 'looking good' (or the same as others).

Did that help? It's well past midnight now and I had to get up early. Being a teenager, this means that I feel very tired and sometimes don't express myself too well.

Post: #3

Time for the old man to put his oar in. Spineyrequiem mentioned the NWOBHM (the title was proclaimed, I think, in Sounds magazine )which came to prominence around the same time as british punk. Immediately prior to that, Metal was thought of, at least by 'influential' journalists, as a dying , and thank god, fading genre. They didn't understand that Heavy Metal music was always the underdog, didn't appear very often in the single charts so didn't grab headlines, but dominated the live music venues, alongside genuine Soul music. It was also a major constituent of the album charts, which was where the long term profit was. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Hawkwind, et al, were a consistent feature of the music arena, but the media generally ignored them ( except for 'shock horror' stories). The USA had Glam Metal, epitomised by Kiss, and eventually their theatrics blended with the industrial, depressive darkness of Sabbath and was again completely misunderstood, this time by Europeans. The excesses of the euro death metal extremists, mostly in Scandinavia, sadly, have overwhelmed the fact that most Metal/Rock musicians are extremely talented and dedicated to their craft. Alice Cooper was a showman. Ozzy is a showman. They are modern storytellers, not prophets ( but possibly profits ) and it saddens me to see what has happened to their legacy. For a deeper insight, look up the work of Ross Halflin( though he was mostly a photographer), Pete Frame, or Charles Shaar Murray. They were journalists who lived through the whole thing, and their work tells it better than I ever could. But ,as Lemmy of Motorhead once said, "at the end of the day, it's all rock'n'roll, just a fuckin' sight quicker." But he was always rat-arsed. Jeff, and I am old enough that I saw Free in a pub when they were called Black Cat Bones. G'night.