On 22 March 1994 Pantera released Far Beyond Driven and it entered the Billboard 200 at number one, shifting more than 185,000 copies in its first week. Two years and two months later the first death metal album ever to touch that chart at all crept in at number 151. Same country, same shops, same eight bar riff at the bottom of both records.
That gap is the decline, and it is a gap in commerce rather than in music. Nothing died in 1994. What happened is that a music whose best selling album in ten years shifted a hundred and fifty thousand copies found itself competing for shelf space with records that shifted that many in a fortnight, and every institution that had briefly agreed to carry death metal quietly stopped. Five mechanisms did the work. None of them is the one the folklore blames.
The industrial arc behind all this, the arrival of major label money and its exit, is laid out in the chapter on 90's death metal bands and the decade they had. What follows is the mechanism, cause by cause. The long view, first record to now, is death metal from the first record on.
One: the roster grew and the shelf did not
Between 1989 and 1993 every label with an extreme metal department signed as many of these bands as it could reach, on the assumption that one of them would turn into the next Sepultura. The buying public did not multiply to match. Shelf space in a shop is a physical quantity and it did not multiply the way the roster did, so a band whose debut had sold respectably now found the follow up selling less, not because the record was worse but because four other albums with the same tuning and the same sleeve painter had arrived in the same month and taken the same money out of the same pockets.
Nobody involved was doing anything unreasonable. That is what makes it a mechanism instead of a scandal. Each individual signing made sense and the sum of them did not.
Two: the house sound became the case against the house
The genre's greatest asset in 1990 was that its records sounded like each other, because a shared sound is what turns a scattering of bands into a movement a listener can join. By 1994 the same fact was being used as evidence for the prosecution. Reviewers who had praised the consistency began writing about interchangeability, and they were not entirely wrong: a form built on a fixed guitar tone, a fixed vocal register and a fixed drum sound has a limited number of ways to surprise anybody, and a hundred bands had spent five years working through them.
The bands felt it before the critics said it. That is why the middle of the decade is full of records reaching for an exit, some of them into mid tempo rock, some into melody, some into dissonance nobody had a name for yet. The roster who tried each of those doors is the 90s death metal bands that defined the decade, and the doors they went through are the reason the second half of the decade sounds so unlike the first.
Three: the only television window shut
Headbangers Ball ran on MTV from 18 April 1987 and was cancelled in January 1995. That is the entire national television presence extreme metal had in the United States, one weekly show, and it went out so abruptly that Riki Rachtman learned by telephone, after filming what turned out to be the final episode, that he need not come in the following week. It did not return until MTV2 revived it on 10 May 2003.
Eight years with no window. For a music with no radio format, no press outside the specialist magazines and no advertising budget, the closing of that one hour removed the last route by which a curious teenager could stumble across a death metal band by accident. After January 1995 you had to already know. A scene that can only be entered by people who are already in it is not dying, but it has stopped growing, and the difference takes about three years to show up in the accounts.
Four: the press had a better story
Editors are not committees, they are people with pages to fill, and from the autumn of 1993 the pages filled themselves from Norway. Øystein Aarseth was stabbed to death in his Oslo flat on 10 August 1993. Varg Vikernes went on trial in Oslo on 2 May 1994 and was sentenced on 16 May to twenty one years, the maximum the law allowed, for the murder and for a series of church burnings, among them Holmenkollen Chapel and Skjold Church. Churches on fire, a murdered label owner, a convicted bassist. No death metal band on earth could match that with a press release about a new album.
So the extreme end of the coverage went north, and it took the extreme end of the audience with it. This is often described as black metal killing death metal, which is lazy and also backwards: black metal did not take the shelf, it took the attention, and attention is the thing a genre with no marketing budget cannot manufacture for itself.
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Five: the same volume, with a chorus on top
The final mechanism is the simplest and the one the underground likes least. A great many people who bought Tomb of the Mutilated did not want abattoir imagery and inverted crosses. They wanted the volume, the low tuning and the feeling of a room coming apart, and from 1994 onward two other forms offered exactly that with a chorus attached and a vocal you could repeat.
Pantera got to number one with an album that is heavier than half the death metal released that year and legible to somebody who owned four records. Korn's debut arrived on 11 October 1994, took more than a year to reach the Billboard 200, went gold in January 1996 and had passed two million American copies by 2003. Neither band stole anything. They simply offered a version of the transaction with a lower entry price, and most listeners, being ordinary people rather than archivists, took it.
Black metal did not take the shelf. It took the attention, and attention is the thing a genre with no marketing budget cannot manufacture for itself.
What did not cause it
The records did not get worse. This is the folklore's central claim and it collapses on contact with the release schedule. Cryptopsy made None So Vile in 1996. Immolation made Here in After the same year. At the Gates made Slaughter of the Soul in 1995 and then broke up while it was still selling. Gorguts finished writing the strangest record in the genre's history in 1993 and spent five years finding anybody willing to press it. The music kept arriving on schedule and in good condition. What went missing was the apparatus for putting it in front of people.
And the collapse was a great deal more American than the histories admit. Vader spent the second half of the decade touring a continent that had never been promised a chequebook and therefore had none to withdraw, Behemoth turned into a death metal band at precisely the moment American A and R men were explaining that nobody wanted one, Krisiun got two albums out of Brazil before Century Media came calling in 1999, and Hypocrisy kept working in Sweden while Peter Tägtgren built a studio that would still be busy twenty years later. The European labels had been constructed for a small market from the beginning, which is the only reason a shrinking market did not break them. A business that never inflated has nothing to deflate.
Nor did the audience vanish. The core held, roughly the size it had been in 1990, and the whole of the revival that followed was built by people who bought records throughout the years the trade press had declared empty. The evidence for that is on the shelves: a decade's worth of albums that sold badly on release and are now traded at four figures. Start with the most underrated death metal albums of the nineties, most of which came out precisely during the years nothing was supposed to be happening.
