The state of death metal
The purpose of an interview is what it does
The recent discussion between Decibel’s Albert Mudrian and longtime YouTube reviewer Anthony Fantano looks benign enough, but what does it do?
Unsurprisingly, Fantano’s line of questioning ventriloquises the polarised interests of the modern fanbase, which tends to oscillate between an obsession with death metal’s origins and policing the present against fabricated purists. The former driven by death metal’s origins in the cassette format, fermenting a kind of historical voyeurism in today’s pastiche hungry casualised fandom.
I sense no ill will on the part of Fantano or Mudrian here, they are simply furnishing an audience with what they crave. Fans are largely incurious as to how death metal distinguished itself in a musical sense from what came before, the proverbial “arms race” doing most of the heavy lifting here. Hence the need to limit the discussion to the social and cultural dimension over the musical. But even here, the treatment is either superficial or selective.
The historical voyeurism toward tape trading is followed by characterising death metal as the plucky underdog against the forces of conservatism during the Satanic Panic. Through some prompting from Fantano, Mudrian then associates this underdog status with a progressive undercurrent in the genre he claims has always been there. This is evidenced by the existence of Napalm Death and Scott Burns’s love of punk.
The purpose of drawing this link is to reassure Fantano’s predominantly liberal/progressive audience that death metal is “safe”. Despite its violent demeanour, it accommodates left leaning political content alongside gore. This obscures the fact that, in the 80s, explicit political content was limited to an almost negligible minority within grindcore, thus negating the need for its modern fanbase to confront the uncomfortable implications of death metal’s stubbornly ambivalent attitude toward capital P politics.
The fact that the discussion broadly skips over the period roughly covering 1992 to 2000 is also telling. The complex picture of the mid to late 90s, one that saw the genre produce some of its most adventurous material whilst simultaneously having a near death experience holds no interest for fans enamoured with the Roadrunner, Earache, Metal Blade tripartite.
Nothing that Fantano or Mudrian say is outright false, nor is it intentionally misleading. I’d speculate that omissions and half truths are almost reflexive at this point. Reaffirming the popular perception that death metal’s story is limited to the tape trading, Tampa, Tomb Mould triplet generates clicks.
That being said, sometimes the only way to get a kid to eat their greens is to make sure there’s nothing else on the plate. Beginner’s guides don’t have to be superficial. They don’t have to leave the accepted narrative unchallenged. They don’t have to flatten nuance. If you treat people like idiots, they will be idiotic.
Which brings us to the obligatory clickbait title: the “state” of death metal. Having satisfied the listener’s craving for retro porn by highlighting death metal’s quaint beginnings, reassured them of its progressive credentials, and defined the music no further than the banality of an “arms race”, we are now ready to talk about the contemporary scene.
The discussion of ‘Absolute Elsewhere’ is instructive here, insofar as it reveals just how much brand capital is invested in these products by commentators of this calibre. They display a clear need to reassure both themselves and their audience that Blood Incantation are in fact as novel as the PR furore led us to believe. Yet it is also acknowledged that the novelty of Blood Incantation’s playlist-metal is not universally agreed upon. Mudrian accepts that is an outlier. Tomb Mold and Horrendous are only just keeping up with the number of genres they can squeeze into an album. The obligatory mention of Necrot, Gatecreeper, and Portal come with no real explanation as to what makes these bands noteworthy, beyond their symbiosis with the Decibel hype machine.
Once the positive story runs out of road, they predictably turn their attentions to an imagined death metal traditionalist. Everyone claims to be familiar with this type of metalhead. I will freely admit to having never met one though. Even the “metal died in 93” reply guys will own up to enjoying a lot of material released after their chosen watershed, claiming that it is only metal as a viable artistic entity that died in their view, not the possibility of valuable contributions to the genre outright. The reason for the collective psychosis toward purists is driven by brand capital more than anything. The party line is that death metal is living through a new golden age. To question this must be interpreted as the refusal of an older fanbase to let the kids play with the toys for a bit, lest anyone be forced to confront dissent on its own terms.
The reason Decibel – and to a lesser extent Fantano – so closely guard against critical dissent is because they have too much brand capital invested in the legitimacy of these bands to change course now. They are also one of the few remaining platforms with the clout and connections to reinforce this narrative, ensuring that a newer generation of fans remain incurious about the genre’s depths beyond a superficial social history (hence Decibel’s taking credit for the existence of Necrot and Gatecreeper et al). They must ensure that they understand its evolution only in terms of the so called “arms race”. And they impose a politics on the genre that never really existed by fabricating links between a handful of isolated grindcore bands in the 80s and a modern fandom’s progressive beliefs, thus papering over a wealth of political ambiguity.
Mudrian almost makes this last point explicit by claiming that early death metal’s debt to punk represents “bad news” for his hypothetical elitist. The demos you old school heads enjoy came from punk all along, “gotcha”. Again, I have never met a fan who refuses to acknowledge this debt, and most enjoy this generation of punk music in its own right and entirely independently of their love of death metal.
There’s a reason a nuanced take on death metal does not generate clicks or interest from a wider audience. There’s a reason this article will get far more views than anything positive I write on bands I believe are making important contributions to death metal. And that’s because, as much as I enjoy championing it and sharing it with others, this music’s audience is and always will be limited. That’s not elitist grandstanding but a statement of fact.
In this sense Fantano and Mudrian, when they turn their attentions to the modern “state” of death metal, are talking about a different genre to the one covered in underground blogs like this. They will claim that’s not the case, that their only intention is to introduce people to the genre. And they wouldn’t be lying. Their intentions are largely benign. But the purpose of an interview is what it does. Here it perpetuates banality and casualisation. And who could blame them for jealously guarding the narrative from people like me? All influencers have is their influence. The surest way to discredit someone is to question their motives – purist, gatekeeper, elitist, traditionalist – rather than engage in a good faith discussion on the complexity and nuance that sits behind any genre of music.
Is it good that platforms as large as Decibel, and indeed Fantano, exist to still cover metal? Prima facie, yes. But in an era of information overload, this brand of beginner’s guide is completely superfluous. If fans are genuinely discovering death metal via this content instead of Spotify – and with a bit of luck digging deeper than these “just-so” stories – then great. But if that is genuinely the case, then it is all the more incumbent on these platforms to challenge their audience by revealing the genre’s wonderful and frustrating complexity instead of feeding their craving for historical voyeurism at one end, and a policed version of what “counts” as the forefront of the contemporary genre at the other. The purpose of an interview is what it does.