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Do you think Djent is an actual genre?


MarksASP

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Some forward thinking dudes came up with an offshoot of thrash called death metal in the mid/late 1980's. Of course once it took off in the early 90's it was out there in the public domain and the originators had no control over where it would go. Subsequent generations of musicians took that death metal influence and added other shit to it as some people will do to come up with new sub-sub-genres. Years later now we've gotta take the bad with the good. We don't have to like it or listen to it but deathcore is most certainly a wretched bastard spawn of death metal. 

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14 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

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 break stuff down into subgenres with my MP3s, but I don't break it down into what the bands themselves call their specific style of music (Like Nokturnal Mortum calls themselves "Lunar Pagan Black Metal"? Come on, man!). To me, subgenres are like: black metal, death metal, metalcore whereas the main genre is metal. Hardcore and punk are about as bad with the subgenre thing as metal is: I cannot count how many different variations of "core" I have heard of over the years (or subgenres like Youth Crew, Deathcore, etc). I generally do: Crust, black metal, hardcore, punk, death metal, power metal, etc. I don't get into ridiculous specifics and generally think it's kind of cringe when bands do this. To an extent I understand it: Melechesh and Arallu are "middle eastern/oriental folk black/death metal" and this is important to describe how these bands sound, but there really isn't a specific scene called "middle eastern/oriental folk black/death metal" just like there isn't a specific scene called "Lunar Pagan Black Metal" (and Nokturnal Mortum is my favorite black metal band of all time, but their self-description from the early 00s was cringe af)

 

14 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

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.

That's exactly who I meant. I saw them with Malevolent Creation, Origin, and an unknown local black metal band called Byam Klavor & they along with Byam Klavor stole the show as the openers. It was probably the loudest show I've ever been to and I foolishly did not wear earplugs and my ears rang for a week afterward. Animosity has always been one of my big bands and it's a bummer that they split up so soon because they were truly doing something great in the early to mid 00s by throwing a little bit of "core" into their brand of death metal, as I've always been a fan of hardcore like Youth of Today, Chain of Strength, Earth Crisis, and Chokehold. Are there other bands like Animosity that I could listen to? No doubt, I'm just not that motivated to seek them out because I'm not tremendously motivated to seek out different bands anymore. I'm still collecting vinyl for bands and albums that I already know and have a ways to go on rebuilding my former CD collection that was destroyed in Hurricane Charley on vinyl. The newest bands I've "discovered" lately are Vietah (Belarus), Obtest (Lithuania), and Witchtrap (Colombia) and I credit Hells Headbangers distro for introducing me to these three bands.

 

 

14 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

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.

What I mean when I say Slam, is that you have the children of Reddit now labeling any brutal death metal or hardcore band that plays mostly tough-guy breakdownz as "slam" now.


I mean, you even have these same kids referring to Dying Fetus & Nile as "slam" now, because "slam" is the new popular term for a wider genre that already existed for nearly four decades now. The thing is: I say that it's "kids" but I can't really blame them because it's people in the music industry, label executives and A&R people, who are trying to do a repeat of what they did to hardcore and screamo in the early to mid 00s: they're taking a term that they don't understand and slapping it onto bands to try and market them to kids as being something "new" when what these bands are doing is not remotely new (and as I've said before, there is nothing remotely wrong with not doing anything new or groundbreaking in metal).

It's the same thing that Victory records did to hardcore and screamo in the early and mid 00s: Hardcore and screamo were already well defined genres... but this pseudo-indie label realized that the terms had not been marketed at MTV level yet and began calling their insipid, late-stage Nu-Metal like Atreyu "hardcore" and their watery versions of mainstream-accessible post-hardcore like Under0ath "Screamo" and they did it specifically to cash in on the Hot Topic crowd. Now the same thing is starting to happen to black metal. The mainstream industry has realized that it needs a new youth guitar-music subculture to cash in on, so it's frantically searching for something to get teens jazzed up about and the only thing it really has left is black metal so it's working overtime to rebrand black metal as something non-threatening and "inclusive" that normal, well-adjusted suburban teens can participate in to "express their unique identities". At it's heart, it's yet another shitty, cynical cash-grab by the pseudo-indie culture industry of magazines like Alternative Press and corporations like Hot Topic and I feel like it's going to do an immense amount of damage to black metal.

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