Editor’s Note: This post is guest written by Calder Hannan, who is a PhD student in music theory at Columbia University.
One of the most enjoyable things about a lot of metal, for me, is the way that it often forces me to think about and experience time in new and challenging ways. While I and others have written a fair amount about bands that obviously play with rhythm and meter, such as Meshuggah, Dream Theater, Car Bomb, and The Dillinger Escape Plan, I’ve been thinking recently about a song from a less obviously technical or experimental band: “The Atavist’s Meridian,” from Inter Arma’s excellent recent album Sulphur English.
In June 2019, I finished my PhD dissertation and graduated from Northwestern University! (This post is backdated.) You can read the abstract below, or download the full 300+ pages on Academia.edu.
Chapter 1 is about headbanging and drum patterns in metal music. Check it out! The rest of the dissertation is about classical music. More details below.
Chicago’s heading into a cold snap again, so I was at Trader Joe’s a night early stocking up on enough beer and peanut butter cups that I won’t have to leave my apartment all weekend (they say Thursday is the new Friday). And what genteel strains did I hear floating over the mountain ridges of Green Juice and Pumpkin Spice Instant Oatmeal? “There ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues…” Someone up there must have a sick sense of humor. The parking lot is covered in ice and the high temperature tomorrow will be almost twenty degrees below zero, and here some hipster music algorithm is playing a summer hit from the 1960s.
Or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I got home and realized that “Summertime Blues” was released in the middle of the winter, on January 16, 1968. ((Well, one could argue that it wasn’t really winter, since Blue Cheer lived in San Francisco and it never really gets below 55F there, even in mid-January. Maybe they wouldn’t have appreciated the irony.)) They released a cover of a summer song in winter, and here I was listening to it in winter, too. That’s enough of a dumb coincidence that I kept thinking about it.
Then I remembered that I’ve got this blog that I theoretically still write, and I’ve been looking for something to write about to kick off a series about the 50th anniversary of the birth of heavy metal. Somewhere in the dusty corners of my mind I dimly recalled that Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum came out in 1968, and fifty years ago is 1969. I can’t do that one, I thought. I would’ve had to write that piece last year. But then I thought what the hell, 50 years is a nice round number but it doesn’t really mean anything. So here it is, time to celebrate Half a Century (Plus One) of Heavy Metal with a post about the genesis of heavy metal, “Summertime Blues” by Blue Cheer.
What’s that, you say? Blue Cheer isn’t really metal? Metal really began with Black Sabbath or Deep Purple? I respectfully disagree.
After two decades of being rejected from the metal genre, System of a Down is getting more love these days. At the beginning of their career, the band had this misfortune to be lumped together with that short-lived 90’s fad “nu metal” (System of a Down never accepted the label, though). System of a Down continued to have a contentious relationship with genre, but especially with metal. Metal fans lambasted System of a Down for being paradoxically too commercial and too weird, too political and too silly. ((If you don’t believe me, check out this thread from Encyclopedia Metallum.)) But more recently, the band seems to be getting more favorable treatment, placing well on several lists of “best metal of the 21st century” and that sort of thing.
This could be because people who were growing up when System was popular (like myself) are now in their late 20s and early 30s and working their way into rock journalism jobs. Another factor could be their enduring success as one of the heaviest bands to continue to sell out stadiums. I mean, how many other metal(ish) bands can successfully attract a headline spot and an devoted crowd at a major festival like Download when they haven’t released an album in more than a decade?
But it’s also because their music actually has a fair amount of metal in it.Continue reading
I think Body Count’s “Black Hoodie” is one of the most compelling metal songs to be nominated for a Grammy, ever. But more importantly, I think there’s a pretty good chance it will win the Grammy for Best Metal Performance this year. And while the much-discussed political undertones of the lyrics certainly are important, ((See the opinions of writers for Loudwire on the topic of Body Count’s politics: http://loudwire.com/opinion-who-will-win-the-60th-annual-grammys-rock-metal-categories/ )) the biggest reasons I think the song should win the Grammy are musical.
Editor’s Note: This post is guest written by Calder Hannan, who just finished his Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory at the University of Virginia and will be starting studies for a PhD in Fall 2018.
One of the most exciting relatively new metal bands for me has been Car Bomb, especially with their latest album Meta, because their rhythmic technique sounds completely new. While it took me a while to figure out exactly what was happening, it’s easy to hear that their uniqueness has to do with the fact that their music plays extensively with tempo in a way that the bands they are influenced by rarely, if ever, do. The music of Meshuggah, for example, makes extensive use of unusual groupings and polymeter, as explored in other Metal In Theory posts and in several academic papers, but rarely does Meshuggah’s rhythmic difficulty extend into the realm of tempo ambiguity or change. ((There are a few exceptions, but none in which tempo can truly be said to change–see the middle section of Meshuggah’s “Nebulous” for example.))
