Sunday, November 23, 2008

Bring back teh evil

The January edition of Revolver has a story titled Death Metal: The Ultimate Extreme Oral History that I would have linked to had their home page not suck so badly. Proudly I'll say this Metal movement originated in central Florida during the 1980's spearheaded by the bands Morbid Angel, Obituary, Death, and Deicide. Being in a tourist state everything is overly homogenized and pasteurized to appeal to snowbirds and lame families that think Disney is really where it's at.

It wears on the cognizant locals and ya just want to burn all overly-commercialized shit down......enter the angry GenXsters from Tampa and Orlando: Death Metal filled a canyon sized void in hard music at the time. Hair Metal owned the airwaves for most of the 80's, Metallica torched their head-banging fans by giving us ballads and Seattle bands made guitarists ashamed for knowing scales. These Floridians couldn't be bothered with what was popular, they just wanted to bust ear drums and shred.


When these dudes wear pentagrams you get the sense they mean it.

3 comments:

Nixon said...

Like Punk, Death Metal has earned its chops as being an important part of the American Lexicon. Primarily for rural and suburban Americans of Gen X. What better way to contradict the boring life than bullet belts, fast as lightning guitars, and deeply disturbing (albeit slightly undecipherable) lyrics.

Wek said...

Suburbia tends to give us the most fucked up shit we ever here. Without these guys carrying the torch of efficient guitar playing in the era of "knowing the scales is a sin", we may never have had the awesomeness of Children of Bodom today.

Wek said...

Meant "hear" not "here" (but you prob already figured that out). Duh to me.