“My
love for you is like a truck, Berserker....
Would
you like some making f**k, Berserker”
“Did he just say making fuck?”....
Berserker, the song that Olaf (Silent Bob's metal head cousin from
Moscow) uses to serenade Veronica Loughran (played by Marilyn
Ghigliotti) was an actual song that appears on the official Clerks
movie soundtrack album, performed by Love Among Freaks. “Girls
think sexy” Olaf and his fictional band, Fuck Your Yankee Bluejeans
were hardly Death metal... a closer approximation would be early
Judas Priest. Death metal is considered a sub-genre of heavy metal
music, though over the years, it's morphed into any number of sub-genres
of its own. The style evolved from thrash metal (Metallica,
Megadeath, Slayer) and black metal (Emperor, Mayhem, Burzum) The
style further developed and spread with the relative success of bands
such as Death w/ Chuck Schuldiner (not the Detroit band) Venom,
Celtic Frost, Slayer and Kreator.
Death metal is much maligned, due
mostly to its inherent preoccupation with subject matter such as;
death, suffering, destruction and mayhem..... did I mention death and
suffering? The primary characteristic of Death metal that sets it
apart from other sub-genres are the vocals. Typically, lead singers
will employ a hoarse roaring grunt, sometimes referred to as death
growls, which should never be confused with vocal fry, a technique
used in other forms of black metal. “The vocal fry register (also
known as pulse register, laryngealisation, pulse phonation, creak,
croak, popcorning, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape, or
strohbass) is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a
loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly
with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency” Though
unproven, growled vocals may have been a part of Viking music.
Death growls are also referred to as
“cookie monster” vocals, due to its vocal similarity to that of
the Sesame Street character. Regardless of what you prefer to call
this mutated vocal style, it's nearly unintelligible to all but the
most harden fanatics. “However, the harshness of death growls is in
keeping with death metal's abrasive music style and often dark and
obscene subject matter” The opposite of this vocal style would be
the screamo/crunk pig squeal which is a squealing vocal technique
resembling that of a pig. Another quirk that sets Death metal apart
from the rest is the use of Death metal English. The ponderous
diction accents the ominous music. It's a lyrical style designed to
give Death metal lyrics a sheen of intelligentsia. Which is totally
lost on the listener unless you can decipher the death growls
delivering the message. The music website, Invisible Oranges does a
bang-up job of identifying some common traits of Death metal English,
albeit... tongue in cheek:
- Big, polysyllabic words: You don’t have to use them correctly; you just have to use them. These words don’t even have to be real.
- Adjectives: In Death Metal English, they’re like guitar solos. You aren’t using enough. Add more.
- Prepositional phrases: Same is true here, too — the more prepositional phrases, the better.
- Progressive tense: Especially useful for song titles
- Passive voice: Active verbs aren’t brutal. Passive voice is useful when you need to add more syllables to a line to make it fit the riff.
- Archaic or pseudo-Biblical verbiage: If you write like you are some kind of ancient, ageless force who is unfamiliar with modern grammatical conventions, you are probably pretty evil. Bonus points for using constructions that evoke the King James Bible, which is ironically among the most metal texts in the English canon.
- Grandiloquent metaphor: This is death metal. Make whatever you’re talking about sound really big and important.
The
difference between the genres is in the details. What primarily
separates Black metal from Death metal is the former's adherence to
ideological Satanism (not necessarily practical Satanism) Defining
the term 'black metal', Euronymous (a founder and central figure in
the Norwegian black metal scene) said that it applies to any heavy
metal band who are theistic Satanists and write Satanic lyrics. Such
extreme ideas repeated by other scene members, eventually caused it
to implode upon itself. Not all the musicians and fans were mother
loving Satan worshipers, many were bandwagon believers who dropped
all pretenses of allegiance to Beelzebub once the shit hit the fan
with a pair of highly publicized gristly murders involving key
figures in the Norwegian black metal scene.
A wave of church fires preceded Bård
Guldvik "Faust" Eithun (drummer for black metal band,
Emperor) stabbing a gay man, Magne Andreassen to death near
Lillehammer. Faust later confessed that he encountered Andreassen at
Olympic Park “this man approached me, he was obviously drunk and
obviously a faggot” the two went into nearby woods, Faust
confessed: “I had decided that I wanted to kill him, which was very
weird because I'm not like this” Faust was armed with a knife
because “It's better to have a knife you don't need than to not
have one when you need it” He stabbed Magne Andreassen 37 times and
kicked him in the head repeatedly. It would later be revealed that,
all three men, Faust, Euronymous (Mayhem) and Varg Vikernes (Burzum)
were present at the burning of Fantoft Stave Church and Holmenkollen
Chapel.
After Varg Vikernes, a protegee of Euronymous formed Burzum,
animosity arose between the two men. The motives for what would
follow are shrouded in mystery.... a power struggle, a financial
dispute or a need by Vikernes to outdo the murder of Magne Andreassen
by committing an even more hideous murder of his own. Whatever the
reasons, “on the night of 10 August 1993, Vikernes and Snorre
'Blackthorn' Ruch drove from Bergen to Euronymous's apartment in
Oslo. When they arrived there was a confrontation and Vikernes
stabbed Euronymous to death. His body was found outside the apartment
with 23 cut wounds” Vikernes claimed he killed Euronymous in
self-defense, having been lured to the Oslo apartment under the
pretense of meeting to iron out details of an unsigned contract. Varg
claimed that Euronymous planned to ambush him using a tazer and
torture him to death while “filming the event”
"There are very few bands in the history of rock & roll that
are undeniable as genuine innovators, Mayhem is one of
them." writes Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) in the afterword for
The Death Archives: Mayhem 1984-94. (co-authored by Jørn
“Necrobutcher” Stubberud) Formed in Norway in 1984 and
recognized as the most influential black metal band in the world,
they are a group whose story has, over the years, grown so big, so
notorious, it often seemed in danger of swallowing them up entirely.
Arson and extremism; exploiting the grusome suicide of corpse-paint
wearing singer Pelle "Dead" Ohlin and murder of guitarist
Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth by then bassist Varg "Count
Grishnak" Vikernes Today, Norwegian Black Metal is one
of the most distinct and controversial subcultures in the music
world, its popularity spanning globally to Europe, the UK, the U.S. ,
Mexico and Brazil.
