Some general musings on music and art

These thoughts have been rolling around my head for a while

These are basically all different thoughts or observations I’ve had in the shower at some point or another, no promises that they make any sense together or apart.

This whole tirade was actually comes out of a tweet, which is probably about the worst justification you can have for writing something to be fair. Whatever the case, this sorry soul made the assertion that Cannibal Corpse of all bands was the best death metal band ever, and other accounts that I had some respect for were blindly agreeing and it was rather demoralizing. I’ve already made my feelings about Cannibal pretty clear in other articles here, and I think those do a good job of explaining why Cannibal being at the top of a “greatest death metal band” list is so baffling to me. Something I remarked in that November 2022 article was that I only bought an Immolation shirt, despite them having a fairly bad performance, because more than any other band there, they were interesting. This is what is lacking from Cannibal, their music isn’t particularly groundbreaking or innovative, and beyond that it doesn’t really feel like it does it any better than anyone else aping their style. I truly don’t know how one could listen to Cannibal and nearly any of their peers and conclude that they were the best. Sure, they made some fun songs, but never did they make a single record as interesting as Symphonies of Sickness by Carcass, Domination by Morbid Angel, Realm of Chaos by Bolt Thrower, hell even In Dark Purity by Monstrosity easily clears most of their discography. But this entire article isn’t just my beef with someone on Twitter making this outlandish claim, it’s more to do with the idea of ranking music, and how we should be viewing careers in music.

First of all, I’m not going to pretend that ranking music isn’t fun, that’s not my contention here, I love ranking bands, but I think the way people go about it is pretty stupid some times. One of the comments I saw most frequently is that Cannibal have a “consistent” discography, that their releases tend to hew to the same level of quality. In this author’s opinion that level of quality is thoroughly Mid, but even beyond that I take issue with this idea of ranking bands by consistency at all. I’m going to take a bold position here, I don’t care about consistency. Furthermore, I think it’s a stupid way to consume art, this shit isn’t sports. It’s not about who was the best over a certain period of time, its about who made the actual most interesting music. There’s something that feels wrong to me about saying “well Cannibal released consistent 7/10’s so thats better than Cryptopsy releasing a single 10/10 and then tanking”, it just seems like such a coldly rational way to view art. I think the peaks of artists careers are the most thrilling thing in the world, when they reach the height of their powers, and to try to just drown it out with regularity seems insulting. All this is to say, art isn’t about efficient, clean consistency, its about trying to be interesting, which I’m sorry, is something that Cannibal has not done for a long time.

The other thing I wanted to briefly bring up is that actually, its awesome and half the fun to be really specific and particular with genres in extreme music. You will notice that old people and really annoying losers get upset with this, people in the most mediocre bands you’ve never listened to like Spiritbox or Sleep Token or some shit will tell you that “it’s all just metal! just call it metal!”. Yeah I know it is, but I actually want to recommend it to my friends, and it sounds even fucking cooler when I say it’s cybernoisegore or post-deathgrind, fuck you.