Car Bomb’s music rarely seems to go for more than a few seconds, much less an entire song, without forcing the listener to question tempo. This, in addition to their use of asymmetrical and unusual groupings and polymeter, ((To read about asymmetrical groupings in other metal, see this previous Metal In Theory post about Meshuggah’s song “obZen.”)) makes their rhythmic style very disorienting indeed. One song section that can act as a prime example of a major aspect of their rhythmic style is the opening to “Lights Out,” from the 2016 album Meta. This first section, from 0:00–0:42 sounds like a series of disorienting tempo changes in quick succession. Tempo, which can be a complicated concept (especially in this example), can be thought of in this example as the rate at which you would tap your foot (or bang your head).
I’ve mapped out the first section in the below table with the rate at which it feels natural to tap my foot (in beats per minute), which is the same as the rate at which we hear cymbal hits, labelled as the approximate tempo of each section. However, each of these rates conforms to a whole number of eighth notes—the number of eighth notes between cymbal hits is included as well.
Table of tempo changes in “Lights Out” by Car Bomb
The fact that each new tempo is in fact made up of an integer multiple of eighth notes is the key to the rhythmic excitement and disorientation of this passage. Because the length of these eighth notes does not change, the change in cymbal hit rate does not quite feel arbitrary—it is still disorienting, but does not feel completely disconnected.
In other words, it is possible to hear the whole section at the same tempo (probably dotted quarter notes at 144 bpm), because the basic pulse rate does not change (it is possible to count the same fast eighth note pulse through all of the sections). It is even likely that the band must hear it this way, in order to stay tight live. However, this is by no means an easy conclusion to reach, as becomes apparent when listening to the section. The aural illusion of almost chaotic change hinges on the cymbals; because they are normally such an important marker of tempo in the genre (especially in the music of Meshuggah), their fast-shifting accents in “Lights Out” lead to the strong perception of tempo change.
The section is a sort of arithmetic game, as the cymbals hit after one less eighth note in each subsection. While it is not easy to hear that this exactly is happening, it is clear that the beat seems to be speeding up, which paints the song’s lyrical motif of being “straight on course,” of inevitability—the riff, which is presented in shorter form in several other sections of the song, seems to collapse inexorably toward the faster beat. This example also paints the album title, Meta: the use of cymbals in a non-conventional way (to mark a changing tempo, illusory or not) comments on and exploits genre conventions to create an especially disorienting experience for listeners already familiar with the genre. ((For those interested in the more theoretical aspects of this, it is an example that points to the equivalency of meter and tempo at certain rates—it is almost equally reasonable to hear these cymbal hits as a moderate tempo or fast measures. Yeston’s characterization of rhythm as consisting of several layers in his book The Stratification of Musical Rhythm suggests this equivalency as well, as tempo and meter are simply two among many traditional ways of grouping a much faster steady stream of pulses.))
I would further argue that this is an example of rhythmic disorientation leading to heaviness. I think that rhythmic disorientation is a fairly intuitive concept for fans of this type of music—it has to do with how hard it is to learn to feel a given passage. It also has links to a concept developed by Brad Osborn, who wrote a scholarly article about the difficulty involved in math rock grooves. Basically, he argues that these grooves are more difficult when they force you to change how you tap your foot (or bang your head) throughout the course of a song. This certainly happens in “Lights Out” (and pretty much all of Car Bomb’s music)—you can never quite settle into a comfortable groove, because the tempo seems to be constantly changing. While this is not the only way in which music can be rhythmically difficult, or even the only way that “Lights Out” is disorienting, it gets at the feature of Car Bomb’s music that sets them apart.
I’ve written about the link between rhythmic disorientation and heaviness at length in other places, but will summarize the main ideas here. Rhythmic difficulty makes it harder to metaphorically wrap one’s head around a song, enacting a metaphorical size that is at the heart of musical representations of heaviness. It also gives the band power, because they demonstrate the ability to control and work with unwieldy, difficult music, and power is another key aspect of heaviness. Finally, they position themselves as a serious band by innovating, specifically in the way that they reinterpret genre conventions to suit their needs, and seriousness is another expressive quality closely linked to heaviness. While there are of course many other aspects of the band’s sound that contribute to heaviness outside of use of rhythm (palm muted riffs, downtuned extended range guitars, compressed production style, etc), the rhythmic difficulty displayed in their music sets them apart. In his review of Meta on the blog No Clean Singing, Todd Manning concludes that “they come across as so much heavier than anyone else.” While this is only one example, it at least begins to support my argument. Car Bomb’s use of rhythm is innovative and complicated, but it would seem that it is motivated by a fairly common goal in metal music, namely the pursuit heaviness. I have no problem with saying categorically that they succeed in this respect; in this case, with great rhythmic difficulty comes great heaviness.
