Where did death metal come from? Death the band (“Death” metal) and their Death By Metal demo or Possessed and their Death Metal (straight to the point) demo is an eternal debate among headbangers up there with good old, “Who would win in a fight?” bar discussions or comparing sports legends across time and space. Maybe death metal came from somewhere else? I could easily see Rolling Stone or something calling Metallica’s Fight Fire with Fire death metal. The Simpson’s said Judas Priest were death metal in an episode that made a joke about just how popular death metal is in Sweden (There are two Swedish Death Metal Encyclopedias organized by city and year and an extremely comprehensive bathroom reading book about it). So where did death metal come from?

Google Books says Newsweek called Metallica and Megadeth death metal in 1987. I don’t believe that. There’s nothing with “death metal” as a reference in Google Books that predates 1986. The two demos predate it. There’s nothing in Google Scholar either.

A quick search on google for Celtic Frost and death metal on a hunch led me to this forum thread: http://www.triptykon.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=711&sid=627214ae1d197da968d459d52cc8aa2f

Tom G. Fischer (“Tom Warrior”), the guitarist and frontman of Hellhamemr and Celtic Frost stated that the term “death metal” comes from photocopied fanzines and he still owns a few of them from the early 80s, well before the members of Death and Possessed had even begun to play hyper aggressive music.

The “enclosure of knowledge” by copyright and the extreme lengths taken by those who hold the rights to newspapers and academic journals through the legal system to enforce their rights for their own monetary benefit reminds of late medieval guild systems. Individual subscriptions to each journal are so expensive, costing thousands of dollars per year. Journals in the hard sciences can cost up to fifty thousand dollars, about the average yearly income of an individual in an industrialized society. Access to these and the online databases containing them are therefore only accessible mainly to large universities and corporations. This in effect isolates the public, the common man on the street away from direct sources of knowledge.

The average person is steered away from the direct data and researchers’ own published conclusions. Instead, he or she is forced to rely on others interpretations and commentary there of. This economically forces an intermediate lens on the public, preventing them from forming their own conceptions about the world from the direct perceptions of others. The worldviews of those with economic access to knowledge are forced upon the public.

Such use of Copyright law is just another method of control. It is on a scale beyond rent seeking due to the cost of access but on a scale that resembles feudalism more than consumer capitalism. Legal access to the knowledge is economically impossible for most people to earn in their own lifetimes on their own. Those who store it, the large database providers charging ridiculous amounts of money, are basically acting like a medieval guild system: “Yes you can know what we know if you’re born into it or pay us to apprentice. Otherwise good luck being an illiterate dirt farming.”

The strict legal enforcement thereof resembles the guild system ever more so and is in some way even more restrictive. Just as in 1200, you couldn’t legally make and sell a chair in a medieval town without joining or being approved by the appropriate guild, today you can’t sell or distribute copies of a copyright work without the permission of the rights holders as they all want to make money from it. They won’t let you join except for a heft initial investment as they want to control access to the knowledge and skills for their own, ingroup benefit.