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Do you think Djent is an actual genre?


MarksASP

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On 7.4.2017. at 5:11 PM, JudgeDread said:

i think it was like a type of guitar "sound" and now its just developed into a genre, meshuggah were doing that guitar sound, but they are not what people call "a djent band"

problem with bands you associate with "djent" periphery, monuments etc, all sound to similar i think 

I mostly agree with this, I'd only add that this term could be a style of playing and aestethic, playing polyrhytmic patterns on mostly just one or few notes on guitar that has seven or more strings in that very low tuned way.

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New guy here, I think djent was actually a progression of 90s prog rock, some of the more aggressive bands of the 2000s, and a bit of ADD thrown in. I love the talent that goes into some of these bands, but honestly the constant changes, vocals that just don't seem to fit, and all the guitars with a massive mid spike at 1.6kHz is really just not my thing, though I absolutely respect their abilities and musical talent! Especially Tosin Abasi.

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I think it's a subgenre of prog, in its purest form, that borrows a lot from hardcore. It's got its own tropes and approaches to other genre tropes. That said, it seems more a production technique than anything else. Evidence being that bands like Novallo, Shattered Skies, Voyager and even Orden Ogan have used said elements but incorporated them with their own style.

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all metal bands use the djent thing...it is a staple sound started by Sabbath...specifically in Symptom of the Universe. To me, most current "DJent" bands are just metalcore....which I try to avoid personally...

Meshuggah was always prog-or tech death metal...probably one of the first in that genre...but that is to me....

 

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Correct me if I'm wrong I think Misha Mansoor (Periphery) coined the name Djent to describe a guitar tone he was trying to achieve.

As with all language words gain and lose meaning but as it stands I think Djent is a genre. When people say Djent I think of bands like Periphery, Monuments, Sikth and Meshuggah. Regardless of the origin of the word it seems to have stuck with the metal community. At least for now.

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Is it a stand alone genre? Fuck no it isn't. Djent is a variant of progressive metal. The term acts in much the same way as funeral doom. It informs you of a particular style with key characteristics shared by bands playing it. I happen to find djent very boring. Have we really reached a point where everything needs to be a fucking genre?

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  • 10 months later...

not really i think Djent had similar case with Slam.still debatable Too.are slam are genre or not?. but i think yes but not stand alone sub-genre i think.because the band can be called as djent just because they music containing palm muting play style but with leave the treble sounding.and i didn't found another main characteristics djent's music. just my opinion 

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On one hand, I see why people get upset at the use of the term djent. It wasn’t meant to be used as a term for a sub genre. But, on another note, everyone knows what people mean when we use the term djent. I think it’s become a very complex adjective. Personally, I can’t be upset. I think “djent” is much easier to say than “progressive metal with complex polyrhythms, high-gain sharp-attack tones, and tight noise gates.” I don’t mind. New words are introduced into our language and they serve their purpose. To communicate better. Can’t be upset at that.

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Nowdays it is a actual genre as there are full albums without any metal reference on their songs and they dive deep into those odd time signatures, crunchy sound that makes variations of one and two notes and the rest are just sound effects. Messuggah, After the Burial and Periphery are not the best example of this genre as they share more elements with deathcore, death metal and Metalcore but there are other bands who stay away from the metal elements and they use most of djent sounds with a rock music base or even an acoustic guitar to do melody over djent driven sounds.

Is like all genres at their start it was not defined what they were doing but as new fans discover those sounds and mix then into their own Work. A new genre shows up or at least a subgenre if it shares elements already known. Like Between the Buried and me. (Who is not djent but share elements with other genres driving away from traditional Heavy Metal)

 

 

 

 

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Djent exists in the way that "Skramz" exists... it's a name made up by trendy, self-important kids for a genre that already had a name and their generation, as they are well known for doing, redefined the word to mean something that it was never supposed to mean in the first place.

(In case you're wondering, "Skramz" is what children now call what was called "Screamo" in the early 90s, because of the existence of "MTV Screamo" like The Used, Thursday, and Silverstein that came around in the early to mid 00s).

Djent is a perfect example of this phenomenon taking place. It used to be called "progressive metal" but now has a dumb name attached to it. "Slam" is another example of this phenomenon. It's just trendy kids making up fake genres to make their generation of music sound like it's original when in reality, it is already part of a well-established genre.

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As it happens the term "slam" was coined in my hometown of Huntington NY by members of LI band Internal Bleeding in 1992. I'd say it's status as a full-fledged sub-genre is debatable (like groove metal) but the term has been around for 30 years now and I believe it means something fairly specific to most death metal fans. It wasn't just made up in the last 10 - 15 years by Millennials or Zoomers.

