Pod Insights Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin Daron Malakian - ON METAL (Part 2) About this episode Daron Malakian returns to continue his conversation in Part Two. Composer, guitarist, vocalist, and record producer Daron Malakian, a founding member of System of a Down, reflects on his lifelong relationship with heavy metal. Using music as a guide to discuss how different styles, sounds, and eras shaped his identity as an artist, he talks through what he listens for in metal, including riffs, mood, aggression, and atmosphere, and how those elements influenced his own songwriting and creative direction.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Rick Rubin? Tetra Grahamington.
0:24 Speaker 01 So when I was like 12 or 13, at that point, I had been playing the guitar for like a year. I was with these guys in my school that we would, in their dad's garage, we would play Metallica covers. It's pretty much all we'd play, a bunch of Metallica covers. And that's kind of a big part of how I learned how to play the guitar was playing either Sabbath, Metallica, Maiden, sometimes Slayer. My friends really didn't get Slayer, but they loved Metallica.
0:54 Rick Rubin? Understood.
0:55 Speaker 01 But I loved Slayer and I would fight with them over it. But we would play these Metallica covers, so I knew all these Metallica covers. As you know, when I got older, I knew them. And so we were on tour with Metallica on the Summer Sanitarium Tour. I met Metallica onstage.
1:12 Rick Rubin? Really?
1:12 Speaker 01 Playing with them. I never met them before.
1:15 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:16 Speaker 01 We're the first band, nobody knows us, it's 1999 maybe at this point. Toxicity's not out yet, we're on our first album. And we are on the Summer Sanitarium Tour, it's us, band called Powerman 5000, Kid Rock was on there, I think Korn was on there, and Metal, there was like five bands on the bill. We were the first band that opened up.
1:39 Rick Rubin? When people were walking in.
1:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Nobody knows who System of a Down is at this point. And so we're on that tour, and James Hetfield, along the way, gets injured. I don't know, they told me he was going water skiing or something, and he got injured. So they didn't cancel the show, so all the opening bands played, and then Metallica still went onstage, and Jason Newsted was singing, and then they brought the guys from Korn on, and they kind of played like this Cheech and Chong cover song or something. It was like, they didn't know what to do.
2:14 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
2:15 Speaker 01 Because James wasn't there, and I turned to my tech, and I go, "Listen, man, I go, go tell their tech that I know a lot of their shit." Cause I learned it playing it in this garage with these other guys. I go, I know a lot of their shit. From you could say, Justice for All and back.
2:32 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
2:33 Speaker 01 Next thing you know, my tech goes and talks to their guitar tech and then my tech comes back to me. He's like, all right, come with me. Never met Metallica before.
2:42 Speaker 01 And I'm telling you, Metallica was the first concert I ever went to in my life. Like I was a huge Metallica fan.
2:48 Rick Rubin? Were you seeing played for a show?
2:49 Speaker 01 At the Irvine Meadows.
2:50 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
2:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. Faith No More opened up for them. Justice for All Tour.
2:55 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
2:57 Speaker 01 So, next thing you know, I go on the other side of the stage. I get handed a Les Paul, I think it was one of Kirk Hammett's Les Pauls. And they're like, all right, go. 60,000 people.
3:13 Rick Rubin? That's so wild.
3:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, 60,000 people. I'm in my after show, I'm wearing a Lakers fucking sweats. I'm wearing like, I'm not even ready to like get on stage. I'm wearing a white tank top and a Lakers sweats and I'm, I'm just completely was there just watching Metallica, you know?
3:31 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
3:32 Speaker 01 Next thing you know, I get handed a guitar and they go, go. You gotta understand, our band's not big yet. I'm still a kid. I'm 22 years old. I can't even believe that we're even allowed to open up for Metallica.
3:44 Rick Rubin? Of course.
3:44 Speaker 01 So, this is all new to me.
3:46 Rick Rubin? Yes.
3:47 Speaker 01 At this point of my life.
3:48 Rick Rubin? Yes.
