The descriptions we use to classify music are ridiculous and contribute to the lack of creativity and individualism in heavy metal. Music is a thing. A noun. Heavy metal is an adjective, a description of a kind of music. The problem is, if you just say 'heavy metal,' that suggests an album like Painkiller or Number of the Beast, not the genre as a whole.
So if a heavy metal band doesn't sound like that, they need another qualifier. Maybe a band is a death heavy metal band. Add a description to a description of music. But surely an album like Lunar Strain, which has a death heavy metal pedigree, isn't the same stylistically as Butchered at Birth or Legion. So we divide it up into melodic death heavy metal and brutal death heavy metal (brutal death heavy metal has to be the most unintentionally hilarious description ever conceived ). A description describing a description describing a description describing music. But isn't Clayman a distinctly different style of music from Subterranean? I'd agree on calling the earlier style melodic death heavy metal, but I don't know what to call what they're doing now. Or is it still called melodic death heavy metal and we have to separate modern melodic death heavy metal from oldschool melodic death heavy metal?
If you think this is getting stupid, you're right. Notice that when you add a second qualifier, 'heavy metal' as a term itself becomes unwieldy? You are not supposed to say 'death heavy metal,' you are supposed to say 'death metal.' It takes the heavy right out of metal. I refuse to participate in that charade any longer.
Punk rock and hardcore are nothing more than marketing labels and do not exist as distinct musical genres for this same reason. Punk rock is merely a subset of rock. Hardcore is supposedly a meeting of punk rock and heavy metal, but it has no unique characteristics of its own. Anything labeled 'hardcore' is either punk rock, and therefore rock and roll, or it is heavy metal. I'd wonder if the same things could be said about gothic and progressive music. Are they their own genres, or just social constructs build around rock? I'll leave those investigations to someone else. The only thing that has convinced me is the argument that heavy metal has separated itself from rock and roll.
It is a nightmare to describe a band because of the necessary layers of description which do not have standard definitions. The problem intensifies when a band is of an ambiguous style. Follow the Reaper and Supernatural Addiction have very little in common, yet both have many things in common with thrash and death heavy metal (two categories with a huge overlap), and power and "plain" heavy metal (good luck separating those, and people will kill you if you classify them with one if they think they are the other).
I'm not talking about any sort of "journalistic" attempt at description when writing reviews. The difficulty in description comes up between friends talking music. In line at shows discussing new bands. Helping out somebody on an online message board.
Is there another genre of music which so thoroughly obfuscates itself in a mass of meaningless mumbo-jumbo? How did this happen?
Blame the creative musician's search for individuality, the uncreative musician's search for novelty, and music writers' combined laziness and hopes for glory.
Every new (sub)genre in music starts off as an older form of music before branching off. Whether by accident or design, some young punk (how often is it some pea-soup smelling old fart?) introduces a new idea, or combines two old ideas in a novel way, and it becomes their signature. Most musicians find it easier to copy than to create, and most musicians feel more creative copying something new, so the new idea or new combination gets ripped off by the originator's contemporaries, and suddenly you've got a new sound, a new subgenre, based on somebody else's original idea.
Enter the music writer. He's essentially lazy. He doesn't want to take the time to list the characteristics of every band he writes about, and he certainly doesn't want to do it if there are a number of bands sharing the same general description. And editors impose limits on the lengths of reviews. So the genre name becomes shorthand. Although real journalists have standards and ethics, music "journalists" do not. (LotFP certainly wouldn't exist under any true journalistic authority. Op-ed all the way, man.) That means that everybody that writes about music just interprets, invents, and uses the descriptions as they please.
Blame Geoff Barton for the madness. Before there was death, thrash, black, gothic, speed, power, or progressive heavy metal, there was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Barton (although Barton himself credits Alan Lewis for this) coined that phrase to describe what was happening around him in the late 70s, early 80s, and it caught on. The NWOBHM was an identifiable movement with a more or less identifiable sound with a distinct name that can be traced back to one person, that had artists that went on to sell millions and millions of albums as well as artists that went on to long term cult fame. It had everything.
I propose than many of the music "journalists" that use ridiculous descriptions of descriptions of descriptions of music want to be just like Geoff Barton, and have their name live on. Nobody remembers reviews, nobody remembers interviews, and the authors of such things are remembered even less. But get your name associated with coining a genre title, and you can reach the only hope of heavy metal "journalism" immortality possible. Just like Geoff. Even if nobody knows who grabbed the terms "death metal" and "black metal" off of Seven Churches and Black Metal and applied them to large groups of bands, writers still hope their invention will carry their name.
So are we in agreement that a labyrinth of ambiguous epithets promotes silliness, closed-minded fan cliques, and collective behavior rather than reliably describing heavy metal and recognizing what it stands for?
