When it comes to metal music, there are many subgenres to choose from: progressive, alternative, death, heavy, and many more. While this may help identify what kind of metal music you are into, it can also help you get into new bands, the classic ones aside. But when it comes to the classics, one band that’s been called the pioneer of its genre, can be Death.
As the name of the subgenre suggests, Death has been credited to be one of the founders of death metal, Chuck Schuldiner, in particular. Starting his career with Death in 1984, Schuldiner rose to fame quickly. Despite having a 17-year career with the band, there was one thing he could not stand about this music.
What Schuldiner Could Not Stand
Even though Death has been considered the pioneer of death metal both by metalheads and music critics, Chuck Schuldiner hated one thing about metal. Speaking to Virus in a 1998 interview, three years before his passing, Schuldiner revealed:
“I hate categories, categories suck. You know, categories are okay if you go to the grocery store and you want to go to the vegetable department and the meat department but for music… Metal is metal, and all those categories screwed a lot of people up because it, it like, made people kinda scared to listen to a certain type of metal because they heard rumors about that kind of metal.”
Growing up, Schuldiner listened to many bands we now call heavy metal. In his words, a particular part of people hated what he listened to growing up because they were ‘scared.’ He continued:
“If you’re metal, you’re metal. If you have long hair, you sweat your ass off, you play fast, melodic, guess what, you’re metal. And some people are scared to admit that, at least in America especially they’re scared of that term ‘heavy metal.’ But for us we all grew up on heavy metal. We all grew up on Metallica and Iron Maiden and Slayer and Raven, Exciter and Judas Priest, Kiss, Sabbath.”
‘It’s Good to be Unpredictable’
After their sixth studio album ‘Symbolic’ was released, Death broke up due to tension with Roadrunner Records. Eventually, the band managed to come back together with a new drummer and new bassist, and released their final album, ‘The Sound of Perseverance.’
Touching on his band’s comeback and resembling it to other comebacks, Schuldiner shared his belief on how sometimes being unpredictable is better:
“I think it’s good to catch people off guard. You know it’s good to be unpredictable. Life’s too predictable sometimes. It’s nice when all of a sudden you hear out of nowhere that a band’s getting back together. As a fan I was thrilled to hear Kiss was getting back together. Not that we’re Kiss, but to fans, a fan is a fan and I think it’s great that people are like, ‘Wow, Death is getting back together,’ and blablabla, and there’s a lot of rumors and talk about it, and it made for good hype. A lot of people were surprised and it just worked out that way. It wasn’t something I planned it was something that felt right at the time.”
In conclusion, the rocker did not care about categories and genres, and instead listened to whatever sounded nice for him.
You can see the 1998 interview below.