And in that same way while djent might not be a full-fledged sub-genre either, more like a descriptor of a certain sound, conjuring up mental images of guitars with a plethora of extra strings, it does serve a purpose to differentiate that kind of prog metal from other kinds of prog metal. I'm not a fan of any type of prog at all, metal or otherwise, but I do know that all prog metal does not sound like djent.

So new sub-genre names come into usage when there is a need among fans of that type of music to differentiate between similar things. The rest of us might not like it, but what do we really care? I'm not a fan of prog metal or djent or tech nor do I listen to a whole lotta slam or BDM so I reckon it's almost like none of my fucking business what people who are really into that kinda stuff want to call their shit.

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4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

The rest of us might not like it, but what do we really care?

Because it's confusing. A band that I went to see (Animosity) was "death metal" when I went to see them, but is now "slam" according to the trend-followers who retroactively applied the label to it in order to make themselves and their bands sound more original when in reality, they aren't doing anything remotely new... and there's nothing wrong with not doing anything new. These names are created as marketing terms so that bullshit pseudo-indies like Victory records who are always hunting for the "next big youth fad" to co-opt and market the hell out of can find bands to sign. They did it with the terms "hardcore" and "screamo" in the 00s and now they're doing it with metal bands & this leads to a lot of fashionable haircut kids infecting the scene in general and turning it into just another avenue for fashion and selfies.

Genre names are important so you know whether or not you might be into a band. I'd check a band out if they were labeled as "death metal" because I know that there is some death metal that I like (Necrophagist, Dying Fetus, Cannibal Corpse) but I would hesitate to check out a band that called themselves "slam" because that reminds me of trendy bands that I do not like, such as The Acacia Strain and Whitechapel. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the time period I already referenced: Victory would put hype stickers on their CDs that said "YOUR NEW FAVORITE HARDCORE BAND" and the band wouldn't have anything to do with hardcore at all... their guitars just had a little bit of distortion and the singer would do that awful cryscream vocal style while singing about failed relationships.

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I once had someone describe to me that we needed genres and sub genres and sub sub genres so that we didn't end up with bands who don't fit with each other playing on the same bill. This was before the world's need for every second gig being a festival so the reasons were so that we didn't have bands like Metallica and Poison playing on the same bill. I thought that was the stupidest reason ever and even back there there was bills with bands from different genres, and there was a lot less genres to choose from. For me it enforced the idea that some people just need labels to make their life easier. I was always of the opinion that if I liked it I didn't care what genre it was.

 

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Sub-genres are only "important" so pedantic twats can have something to argue about. They can also come in handy when describing bands to others, unless you can come up with something original and cute like FA's "sunshine and constant motion." I enter sub-genres for all my albums when adding files to my desktop MusicBee library so I can sort bands by sub-genre when the mood strikes me. But I don't break them down into too much detail, I don't have different sub-sub-genres of black metal I just use broad categories like: black metal, death metal, black/death, black/thrash, thrash, crust, hardcore, punk rock, stoner, sludge and doom metal. I do this for my own personal curation, they're really not much good for anything else. And I freely admit I am totally guilty of relishing a good sub-genre debate as much as anyone you'll ever meet. But that's just me, I'm happy to argue about almost anything for recreation and relaxation, it doesn't have to be anything I consider important.

But I mean still there are more than a few widely if not universally accepted definions in the metal universe for sub-genres. It's really not hard to learn the basics. Animosity might be a bad example because according to M-A there have been 11 bands with that name so I'm not exactly sure which one Nokky means. But I'll assume he means the Animosity from San Francisco. They, along with The Acacia Strain and Whitechapel would be considered deathcore, which is a sub-sub-genre of death metal. Slam is something else entirely, although it's also a sub-sub-genre of death metal. Bands like Devourment and Abominable Putridity are slam. I believe the names slam and brutal death metal are all but interchangable for all but the most hardcore fans of those genres. I asked my friend Cody from Afterbirth not too long ago what he considers them to be, brutal or slam and he said he really wasn't sure, maybe some kind of progressive death something or other. He said he prefers to leave it up to the listeners to decide for themselves. But simply put, all brutal dm, slam and deathcore bands fall under the larger sub-genre of death metal. But not all death metal bands can be considered to be brutal dm, slam or deathcore.

 

Abominable Putridity

Devourment

 

Afterbirth

 

 

 

The Acacia Strain

 

Surely you can hear that one of these bands is not like the others? Especially vocally. 

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