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| Some people started listening to “Here Comes the
Sun” or “Something” as soon as they heard about George
Harrison’s demise. I am not like that. I heard that Schuldiner
was dead, and since I, in Frost’s phrase, “[was] not the
one dead, went about [my] business” -- I went out and saw The
Man Who Wasn’t There, which was pretty excellent, and came
home and went to bed. And when I got up this morning, I put on a Morbid
Angel CD, since there probably wouldn’t be any Morbid Angel at
all without Chuck Schuldiner’s brave,
pioneering work. But as I listened, I was surprised to find that Schuldiner’s
death was so prominent in my thoughts that it made it hard to enjoy
my usually-beloved Morbid Angel. Ditto the pretty excellent Greek metal
band whose CD had been waiting in the mailbox for me when I got
home from Minnesota. The gap between Schuldiner’s accomplishments
and the public’s acknowledgement thereof was just too great,
and the near-total silence which I could be certain would shortly
greet his death was too disproportionate to his stature. What I mean
is: Aaliyah, who invented exactly nothing, gets retrospective biographies
on MTV, the covers of every major music magazine and millions of record
sales after a lousy couple of albums and season or two in the tabloids.
Kurt Cobain, who resurrected an old style and pumped a little new
life into it before killing himself, gets deified yearly whenever
rock writers run out of things to write about. Chuck Schuldiner, though,
will be lucky if Ian the metal guy sneaks in an “in other news”
mention during the three minutes of news M2 shows every hour or so,
even though Schuldiner is the guy who pieced together the foundation
of an entirely new genre from just a few Black Sabbath albums and
a love of intensity for its own sake. |
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