3:50 Speaker 01 And they put me out there and I turned and I'm like, hey, it's Lars, it's Kurt, it's Jason Eustad was the bass player at the time. They're like, what do you know? I go, I don't know. Master of Puppets? Okay. Count it in. We're playing fucking Master of Puppets. I'm like, I'm up there with Metallica playing Master of Puppets in front of 60,000 people.
4:12 Rick Rubin? Unbelievable.
4:13 Speaker 01 And I'm like, who's gonna sing? I said, fuck it, I'll go sing.
4:16 Rick Rubin? And you sang it?
4:17 Speaker 01 And I sang.
4:18 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
4:19 Speaker 01 And then there's this thing that happened where in the middle of Master of Public it has this slow part, instead of going into that slow part, they went into Sanitarium.
4:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
4:31 Speaker 01 And I didn't know they were gonna do that. And we went in and we did the middle part of Sanitarium and then came out of it and went back into Master. I mean, you would think we rehearsed it, but we didn't rehearse it.
4:43 Rick Rubin? And you didn't even know it was gonna happen?
4:44 Speaker 01 I didn't even know it was gonna happen. And it happened. And I'm up there and I'm playing Metallica with Metallica in front of an audience where I would have been in the fucking cheap seats just three years ago. You know, I would have been in the last fucking row.
5:01 Rick Rubin? That's unbelievable.
5:03 Speaker 01 And then, I don't know, somewhere down the line, like, I got offstage.
5:06 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
5:07 Speaker 01 And next thing you know, they're coming to me, they're like, "Hey dude, James isn't gonna be able to play for a few nights, they want you to come and play with them like fucking everything."
5:18 Rick Rubin? That is wild.
5:19 Speaker 01 And next thing you know, Kirk Hammett's in front of me with a guitar and I go, "Hey, bro, I know all your old stuff, but I don't really know the load and the reload and all that stuff." So Kirk's trying to teach me stuff, upload. And then next thing you know, um, they're like, "Hey, get your shit from your bus, cuz you're flying on the private jet with us now."
5:40 Rick Rubin? So you actually were in Metallica for this window?
5:43 Speaker 01 So, the first plan was to have me play a whole set with them.
5:48 Rick Rubin? Yes.
5:50 Speaker 01 And I was preparing for that and I was relearning all the old stuff and trying to learn all the load stuff. And then by the time we got, and so I flew with them
5:59 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
5:59 Speaker 01 and everything, and then I, and then they decided, hey, it would be a cooler thing if we invited different band members from
6:07 Rick Rubin? Of course.
6:08 Speaker 01 from the different bands that were on the gig.
6:10 Rick Rubin? Yes.
6:10 Speaker 01 So, the next night, I was up on stage with Metallica again, and I know I was supposed to play one. And I got there and I, you know, was ready to play one and I turned to, I forgot, maybe Jason or Kirk or someone, and I'm like, "Who's gonna sing?" Because I had no idea.
6:29 Rick Rubin? Of course.
6:30 Speaker 01 They turned to me and they're like, "Bob." And I'm like, "Who the fuck is Bob?" And I see, and then I see Kid Rock come up, and I didn't know Kid Rock's name was Bob.
6:42 Rick Rubin? That's so funny.
6:42 Speaker 01 And so Kid Rock comes up and he sings the first line, and we did one, and it's really fucking cool because one has the whole
6:51 Speaker 01 And I'm like thinking, dude, you're playing this shit with fucking Metallica. You're turning around and it's like Lars.
6:58 Rick Rubin? It'd be completely surreal.
7:00 Speaker 01 It was crazy. I'll never forget it. And even after that, like there, there are techs would come up to me like in different tours and be like, dude, don't think we forgot what you did. You brought it that day. I don't want to say like you saved the show, but they were kind of like, you, you fucking brought it. They were struggling and then you got up, you did Master of Puppets and
7:19 Rick Rubin? Wow.
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, man, like that, that happened. That's, that's as a little kid growing up and, you know, I'm telling all these things, all these bands.
7:26 Rick Rubin? And you're not in a popular band yet.
