‘Eavy Metal

Metal Monday – Carcass & Cannibal Corpse

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Calvin and Hobbes

Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…

At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…

Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot

Reek of Putrifaction:



Exhumed to Consume



Cannibal Corpse is just as extreme in its lyrics, but perhaps somewhat more honest in their motivation:

“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”

Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.

Meat Hook Sodomy:



Butchered at Birth



So… Metal classics or just noisy filth?

Metal Monday

'Eavy Metal
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I was both pleased and slightly annoyed last Friday on discovering BBC Four had decided to broadcast a heavy metal theme night. Pleased because metal rarely gets any kind of mention on the BBC, annoyed because if BBC Four was doing a Heavy Metal Brittannia retrospective it meant the genre had well and truly become obsolete. And true to form, the main documentary was indeed an exercise in nostalgia, focusing too much on metal’s pioneers, spending too much time on the sixties and early seventies, with barely a mention of the eighties and the N.W.O.B.H.M. and absolutely nothing on developments since. Even if the focus was on British metal, why was so much time spent on barely relevant acts like Uriah Heep instead of important post-1980 bands like Napalm Death, or Paradise Lost or whatever? Is it cynical of me to think that cutting off the story around 1980 would make metal still reasonably understandable to the BBC Four audience, while not having to mention the more extreme developments since? Still, it’s comforting to know the BBC’s usual slightly out of kilter view of music extents to metal as well — seemingly obsessed with roots and almost unable to move out of the baby boomers’ sixties-seventies time frame, as if everything that’s interesting in rock and pop got its start there.

But though I can fully appreciate the genius of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and the other hard rock pioneers, they’re not metal. These bands all fit in perfectly with the other big rock bands: the Stones, the Who, Cream and all the seventies stadion rock acts. Perfectly normal people could listen to them and go to their concerts and not be looked down upon. They weren’t metal. is metal:



And this.



Not to mention this.



Metal has always been a skeevy sausagefest sort of music, both thuggish and nerdy, listened to by the weird dorky kid with the Tolkien posters in his bedroom and the thicko failing woodshop with a habit of casual violence. It’s never been cool or top forty material, with some exceptions, yet remains popular everywhere anyway. Its image is violent, reactionary and misogynistic but apart from a few of the more loonier Christian pressure groups in the eigthies nobody ever got as outraged about it as they would get over a single fiddy cents video. And I love it.