I won't deny that that's true. I don't listen to a lot of death metal. But I haven't encountered any substance in the genre yet.
I'm curious what genre's have substance to you.
I won't deny that that's true. I don't listen to a lot of death metal. But I haven't encountered any substance in the genre yet.
Apparently, you're not aware of the meaning of the word "random." Is English not your first language?
I'm curious what genre's have substance to you.
I said something in response to a user who wasn't you,
nor was I talking about anything your response to me said.
Then I heard technical death metal.
Now regular death metal sounds silly.
Kid, it's not my fault that you don't understand the concept and purpose of a forum. A forum exists to facilitate public discussion among the entire forum community, not to facilitate private conversation between individuals. When you post to a forum, you implicitly announce that you are open to public discussion and even criticism of your ideas. If you want to keep a conversation private, well, that's what the "private message" function is for.
So you're saying that you never wrote the following?
If you didn't write that, who did? Gremlins? The other people living in your head? If you're experiencing paranoid ideations, I strongly recommend that you speak with a therapist, counselor or psychiatrist as this may be a symptom of untreated mental illness.
In any event, we both know you wrote what you wrote. It's still visible to anyone who cares to view the previous page in this very thread. So let's parse what you wrote, shall we? You're drawing a distinction between "regular death metal" which is "silly," and "technical death metal," which your context implies is not silly.
Are you with me so far, kid? Good. Now, here's the rub. In practice, the only difference between "regular" death metal and "technical" death metal is complexity of the playing technique required by the latter, which is to say, they only differ in how difficult they are to play. In other words, when you make the qualitative judgment that "regular" death metal is "silly" in comparison to "technical" death metal, what you're really saying is, "Technical death metal is better than regular death metal because it is harder to play." I find that judgment to be silly to the point of absurdity, and pointing that out was hardly "random" (I'll refrain from adding, "you fucking retard"). Oops.
What's some new stuff you guys would recommend for an old school fan?
Obituary, Autopsy, Morbid Angel, and the like....
The aesthetic of death metal IS the substance, be it realistic of not. The occasional bands have lyrics worth reading for allegorical content, but mostly its an escapist art form that embodies a certain aesthetic relating to death. Technical bands have been known to completely lack the aesthetic value of "true" death metal and only just play instrumentally in the style of death metal; ie blast beats, tremolo picking, and fast intricate noodling.
Lyrically lots of DM bands like to base their content on mythology typically borrowed from history or religion. Other time they take from horror/fiction like HP Lovecraft. Though as a death metal fan I admit that im not close minded to good DM just because the theme is shallow. Not all DM is like Cannibal Corpse though; and yes, stuff like it isnt supposed to be taken seriously.
I think it is a serious error to view death metal as "escapist" in character. Death metal is instead wholly realistic in its outlook. The fundamental project of death metal is to force us to confront those realities that our modern society would prefer not to acknowledge at all. That death metal uses fantastic elements to tell its story doesn't alter the underlying realism. Rather, death metal functions like Romantic literature and myth, using the fantastic to vault beyond temporality in the pursuit of eternal truths.
That sounds lovely but to a great extent, I think you're simply glorifying death metal. I would argue that most bands do not even share such motivations or intent.
Most artists in any context have no real intent beyond imitating or duplicating art they themselves have enjoyed. This isn't exactly a revelation: there's always far more mediocre crap than quality gold. However, a genre is defined by its most outstanding contributors, not by the parasites, hangers-on, me-tooers and would be profiteers. The best death metal is not and never has been escapist. Who gives a shit about what lesser bands are up to? They simply don't factor into the equation.
Ok, a genre is typically recognized by the contributions of great bands and pioneers who influenced many, but in truth it's the unoriginal bands came after that actually made it into a genre. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, but in the beginning of any style, there's always bands who are in some ways similar yet remain unique to one another but it's not so much a collective and conscious effort to accomplish something as it is just individual twists on familiar themes and ideas - metal was gaining a lot of momentum in the late 80s and death metal was an evolution of thrash metal and 80s extreme metal, taking it to a new level of extremity, musically and lyrically - but it's only after when unoriginal bands come along cement certain things into definition that it becomes a genre, and people then look to the pioneers to understand the phenomenon.
You know what I find silly? People who think that "quality music" has to be hard to play.
Your logic here is sensible, but it begins from a premise that is factually in error. Even if you were to look at only significant artistic contributors to death metal, you're still talking about dozens of artists working over a period of 25 years and producing a corpus of several hundred albums. That's a distinct and separate genre with or without the tagalongs.
Although it is easy to dismiss these bands as throwaways or tagalongs, I do think you are underestimating their importance. Without them, you are not going to have the longevity that exists and scenes or flash-in-the-pan genres will die out once the recognized bands split, change direction, or slip.
Bullshit. The also-rans contribute neither creatively nor commercially. The top 3-5% of bands are responsible for essentially 100% of the creatively significant albums and 75% or more of the aggregate album sales. The only real impact that the many bottom feeder acts ever had - creatively or commercially - was that they allowed a handful of studios like Morrisound and Sunlight to be commercially viable as single-genre producers. For artists and labels though, all of the money that has been made has been made off of the elite artists. The reality is that not only would the genre be no different from a creative aspect if the lesser bands had never existed, it wouldn't have made meaningfully less money for labels, either.
The problem is, you're looking at things through a narrow scope, and in hindsight. You can easily look back on time, and just pick 25 death metal albums or bands and say "that's everything", the rest was never significant, but that's not how it works. If a city doesn't have a scene with existing metal acts (no matter how unimportant they may be to you) it's much harder for a band to get their start. And classic bands and albums just don't pop out of nowhere.