7:29 Speaker 01 Nope. System of a Down ain't shit yet.
7:31 Rick Rubin? That's wild.
7:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:34 Rick Rubin? What a cool experience.
7:36 Speaker 01 Oh, man, I'll never forget it. Even though my band is where we're at right now.
7:42 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
7:42 Speaker 01 It still brings like goosebumps to my, that I had a chance to experience that at that point of my career.
7:51 Rick Rubin? And being such a fan of them.
7:53 Speaker 01 Huge fan.
7:54 Rick Rubin? It's so cool.
7:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:56 Rick Rubin? It's so cool. It's like living a dream.
7:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was.
7:59 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
7:59 Speaker 01 It was.
8:00 Rick Rubin? Let's hear Master of Puppets.
8:11 Speaker 01 At this point, we're in 1986.
8:15 Speaker 01 I'm 11 years old.
8:26 Speaker 01 So this was my introduction to thrash.
9:02 Speaker 02 Mind your passion play, rumbling away I'm your source of self-destruction Feeding pop with fear, sucking dark is clear Needing on your death construction Take me you will see, more is all you need Dedicated to, how I'm killing you
9:32 Speaker 02 You're falling faster Obey your master
9:41 Speaker 02 Your life burns faster
9:46 Speaker 02 Obey your master, master Master of puppets are pulling your strings Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams Staring by me you can't see a thing Just call my name 'cause I hear you scream Master, master Just call my name 'cause I hear you scream
10:09 Speaker 01 So during this time
10:12 Speaker 01 There was a whole thing happening in the Bay Area With Bay Area Throats They came from the Bay Area
10:45 Rick Rubin? The difference between that song and the first Metallica song we listened to was in the early Metallica, you could hear more of like the Iron Maiden influence. Whereas this doesn't sound like any of the old metal. It's like they found their voice.
11:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, and a little bit more polished, you could say, as well. As it went on, the first album was a little bit more raw. You heard more of the Motorhead there. Now you're starting to hear more of the metal.
11:15 Rick Rubin? But the first one we listened to, the vocals sounded more derivative. And on that one, they sounded more like what we know Metallica sounds like.
11:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, like I said, a lot of these bands evolved themselves into other things.
11:30 Rick Rubin? Absolutely.
11:32 Speaker 01 Here's a band that I really fucking love from this era that kind of gets forgotten is a band called Overkill.
11:58 Speaker 01 Not Bay Area, they're from the East Coast.
12:04 Speaker 01 But I remember them being a really big deal for me when I was in my teenage years.
12:48 Speaker 03 I'll steal your life and cut out your heart. Rip the core of your world apart. Then I'll take your face, leave you blind. Laughing hard if you lose your mind. That's it, you know, he got the brain. That's all I'm about, what's it mean? Under the danger, the welcome danger. You deny the cross. Under the danger, the welcome danger. You deny the cross, deny the cross.
13:24 Rick Rubin? And the fast double kick drums.
13:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. All that starting to happen.
13:36 Speaker 01 Tight riffs.
13:37 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
13:38 Speaker 01 With the hardcore energies, but with the tight riffs like Metallica.
13:42 Rick Rubin? Do you call it more speed metal, maybe?
13:45 Speaker 01 I mean, you would either call it thrash or speed metal. That was the word that we used to use.
14:13 Speaker 01 There was Exodus, there was Testament.
14:17 Speaker 01 Then you had
14:20 Speaker 01 German bands. That, Creator, Destruction, Sodom. Those are like the three German bands that were kinda around the same time as this was happening.
14:37 Rick Rubin? Who's your favorite of those?
14:39 Speaker 01 I really used to love Creator.
14:41 Rick Rubin? Could we hear them?
14:55 Speaker 01 Now you got the vocals doing some shit here that is a little ahead of his time as well.
15:39 Speaker 01 I remember I'd be sitting in the car with my parents and I would tell them, "Put this on, son."
15:46 Speaker 01 And I'd be in the backseat.
15:49 Speaker 01 But they would be listening to it too. Wow.
15:51 Rick Rubin? You're a very understanding parent.
