Subgenrefication

This blog was originally going to be all about Rule 17. Then I deleted it all and started it over, just so I could rant.

Once upon a time, people got together and started bands. Most bands were assembled to play hit songs for people to dance to. Some people assembled groups of musicians to see what would happen when they wrote original music. Some people had a vision of the type of music that they wanted to do, and hand-picked the right people for the job.

The legendary rock bands of the past and present seem to have been built around a combination of the second and third types. Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Queen, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult...the list goes on and on. These bands are all very influential, share a level of internal stylistic similarity, and yet are diverse in their influences and in their output. At the same time, they always sounded like themselves. If you hear a song from any of the aforementioned groups, it takes a matter of moments before you figure out who it is.

Today, particularly in the realm of hard rock and into heavier, more extreme styles, the goal seems to have been to decide very finitely on the direction of the band, then point everybody in that direction. This has been particularly true in the realm of heavy metal, which has fractured into a hodge-podge of subgenres with only a trifling difference between them. You have the "-cores", the various death metal subgenres, the various "regular metal" subgenres, and probably tons more that I'm not aware of.

It started in the 80s as ambitious rock journalists tried to fit handy labels to describe various bands. New adjectives started cropping up. To a degree they were useful, but there wound up being so much overlap that more adjectives started getting added to the mix. I have yet to discover a "Thrash" band that didn't stylistically play something that could be called "Speed Metal", and vice versa. Bands like Possessed and Kreator blurred the lines between extreme "Thrash" and "Death" metal, before the notion of death grunts were totally incorporated. So, "Death Metal" became a style distinct from Thrash, mostly due to the vocal difference (at this point, most Thrash vocalists still sang to varying degrees).

Eventually, you wound up with "Progressive" Thrash Metal, "Technical" Death Metal, and "Power Metal" became a term to describe bands that more or less are like a 20bpm faster version of Iron Maiden with newer amps. "Black Metal" originally meant bands like Mercyful Fate or Venom that sang about the devil a lot. Eventually, it became an aesthetic that was associated with a handful of Norwegian bands from the early 1990s.

From here, we wound up with an incestuous cross-pollination of subgenres, where black metal wound up influencing death metal, and you wound up with "Blackened Death Metal." So, is that Death Metal about the devil, Death Metal played while wearing makeup, or Death Metal played while the singer screeches a bit higher rather than in the more traditional guttural Death Metal delivery? I honestly don't know. If it's the first, then Possessed could just as easily have been a "Blackened Death Metal" band 25 years ago. If it's the second, it's just silly. If it's the third, then I guess we could have called the later period of Death "Technical Progressive Blackened Death Metal." I'd like to add a "-core" to the end, just to make it even more absurd.

It hasn't just hit extreme metal, either. "Doom", "Stoner", "Groove", and other terms have been used to the point of complete meaninglessness. I've mentioned how silly I think the term "Power Metal" is, and adding the word "Progressive" only makes it worse. We can pretty much drop the term "Progressive" from any band that we already say plays "Metal", because all of the originators of the "Metal" style came from the same scene that gave birth to Progressive Rock (Purple, Zeppelin, Sabbath), or were influenced by Progressive Rock (Priest, Maiden). I think it would be more appropriate to refer to ultra-simple metal as "Regressive Metal", since that would be the exception to the norm anyway.

So, what does this have to do with Rule 17? Those of you who have been listening to the 3-song demo that the 4 of us made have been hearing the result of 4 different people interpreting the same basic tune. I wrote the basis of all of the songs that we do (same as with the 7th Seal album for the most part). But, I don't decide how the drums go. I don't hammer out exactly how the bass lines should go. I don't dictate how the arrangement should go. Troy and I work out the guitar parts in the way that they seem to work best. I write guitar parts and lyrics and then as a band we work out how it should flow, how it should sound, where it should be punchy, and where it should lay back.

Going back to the beginning of this blog, my ideal is that Rule 17 is four guys heading in roughly the same musical direction - a combination of type 2 and type 3. I have no desire to play "Bla-bla-bla-metal". In a lot of ways, I identify more with Lemmy when he says "We're Motorhead, and we play Rock n' Roll".