Helter Skelter

tl;dr version - I like making mixed tapes. I'm making a mix tape for BW and its gonna be awesome. Kids these days don't even know where to begin when it comes to appreciating good music.


A guy asked me at work the other day if I could recommend some metal music that would be good to listen to while running. I thought about it for 3 seconds and knew the answer was groove metal. Stylistically it's paced well, not slow or stupidly fast, and there's a big focus on the work of the drummer, which something that carries well when you're out on a 10km run. The answer sparked a bit of a conversation between my  coworkers about the various styles of metal, which for most part is unknown territory to pretty much all of them. Of course they've heard of some of the band names, perhaps heard the music a few of the commercially successful bands and the real keen ones might have tried to venture further, heard a death growl and promptly hit the stop button. I listed off a heap of the different metal sub genres and I think there may have been a brief musical comparison between rock or metal, although that could have been a past conversation from another day (these things tend to jumble).

So a challenge was laid down. Make a mix tape of metal. Specifics weren't delved into so I'm taking a few liberties in this area. I assume a cd is a suitable substitute for a tape. While I have a tape deck and a few tapes I'm not sure the years have been kind to either. I also assume the mix was to contain as many sub genres as possible. The challenge as I now see it is to fit as much metal into 80 mins that gives the most well rounded view of the genre. Sounds easy when ya put it like that, right? ;)

I consider myself a bit of mixed tape master. Decades ago I'd sit with my cousin in his bedroom pretending we were radio DJs, making up a mix of tunes we liked with voice over stuff in between like we were really on the air. Then later when I got to high school and into metal, tape trading was huge. Living in a rural setting with a taste for music that was far from the mainstream made it very hard to get new music. Most stores would order the few token metal tapes (and later cds) or you had to be aware of what albums were available (before interwebs remember) and order them in. I remember pouring through a drab, alphabetical print out from some distributors database look for metal albums I knew or had heard of, hoping to find something worthy of the few measly dollars I'd managed to save. So we traded tapes. Blank tapes weren't free either so getting whole albums was something you only saved for the best albums and to find the best albums we made compilations for friends. Mixes of everything I thought was great would go onto a tape and get sent off to mates with the expectation they'd do the same in return. When we hit stuff we liked, we'd get a copy and if we REALLY liked, we'd get the store to order it for us.

Technology has changed a lot since then and I don't think the advancements have really encouraged people to appreciate music properly. I mean why would someone listen to a song, I mean truly listen to a song, when they don't have to be selective? Getting right into those drums fills, listening to every nuance of a solo, the word choices made in the lyrics, looking for the songs that are worthy of your collection...gone. Because space isn't an issue. Because acquiring more music takes seconds rather than weeks. For the masses, music has become more and more a throw away commodity. No one takes the time to enjoy everything that's gone into a song, so popular "artists" don't need so much talent and most of the real talented musicians are ignored. There are exceptional young individuals who see music much differently but unfortunately they are the minority. But I still make mixed tapes, or mixed cds to be precise, and I still love doing so for people I know will appreciate them.

So climbing back off a tangent, how to make a mixed tape encompassing metal?  Start at the start? The pre-metal progenitors? It started with The Beatles - Helter Skelter if you were wondering. Others may put forward some other possibilities and I would readily admit that those songs were indeed part of the roots of metal, but they would only have 1 or 2 elements which would later make up the metal style. While Helter Skelter isn't metal, its got a lot more going for it stylistically which would emerge later as some of the defining characteristics of metal. But that's possibly not what this cd is about. So we move to Black Sabbath. Claiming any other band as the fathers (or is it grandfathers now?) of metal would be false. There were a lot of contributors to early metal and ignoring them (especially Deep Purple) is a crime. But Sab is it! The First! The cd could quickly become a metal timeline, tracking the branches through the decades, following through to each twisted twig or flourishing leaf. Ok, I just tried to glamour that up a little because the end result would be as dry as a history essay and the entertainment value would be drained from it. And then there's the 80 min limit to think about.

While I'm going to toss the timeline idea, I'm thinking it's a great place to start. My new plan is to start at the roots, build up a list of songs that are important in metal, add a great example of each of the sub genres (well at least the ones I have cds for) and end up with a mega metal playlist...and then chop it by about half so it fits on the cd. The culling will be the most difficult because a good mix tape needs to flow, songs need to gel and moods need to be created. The whole cd needs to ebb and flow, so as well as history lesson the listener can enjoy everything that's going on. Unlike clicking play on a 3000 song playlist the cd needs a start, a ride and an end. And that's the fun part :)