16:06 Rick Rubin? You can see how for like adults, hearing something like this, or hearing rap music for the first time, was just like, it's not even music. It's just some other thing.
16:20 Speaker 01 Extreme.
16:22 Rick Rubin? So extreme.
16:24 Rick Rubin? But that's what drew us to it.
16:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:29 Speaker 01 What drew me to it was it just, it's like heavier than the last thing. And then like, I like, I love Metallica, but this guy sings like this. I remember someone gave me a cassette of a bunch of bands with no names on it. And that's the first time I heard this, but I didn't know it was them. Until I went to the record store and accidentally bought...
16:52 Speaker 01 Creator, Endless Pain. That was the album name. And I ha- I still have the cassettes at home. I still have them on cassette.
17:06 Speaker 01 This is the first time I think I might have even heard vocals that were like this.
17:19 Speaker 01 It became kind of like a black metal vocal vibe as later on, you know? But this was happening in like 85.
17:29 Rick Rubin? Wow.
17:31 Speaker 01 It's getting more extreme, even from Slayer. It's getting more extreme than Slayer. Because these bands heard Slayer and were like, well, how can we make that even fucking crazier? And in comes a band called Napalm Death.
17:49 Speaker 01 Napalm Death is, you'd consider grindcore. But some people may say they were the first grindcore band that comes in. And here's.
18:33 Speaker 01 You hear all the elements of hardcore, heavy metal, punk rock. But then we're gonna take it even crazier and do blast beats.
18:52 Speaker 01 They're doing this in like 86.
18:58 Rick Rubin? Where are they from?
18:59 Speaker 01 England.
19:09 Speaker 01 So we went from Venom, which was like, oh, this is really crazy. And then Slayer, wow, these guys took Venom to another level. Now you got this stuff coming out. There is an element of shock.
19:23 Rick Rubin? For sure.
19:23 Speaker 01 In metal through the years, whether it's the lyrics.
19:26 Rick Rubin? More extreme, more extreme, more extreme, faster.
19:31 Rick Rubin? Crazier.
19:32 Speaker 01 Trying to take it to a higher intensity.
19:35 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
19:36 Speaker 01 So, you know, Napalm Death started like this, but then ended up more like death metal as time went on. But this was like the early Napalm Death. If I'm not mistaken, I think Napalm Death still exists, but I don't think anybody who was on that recording is still in the band.
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21:33 Rick Rubin? Were there other grindcore bands?
21:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. Carcass.
21:55 Rick Rubin? So these bands feel more in the lineage of Discharge, but more technical?
22:02 Speaker 01 It's Discharge, it's the...
22:08 Speaker 01 The fastness of metal, there's just...
22:13 Speaker 01 There's a fusion of things that are happening that bring us here, like the blast beat.
22:21 Rick Rubin? It's fast to the point where it doesn't necessarily even sound fast. It's like just a...
22:28 Speaker 01 White noise or something.
22:29 Rick Rubin? Yeah, like just a sound.
22:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:36 Speaker 01 I used to fall asleep to bands like this. I did, I found it relaxing because it's constant.
22:42 Rick Rubin? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a vacuum cleaner.
22:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
22:55 Speaker 01 Napalm Dead, Carcass, they get credited as being one of the few firsts of the grindcore scene.
23:13 Speaker 01 Here's a band I love called Brutal Truth.
23:49 Speaker 01 That blast beat, like almost not human.
24:10 Speaker 01 Who is the first Cookie Monster vocalist? It evolved into that.
24:36 Speaker 01 So the grindcore thing, you know, there's few bands, like here's another band from the US called Repulsion, that, once again, this was all, still very underground stuff, but these guys were kinda, you know, doing something that other people weren't really necessarily doing.
25:36 Speaker 01 Vocals are not heavy metal vocals anymore either. When we start getting into extreme metal, it starts becoming... Closer to discharge. Closer to discharge and becomes more of, you're not singing anymore.
25:58 Speaker 01 Sometimes punk phrasing.
26:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, no melody, it's all monotone. Yeah.
