![]() ![]() Surely that’s a part of rock and roll’s enduring appeal. I guess every medium has a certain ineffable something that separates the great from the merely very good, but I doubt that there’s any great novel or movie or symphony that defies analysis as completely as some great rock and roll songs do. I don’t think that category really exists in other artforms I don’t think that critics of other media ever have the indignity of looking at, say, O ne Hundred Years of Solitude or Citizen Kane or Beethoven’s Sixth and being reduced to saying “fuck it, I don’t know why it’s good”. So why is it, then, that this one has stuck with me so strongly for literal years, when so many thousands of others at best generated a paragraph or two of analysis or at worst bounced off me altogether? What is it about this tune in particular that always leads me back to it, no matter how many times I’ve heard it and no matter how many other similar tunes I’ve heard and no matter how sick of them I get? What about this one so thoroughly sums up the death metal aesthetic that it automatically springs to mind whenever I think of the style, which I do a lot? Why, when I first sat down to write this entry, was the phrase “the greatest death metal song of all time” the very first thing that popped into my head?įor a while, my operative theory was that it fell into the same rarefied category as “Ace of Spades” and “Sex Machine” and “Green Onions”: tunes that are so obviously, toweringly great despite (or perhaps because of) their apparent banality that there’s something imponderable and inarticulable about them. At first glance, and for quite a few more glances after that, it seems like a pretty generic piece of death metal music, not very much different from literally tens of thousands of other songs. There seems to be so little that’s overtly remarkable about it: it’s not the first of its kind, it doesn’t do anything especially novel, it doesn’t make any kind of conceptual statement beyond the usual shock-rock standard, it has no identifiable chorus nor really much of a hook at all and in fact there’s nothing about it that you could really even deem “catchy”. ![]() The greatest death metal song of all time had me stumped for a good long while, mostly because it’s so hard to distinguish from every other death metal song ever made. “Hammer Smashed Face” - Tomb of the Mutilated (1992) The following is an excerpt from Volume 4 of Badger’s History of Heavy Metal zine, THE BIRTH OF DEATH: Early Death Metal 1985-1993. ![]()
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