Sources.
Capuzzo, Guy. 2014. “A Cyclic Approach to Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah.” American Musicological Society / Society for Music Theory Joint Meeting 2014. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Lucas, Olivia. 2016. “Loudness, Rhythm, and Environment: Analytical Issues in Extreme Metal Music.” PhD Dissertation. Cambridge, Massachusets: Harvard University.
McCandless, Greg. 2013. “Metal as a Gradual Process: Additive Rhythmic Structures in the Music of Dream Theater.” Music Theory Online, 19(2).
Osborn, Brad. 2010. “Beats That Commute: Algebriac and Kinesthetic Models for Math-Rock Grooves.” GAMUT 3(1): 43-68.
Pieslak, Jonathan. 2007. “Re-Casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah.” Music Theory Spectrum 29(2): 219-245.
Smialek, Eric T. 2008. “Rethinking Metal Aesthetics: Complexity, Authenticity, and Audience in Meshuggah’s I and CatchThirtythr33.” Master’s Thesis. Montreal, Quebec: McGill Unviersity.
Yeston, Maury. 1974. The Stratification of Musical Rhythm. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
One of the most-read posts on my blog is this one about the microtiming in Metallica’s masterpiece “Master of Puppets.” Every few months I run across new discussions on different forums or subreddits where someone drops a link to that post. But the most exposure that piece has gotten by far has been very recent, from an excellent video made by one Jake Lizzio who runs Signals Music Studio in a suburb near Chicago. He gives an insightful discussion of the rhythm timings I describe and a great explanation of the stakes of the issue, and I’m amazed and honored that my post inspired him to put that together. Definitely check out some of his other videos if you have a chance! As of today, this video below has over 300,000 views, way more people than I ever could have imagined would be interested in the minute timing details of Metallica’s riffs. (And certainly a bigger audience than I will ever get in an academic music theory journal.)
By far the coolest thing about seeing my research get shared, though, has been reading the discussion it generates. Apparently the idea of microtiming analysis struck a nerve among lots of internet commenters. Many of the posters are hashing out the same stakes about the validity and purpose of music notation that ethnomusicologists and music theorists have been writing stuffy 50-page-long journal articles about for decades. But of course, net denizens get to the point faster (when they don’t go off topic) and are a LOT more colorful.Continue reading
Dear Readers, I’ve recently started writing for the International Society of Metal Music Studies blog. Some of my pieces will now be hosted there, but every time I write for them I will also post the lede paragraph of each article here. Please visit the ISMMS site to view this whole post, and while you’re there read through a few posts by their other excellent writers!
On the fourth day of July, one thousand people in Aurora, Illinois gathered to headbang together in a public park in an attempt to be recognized by the Guinness book of world records. Why July Fourth? This date is celebrated as Independence Day in the US, in commemoration of the vote by a congress of colonial governments in 1776 to declare themselves United States independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Many municipalities sponsor parades, fireworks displays, and other free public events to display national and civic pride. As a large suburb in the shadow of Chicago, Auroradoes not get much attention outside of local news, but they do have one claim to international fame: Aurora is the setting of the internationally-popular Wayne’s World franchise, whose main characters Wayne and Garth are a pair of goofy heavy metal geeks.
I spent an afternoon recently making charts and transcriptions of songs from Metallica’s early albums, looking at how musical details of their songs reflect the topics of the lyrics. I was fascinated by their epic instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” which stretches out a captivating atmosphere of foreboding for almost nine minutes, making it one of Metallica’s longest tracks. The form of this song, which I’ll describe later as a kind of gargantuan, distended version of the protoypial verse-chorus form with bridge that is used in most metal music, is unique among Metallica’s earlier repertoire. Unlike most instrumentals on earlier metal albums, which are sort of transitional acoustic guitar or synthesizer bits that don’t feel quite like whole compositions (like Black Sabbath’s “Orchid” or Venom’s “Mayhem With Mercy”), “The Call of Ktulu” is a full-length track and stands on its own in comparison to the rest of the tracks on the album.