26:17 Speaker 01 So yeah, that was repulsion. Then, you know, we can start getting into as the late 80s come around, death metal. A lot of the classic death metal bands came out of Tampa, Florida.
26:36 Rick Rubin? Really?
26:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:38 Rick Rubin? That's interesting. I wonder why that is?
26:41 Speaker 01 The band Death, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Morbid Angel, all these bands came from Tampa, Florida.
26:48 Rick Rubin? Wow. I wonder what was happening in Tampa at that time?
26:52 Speaker 01 But there is a band, before we get to those bands, that some people say were death metal before death metal. And they even had a song called "Death Metal",
27:04 Rick Rubin? Cool.
27:05 Speaker 01 Which some people say named the genre. But their really great song is a song called "The Exorcist", the band called Possessed, which is from the Bay Area.
27:52 Speaker 01 These guys were doing this really early on, like, early 80s.
28:13 Rick Rubin? Early 80s.
28:16 Speaker 01 They formed early, but this album probably came out around 85.
28:47 Rick Rubin? And they were called, what again?
28:48 Speaker 01 Possessed.
28:49 Rick Rubin? Possessed.
28:50 Speaker 01 The first album they call is called Seven Churches. And yeah, they're from the Bay Area, but you know, it's debatable. But some people will credit them as being one of the first death metal bands.
29:03 Rick Rubin? And what's your favorite of the Tampa bands?
29:05 Speaker 01 I love them all. I love them all. They all do something a little bit different. But we gotta start with Death. Death is a really, really important band. Really important heavy metal band. Some people think that the genre was named after the Possessed song. And some people think death metal is named after the band Death. The main guy in Death is a guy named Chuck Shuldner. The band changes, but he's the same. He's the main guy. But the style of Death goes from your traditional Death influenced by thrash with Death vocals.
29:46 Speaker 01 But as Death goes on, they become very technical and a different version of the same band. But it becomes more proggy, you could say. But they start with, you know, just...
30:05 Speaker 01 This is a song called Evil Dead. And it's off the first Death album.
30:53 Speaker 01 Trapped in thought, run to night, you're This is it, gonna tear you apart, you're Evil! Death! Evil! Death! Force be bound, all life and none Death, living, still you're fighting for your Soul! Evil! Death! Evil! So this is late 80s, and this is the beginning of, you could say, death metal.
31:43 Rick Rubin? How would you describe it as different than Thrash?
31:48 Speaker 01 The vocals, yup. The growly vocals.
31:53 Speaker 01 Morbid Angel, death metal.
31:59 Speaker 01 Called Immortal Rites.
32:22 Speaker 01 Capitalistic upright, the country's murder lie. Call upon immortal, call upon the young to see the deed, we end up on your way. Let the rusty light, take us all with darkness. Oh, it's like nothing's your way.
32:49 Speaker 01 And the lyrics are all... Very satanic with Morbid Angel on these first few records.
34:50 Speaker 01 Right.
34:53 Speaker 01 This gained a lot of popularity, I'd say, in the heavy metal community in the late 80s, early 90s. Like, once you started listening to this, you got used to the vocals and you were just like, "I just wanna hear this." This is, this took heavy to another level.
35:40 Speaker 01 From the grindcore stuff that now these guys are using, Blast Beats. Like, some of this is happening around the same time, but it's also evolving around the same time.
35:54 Speaker 01 Another Tampa band, Deicide. Morbid Angel and Deicide, their lyrical themes were more like satanic. The singer of Deicide, I think, had like burned an upside-down cross on his forehead. Like, it's scarred there. Once again, we're going into satanic kayfabe. And, and you know, some of these dudes, you're like, "Oh, these lyrics are more intense." And they look more intense.
36:24 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
36:24 Speaker 01 And, I mean, we really get into satanic kayfabe once we get into the black metal stuff.
36:29 Rick Rubin? They're living the gimmick, as they say in wrestling.
36:32 Speaker 01 Yes. The black metal really is taking it to another level, but here's a little taste of Deicide.