What are the solutions? How do we get to where a band's style signifies their own sound rather than which trend they are a part of?
The easiest answer is for the fans to just say "No more, we have this album already," when a band plays in a way that is already familiar to people, when their self-description uses well-worn terms, and when record companies promote them with the obvious tags. If this happens, standardized tags will disappear in a hurry.
If the fans were capable of that to any degree at all, there wouldn't be a problem to talk about to begin with. Relying on the fans as a whole to do anything intelligent is utterly pointless. The fans are the most numerous of all within a music subculture, making the decisions of the individual fan insignificant within the greater trend of what 'the fan' will do. Group thinking. Collectivism. Give 'the fans' what they want. Without 'the fans,' we wouldn't even be here. Most people hear something they like and demand ten more albums that sound just like it.
I hate people like that.
The problem of trend-surfing and nonstandard standardized genre titles will never be solved by the fan.
We can count on the record companies to continue to squeeze every last bit of value out of genre names. It's an easy marketing tagline, promotional material needs to be brief and easy to keep in mind. So not only can we not depend on record companies to help solve the problem, they'd be fools to do so.
The musicians themselves can begin to help by not making music based on their favorite musicians. Creating something that is not easily pigeonholed is the best way to not be pigeonholed. That's elementary thinking, but spending time around the heavy metal scene leads me to believe that a large contingent of people don't spend even that much thought on what they're creating, let alone listening to. The end goal is collecting music that one will listen to, not for a little while, but for many years. Isn't it? That doesn't happen by accident. But musicians are put in the position of needing to relate to fans, not appearing arrogant or above their peers, and that means speaking in a language the fans understand. It's easy to say that musicians should just not give a shit and be artists, but the reality is that most don't care about that. Releasing albums and going on tour is cool, and cool will always overcome important and meaningful when the decision has to be made.
So the answer has to lie with the passive observers of heavy metal, the writers. It is too late to remove the idea of standardized genre names entirely. Yet if those whose voices that reach many can stop using buzzwords, if they'd stop describing all of the same bands with the same terms, then that lack of conformity will trickle down to the fans, which is where tomorrow's musicians, industry personnel, and writers are going to come from. Let's introduce a little chaos into the vernacular.
For my part, I refuse to ever use a description of a description in print ever again. If it's heavy metal, it's heavy metal, and if I can't find an effective way of describing a style of music without falling into standard jargon, I shouldn't even be writing about it.
So if a heavy metal band doesn't sound like that, they need another qualifier. Maybe a band is a death heavy metal band. Add a description to a description of music. But surely an album like Lunar Strain, which has a death heavy metal pedigree, isn't the same stylistically as Butchered at Birth or Legion. So we divide it up into melodic death heavy metal and brutal death heavy metal (brutal death heavy metal has to be the most unintentionally hilarious description ever conceived ). A description describing a description describing a description describing music. But isn't Clayman a distinctly different style of music from Subterranean? I'd agree on calling the earlier style melodic death heavy metal, but I don't know what to call what they're doing now. Or is it still called melodic death heavy metal and we have to separate modern melodic death heavy metal from oldschool melodic death heavy metal?
If you think this is getting stupid, you're right. Notice that when you add a second qualifier, 'heavy metal' as a term itself becomes unwieldy? You are not supposed to say 'death heavy metal,' you are supposed to say 'death metal.' It takes the heavy right out of metal. I refuse to participate in that charade any longer.
Punk rock and hardcore are nothing more than marketing labels and do not exist as distinct musical genres for this same reason. Punk rock is merely a subset of rock. Hardcore is supposedly a meeting of punk rock and heavy metal, but it has no unique characteristics of its own. Anything labeled 'hardcore' is either punk rock, and therefore rock and roll, or it is heavy metal. I'd wonder if the same things could be said about gothic and progressive music. Are they their own genres, or just social constructs build around rock? I'll leave those investigations to someone else. The only thing that has convinced me is the argument that heavy metal has separated itself from rock and roll.
It is a nightmare to describe a band because of the necessary layers of description which do not have standard definitions. The problem intensifies when a band is of an ambiguous style. Follow the Reaper and Supernatural Addiction have very little in common, yet both have many things in common with thrash and death heavy metal (two categories with a huge overlap), and power and "plain" heavy metal (good luck separating those, and people will kill you if you classify them with one if they think they are the other).
I'm not talking about any sort of "journalistic" attempt at description when writing reviews. The difficulty in description comes up between friends talking music. In line at shows discussing new bands. Helping out somebody on an online message board.
Is there another genre of music which so thoroughly obfuscates itself in a mass of meaningless mumbo-jumbo? How did this happen?
