Internet Democratization of Music and Metal

Professor O’Malley mentioning that the democratization of music through digital audio workstation software and free but mostly illegal distribution on the internet has led to a massive democratization of the music industry. Apple’s Garage Band software that comes for free with every Macintosh computer Apple sells lets people create any form or genre of music using chopped up samples from others. This effectively lets individuals mix and match to create mostly artistically worthless music such as electronic dance music (EDM) with 80s arena rock vocals singing meaningless phrases, swinging percussion, and a surf rock guitar.

This troubles me as it lets people chop up the aesthetics of other musical genres to apply them as meaningless novelty to others; chopping up samples of modal jazz and arranging them into a verse-chorus-verse singalong with meaningless words and a rock guitar solo doesn’t mean that whoever dragged and dropped the samples into place in Garage Band has actually created modal jazz; it’s just a song composed of individual aesthetic or musical snippets of one type of music arranged into another type of music. Since the sample pop song (Does it truly count as a song if the words are meaningless or there is no real overall vocal melody?) doesn’t meet the requirements to be the music the samples it was taken from, it inherently cannot be that type of music no matter how much it the superifical aesthetics or individual musical elements resemble it.

I’ve notice this phenomenon in heavy metal but it seems to have begun prior to even digital production becoming commonplace. Whenever a new metal sub-genre was created, within five to ten years newer bands came out who claimed to be playing the older, usually more musically complex type of metal but were really just copying small musical elements and the production aesthetics without actually arranging it into the same form of music. Sometimes even the original artist “sells out” and claims as such either through sheer laziness or desire for commercial success, the best example being Metallica in the 90s.

You can see this evident from the get go. Black Sabbath was the first heavy metal band in the early 70s. For a few years, they were the only group playing their own type of music that was musically distinct from everyone else. Other bands like the local Pentagram from the Washington, DC area came around who made music composed of similar power chord based riffs but their riffs were mostly melodically static and repeated unchanged over the course of the song until all the lyrics were said and it was time to play the solo. Exactly like a standard rock band and unlike Black Sabbath. Eighties bands like Def Leppard and Poison claimed to be heavy metal bands but everyone with half a brain can tell “Pour Some Sugar on Me” isn’t the same type of music as “Paranoid.” The music in Def Leppard and Poison is all vocal while Black Sabbath is guitar based and Ozzy Osbourne tries to sing through his nose but truly is just imitating the guitar rhythm.

This superficial copying is also readily apparent in the extreme sub-genres of metal that share almost uniform production aesthetics: Cookie Monster and awful solid state amps for death metal with the Nazgul and massive treble distortion from awful solid state practice amps for black metal. Each of these had distinct song structures and general riffing styles that comprised the music that differed from say Metallica’s triplet riffing or Iron Maiden’s gallops. The lo-fi aestetocs makes death and black metal the easiest to superficially copy the aesthetics of to pretend to be, even though the pretenders (the posers?) most of the time do not actually believe they are pretending. Does this make them delusional?

The internet means that anyone can hear this music that was previously only distributed through independent labels or underground physical copying and pretend to play it without truly understanding what it is was actually being played. Usually some random guy (They’re almost all guys. I can’t think of who didn’t play bass in a major metal band off the top of my head.) gets a high gain guitar tone and shrieks or growls to pretend to be one or the other. Maybe he learned to play a riff or two from guitar tabs found through Google. These riffs will typically just be repeated ad nauseam for five minutes over sampled percussion until the musician himself gets bored of playing them. The “musician” making it cannot grasp the earlier music he wants to actually play. He has not fully internalized it and how it actually works as a musical piece even though he’s selling it on iTunes or Bandcamp as death or black metal. The music he made is of course as far from Death and Mayhem as the Garage Band projects are from whatever they were haphazardly “composed” from samples of.

This phenomenon also applies to modern, professional releases on major labels too. Every contemporary Nuclear Blast Records release sounds like every other Nuclear Blast release no matter what Nuclear Blast is selling. Slayer will do something from “Angel of Death” or “Raining Blood” for ten seconds in the middle of the album, Carcass will do their Carcass gore shtick, and Blind Guardian will sing about Lord of the Rings but if you put their music into a DAW and copy and pasted it around, you could probably make one group into another. Good luck trying that with their original records, Show No Mercy and Reek of Putrefaction. These bands are almost a minstrel show of themselves now.

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