37:10 Speaker 05 This is Night, this is Night, we have no choice It is fear, on the fear, in your dark, this is the best Covenant, the afterment, open up my holyness Father, dear God, let me love, darling holyness Suicide, sacrifice, destruction of all we know Beyond the holy night, we are the sacrifice!
37:39 Speaker 05 We all resist, several of them did, others survived They die, suicide, sacrifice, hope is never night, they love the reality They die, angels like a bed, they know the hell, it's a blast of fire
37:56 Speaker 01 They die, sacrifice through fire, riches won't lie, a beast of the beast
38:02 Speaker 05 Save the death to hell, end my life, wrath of God! Save the sin my soul, blessed with fire, long of stone Save the, I must die, it's my way, death is dead Save the suicide, end my life, I must die, save the!
38:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, you got that?
38:33 Rick Rubin? They sound more influenced a little bit by Metallica than the others.
38:37 Speaker 01 Really?
38:37 Rick Rubin? Yeah. The one before you sounded more Slayer and things.
38:42 Speaker 01 Well, this just, these guys just took all that stuff and it was like, made it more intense, and even the satanic part of Slayer, they took that and made it more intense. They, the lyrics were even more extreme Satan.
39:04 Rick Rubin? Uh huh.
39:05 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah. With, with these two bands at least, but then you have a band like Obituary, all, once again, from Tampa, Florida. Wow.
39:31 Speaker 01 This is Obituary, chopped in half.
39:33 Speaker 02 Jumping out! Feel the blood spill from your mouth! The rotting waves come destiny! Feel the soul shaking on its breath!
39:56 Speaker 02 Jumping out! Feel the blood spill from your mouth! The rotting waves come destiny! Feel the soul shaking on its breath!
40:14 Speaker 01 Obituary didn't use too many blast beats. They were more, I don't know how to explain it, but not necessarily focused on going fast, but a little kinda sludgy.
40:32 Speaker 01 And then you have Cannibal Corpse with their hit song called "I Come Blood."
40:59 Speaker 01 You see how these bands all sound different from each other?
41:03 Rick Rubin? Yeah, they really do.
41:31 Speaker 01 I had never heard vocals like this before I heard Cannibal Corpse. There's a good reason for that.
41:55 Speaker 01 Sepultura started a certain way and as they went along, they changed too. They always kind of pushed the Sepultura sound.
42:12 Speaker 01 Is this early? This is early Sepultura.
42:16 Speaker 01 Not the earliest, but like two or three albums in.
43:21 Speaker 02 ...
43:27 Speaker 01 They definitely sound different than the others. Sepultura is somewhere between thrash. At this era of Sepultura, even the fans were like, "Is this death metal? Is it thrash?"
43:43 Speaker 01 Because the vocals are kinda, have the growly death thing, but the music kinda has the thrash vibe to it. And like I said, as they went along, their sound kinda changed into a more groovy thing. That's interesting.
44:08 Speaker 01 Here's another band out of Brazil that was kind of, you could say, more influential in the black metal scene, was a band called Sarkofago. This is I-N-R-I.
45:06 Speaker 01 So you hear the grindcore kinda thing, but there's more metal here than in grindcore.
45:18 Speaker 01 And these guys, coming out of Brazil. You know, Sepultura and them? So, to be discovered out of Brazil...
45:32 Rick Rubin? Have you seen any of these bands live?
45:35 Speaker 01 Sepultura, I have.
45:36 Rick Rubin? How are they?
45:38 Speaker 01 They're great.
45:40 Speaker 01 I saw them open up for, uh... Ozzy, way back in the day in Costa Mesa.
46:04 Speaker 01 You know, this is late 80's.
46:22 Speaker 01 Worth playing a song from later Death, the band Death, so people can see...
46:28 Rick Rubin? What they evolved into.
46:29 Speaker 01 What they evolved into.
46:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
46:31 Speaker 01 This is a song called "Nothing is Everything."
47:34 Speaker 01 Technical drumming.
47:37 Speaker 01 The musicianship is at like a really high level.
47:51 Speaker 01 Lot of changes.
