Does Death Metal somehow trace its ancestry back to late 19th century (proto?-)blues music?
I ask because I know Death Metal, being a genre of Metal, is also a genre of Rock and Roll, and that generally, Rock and Roll traces for the most part back to blues music, yet I can find no trace of blues (musically speaking) in death metal. (Not that I’ve heard that much DM, though.)
In fact, musically, Death Metal seems to be in many ways quite the opposite of blues music.
If I had had to guess, I would have thought its central influences were in military marches, and also romantic and classical era classical music. Well, I didn’t claim I would have guessed well or even sanely.
Anyway, I’m guessing there’s some kind of hardcore punk influence. Is that correct?
Well, there are two major trunks of heavy metal: blues-based and classical-based. Bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath fall into the first group; Iron Maiden, Manowar, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc fall into the second group. I’m not familiar enough with death metal to say for sure which group it falls into.
The short answer is that death metal (and most other forms of metal) are so far removed from their blues roots that you’d have a hard time guesing there was a relationship just from hearing the music. There is a genre widely known as sludge metal that does have a stronger blues influence, and at least one other band (Danzig) does have a pretty bluesy sound. I’m sitting here listening to Alabama Thunderpussy’s Staring at the Divine, which is a classic sludge metal album and definitely worth checking out.
Death metal’s most immediate ancestor is thrash metal, which was most strongly influenced by the new wave of British heavy metal and hardcore punk, as you suspected. Punk didn’t really have any strong blues influences, but the earlier metal was strongly indebted to Black Sabbath, who started life as a blues band named Earth, so that’s the latest the connection could be. The classical connection is much stronger in black metal, which is more tied to traditional European music, and I’m not really sure where you got the idea of a military march from…
I have to disagree with this. Go listen to the sound clips on Amazon from Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal, Ahab’s The Call of the Wretched Sea or Napalm Death’s Scum and tell me any of those is any form of rock. Metal started out as a style of rock, and there’s still significant overlap between the two forms, but neither subsumes the other.
Death metal came mostly out of thrash (Slayer, et. al.) Punk and not a small amount of Maiden and Metallica went into that style. After that it’s a matter of going back up the tree to Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, which I suppose you could say ends up ultimately at 19th C proto-blues. Things can be as connected as you want to define them; but (IMHO) I’d say there isn’t much left of the blues influence.
Or, you could just listen to Dethklok. (There’s a murdertrain a’comin’… oh yeah, you know what I’m talkin’ about…)
I’m going to have to partly dispute this. The Stooges were quite bluesy. Then again, the Ramones weren’t really bluesy at all and I guess they ultimately had a bigger influence on punk.
I wonder if Death Metal has some roots in reggae or ska because of the influence of the more hardcore mods on early heavy metal culture.
Personally, I would track hard metal back to Surf music (specifically Dick Dale.) Of course, I would personally track most of rock that doesn’t sound like the blues to Dick Dale. Previous to that there was pretty much just happy, lovey 50s music.
Death Metal came from Thrash which came from adding Motorhead to Diamondhead via Venom and speeding it up.
First Death Metal album - Possessed’s Seven Churches (Including the song “Death Metal”)
Best known death metal band - Death (Oddly enough)
Personally I think there can be a clear aetiology drawn between Fear Factory’s industrial Dance Death Metal sound and the Disco version of C Is For Cookie, by the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street Fever.
Individual bands have had varying degrees of blues in their sound, but on the whole punk doesn’t have a significant blues influence. And maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always considered the Stooges more proto-punk than actual punk, if only based on when they were active.
If so, the influence is so indirect as to be unnoticeable.