Blame the creative musician's search for individuality, the uncreative musician's search for novelty, and music writers' combined laziness and hopes for glory.
Every new (sub)genre in music starts off as an older form of music before branching off. Whether by accident or design, some young punk (how often is it some pea-soup smelling old fart?) introduces a new idea, or combines two old ideas in a novel way, and it becomes their signature. Most musicians find it easier to copy than to create, and most musicians feel more creative copying something new, so the new idea or new combination gets ripped off by the originator's contemporaries, and suddenly you've got a new sound, a new subgenre, based on somebody else's original idea.
Enter the music writer. He's essentially lazy. He doesn't want to take the time to list the characteristics of every band he writes about, and he certainly doesn't want to do it if there are a number of bands sharing the same general description. And editors impose limits on the lengths of reviews. So the genre name becomes shorthand. Although real journalists have standards and ethics, music "journalists" do not. (LotFP certainly wouldn't exist under any true journalistic authority. Op-ed all the way, man.) That means that everybody that writes about music just interprets, invents, and uses the descriptions as they please.
Blame Geoff Barton for the madness. Before there was death, thrash, black, gothic, speed, power, or progressive heavy metal, there was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Barton (although Barton himself credits Alan Lewis for this) coined that phrase to describe what was happening around him in the late 70s, early 80s, and it caught on. The NWOBHM was an identifiable movement with a more or less identifiable sound with a distinct name that can be traced back to one person, that had artists that went on to sell millions and millions of albums as well as artists that went on to long term cult fame. It had everything.
I propose than many of the music "journalists" that use ridiculous descriptions of descriptions of descriptions of music want to be just like Geoff Barton, and have their name live on. Nobody remembers reviews, nobody remembers interviews, and the authors of such things are remembered even less. But get your name associated with coining a genre title, and you can reach the only hope of heavy metal "journalism" immortality possible. Just like Geoff. Even if nobody knows who grabbed the terms "death metal" and "black metal" off of Seven Churches and Black Metal and applied them to large groups of bands, writers still hope their invention will carry their name.
So are we in agreement that a labyrinth of ambiguous epithets promotes silliness, closed-minded fan cliques, and collective behavior rather than reliably describing heavy metal and recognizing what it stands for?
What are the solutions? How do we get to where a band's style signifies their own sound rather than which trend they are a part of?
The easiest answer is for the fans to just say "No more, we have this album already," when a band plays in a way that is already familiar to people, when their self-description uses well-worn terms, and when record companies promote them with the obvious tags. If this happens, standardized tags will disappear in a hurry.
If the fans were capable of that to any degree at all, there wouldn't be a problem to talk about to begin with. Relying on the fans as a whole to do anything intelligent is utterly pointless. The fans are the most numerous of all within a music subculture, making the decisions of the individual fan insignificant within the greater trend of what 'the fan' will do. Group thinking. Collectivism. Give 'the fans' what they want. Without 'the fans,' we wouldn't even be here. Most people hear something they like and demand ten more albums that sound just like it.
I hate people like that.
The problem of trend-surfing and nonstandard standardized genre titles will never be solved by the fan.
We can count on the record companies to continue to squeeze every last bit of value out of genre names. It's an easy marketing tagline, promotional material needs to be brief and easy to keep in mind. So not only can we not depend on record companies to help solve the problem, they'd be fools to do so.
The musicians themselves can begin to help by not making music based on their favorite musicians. Creating something that is not easily pigeonholed is the best way to not be pigeonholed. That's elementary thinking, but spending time around the heavy metal scene leads me to believe that a large contingent of people don't spend even that much thought on what they're creating, let alone listening to. The end goal is collecting music that one will listen to, not for a little while, but for many years. Isn't it? That doesn't happen by accident. But musicians are put in the position of needing to relate to fans, not appearing arrogant or above their peers, and that means speaking in a language the fans understand. It's easy to say that musicians should just not give a shit and be artists, but the reality is that most don't care about that. Releasing albums and going on tour is cool, and cool will always overcome important and meaningful when the decision has to be made.
So the answer has to lie with the passive observers of heavy metal, the writers. It is too late to remove the idea of standardized genre names entirely. Yet if those whose voices that reach many can stop using buzzwords, if they'd stop describing all of the same bands with the same terms, then that lack of conformity will trickle down to the fans, which is where tomorrow's musicians, industry personnel, and writers are going to come from. Let's introduce a little chaos into the vernacular.
For my part, I refuse to ever use a description of a description in print ever again. If it's heavy metal, it's heavy metal, and if I can't find an effective way of describing a style of music without falling into standard jargon, I shouldn't even be writing about it.
