(Because sometimes you need more than 140 characters...)
If you know me well, you know two things: 1) my favorite musical troupe of all time is Sonic Youth; and, 2) I played drums in a death metal band for a while in high school.
In fact, to this day, my most consistent listening habits are obscure hip-hop and very heavy artists. I just can't get enough.
I was intrigued to see an interview in Decibel with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore about black metal. (If you don't know what black metal is, you won't find the rest of this post very interesting.)
In this interview, Thurston displays a very deep and broad knowledge of black metal, linking it to the avant-garde stuff he's found so inspiring for so long. He talks about how it's so raw and how it's so much not about being music but being art. It's such a great display of his devotion to all things sonic, and it's a fun read. Not to mention that there are bands in there that only the encyclopedic have ever heard of.
However, he also says the following about death metal:
Were you ever into death metal?
I really drew the line between black metal and death metal. Death metal was obviously more of a technically proficient kind of playing, which I had no interest in. I wanted to hear music by people who had no desire to impress with any kind of traditional, skilled playing. I do appreciate hearing riff masters, but they’re a dime a dozen.
This, as someone who respects Thurston probably way way more than I should, kind of caught me off-guard. I assumed that any musicians that were putting forth concerted effort to express themselves wouldn't be met by a godfather with such disinterest.
When I was playing this stuff in Albuquerque in '93-'95, we frankly had no idea that black metal existed (if it was even called that, which seems doubtful). We knew about american music mostly and the occasional European act like Bolthrower (U.K.). We certainly weren't jet-setting around the world playing shows and having any sort of insight into how metal varied around the world.
Maybe I'm reading too much into a few sentences in an interview. I can't help but be a bit disappointed. I'd like to think we can find something of value in most types of artistic expression. And to write off a whole genre of music that I hold close to my heart... well, it's just too bad.
(BTW, Sonic Youth has a new record out tomorrow: http://70.32.78.35/sonicnews/?p=13.)
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Well, IIRC, the whole Norwegian black metal movement was in many ways a reaction to/against death metal as a genre - death metal was seen as "trendy," and black metal artists viewed themselves as much more outsiders and committed to their scene as a lifestyle. For example, see Euronymous' (Mayhem) letter on Dead's suicide: "Well, the reason for [killing himself] was that he lived only for the EVIL black metal scene, and its lifestyle with rivets, chains, crosses black clothes and hell. Today all "death" metal bands have normal clothing and jogging pants and look as ordinary as they can, and the same goes for the audience who are nothing but trendy little kids with jogging pants and skateboards!" (see: "Euronymous' Epistles (pt 6)") This is why terms like "true" and "cult" (or, as they're often spelled, tr00 and kvlt) come up a lot in discussions of certain types of black metal - there's a definitely very conservative and judgmental aspect to the genre, although it's now a pretty marginal scene as black metal has branched out in a wide range of interesting directions.
In some ways, it's kind of like black metal was the punk to death metal's arena rock - the death metal bands were seen as overly wank-y and cool (and often American), and black metal was for more hard-core sorts of people (not, y'know, poseurs). All despite, of course, the fact that black metal really grew out of death metal in a direct way. And I think this rhetoric was really only used in the early '90s when black metal really was a pretty new, fiercely local, and seriously fucked-up scene in Norway, as a way of defining themselves and explaining to themselves why they were so much bigger bad-asses than the "mainstream" extreme metal of the time. So it is a little odd to see Thurston recycle that logic now. Certainly, death metal as a genre is a bit more focused on technical proficiency and complexity whereas black metal tends towards being more simplistic/atmospheric, but both genres have diversified quite a bit since those days.
So, I dunno, not particularly insightful, but I read this as a bit of a dated effort to show his allegiance to the more underground/punk variant. And yes, it is unfortunately that it's a bit overstated and in dismissive tones rather than as just a personal preference. I mean, I personally listen to a lot more black metal than I do death metal for somewhat similar reasons, largely because the generally simpler and more ambient/drone-y stuff is just more of what I like than the more aggressive death metal side of things. Which is also why I prefer more doom-y death metal, and don't love the more over-the-top black metal - but that's just a question of personal preference, no need to make it a judgment on death metal.
Of course, from a purely aesthetic/human interest perspective, there certainly is a lot more interesting stuff going on in the black metal scene. Those guys were fucking *insane* (see "Black Metal Inner Circle" on wikipedia for an overview).