48:38 Speaker 01 That's fast frog rock. Yup. Well, it becomes very froggy.
48:47 Speaker 01 I mean, listen to what the drums are doing.
49:04 Speaker 01 King V. You could say that in some way, yeah.
49:12 Speaker 01 Death is his own, it's his own thing, man. Like, what? He passed away, this singer.
49:24 Speaker 01 But their albums are really considered classic, classic albums. To the point where, uh, there is members of the band that tour till this day.
49:45 Speaker 01 They play these songs, obviously the singer's not there.
49:48 Rick Rubin? Yeah. At the beginning of the song was the first time I heard a connection between the death metal vocal style, which sounded so original in everything we've been listening to, going back to Lemmy. Because it sounds a little bit like it could be Motorhead at the beginning.
50:04 Speaker 01 Well, that Lemmy vocal style, you know how you asked, well, how do we get to Cookie Monster?
50:09 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
50:10 Speaker 01 That was kind of, you could say, the beginning of just that growly kind of throat kind of vocal comes from Lemmy to some degree.
50:20 Rick Rubin? But I feel like Lemmy just naturally sings like that and mostly does a guy sound like they're putting on a voice to sound like that.
50:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying.
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52:07 Speaker 01 So, we've covered death metal and now my favorite
52:15 Speaker 01 of all the genres.
52:17 Rick Rubin? Yes.
52:18 Speaker 01 Black metal.
52:20 Rick Rubin? Black metal.
52:21 Speaker 01 From Norway.
52:22 Rick Rubin? And when is this compared to the others, time on the timeline?
52:26 Speaker 01 Early 90s.
52:27 Rick Rubin? Early 90s.
52:28 Speaker 01 But we're gonna have to bring up a couple of bands that sparked this. There's the first wave of black metal, which we talked about Venom.
52:39 Rick Rubin? Yep.
52:39 Speaker 01 And they had an album called Black Metal. Then we gotta talk about a couple bands. One of them is called Hellhammer, which, have you ever heard of a band called Celtic Frost?
52:52 Rick Rubin? Yes.
52:53 Speaker 01 So Hellhammer was Celtic Frost before they were called Celtic Frost. So this is Hellhammer, the third of the Storms. And this, you could say, is very, very influential to black metal.
53:12 Speaker 01 Early 80s.
53:15 Rick Rubin? So it's like a precursor.
53:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
53:22 Speaker 01 You could even say the death metal bands were influenced by this.
54:11 Speaker 01 So the aggression that they're throwing down and the vocal style that they're doing and the darkness of the rhythm.
54:22 Speaker 01 Really, really wasn't being done at this time.
55:02 Speaker 01 And we got, I'll play you some Celtic Frost.
55:11 Speaker 01 This song called, uh, "Nocturnal Beer."
55:16 Rick Rubin? How much later is this than what we just heard?
55:19 Speaker 01 About a year, year or two.
55:21 Rick Rubin? So, close?
55:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, very close.
55:39 Speaker 01 But this is also, you could say, a precursor, like, to the vocal style of death metal and the throat vocal.
56:19 Speaker 01 This is, I'd say, around 1984, 85.
56:29 Rick Rubin? This is closer to rock, here.
56:39 Speaker 01 Well, remember, this is closer in time to Motorhead and Venom than it is to later on Death Metal and all that stuff. So you still hear, you still hear the Motorhead and the Venom in this.
57:43 Speaker 01 That's Celtic Frost, Hellhammer Celtic Frost.
57:48 Speaker 01 First wave of black metal, these bands are considered that. And another band that is part of the first wave of black metal is a band called Batteries.
58:06 Rick Rubin? Where are they from?
58:08 Speaker 01 I think Batteries from Sweden.
58:12 Speaker 01 And this is Batteries. Once again, early 80s.
58:24 Speaker 01 Called Inconspiracy with Satan.
58:36 Speaker 01 Listen to the vocals though, this is once again ahead of its time.
59:40 Speaker 01 So you hear how the production is and everything?
59:42 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
59:43 Speaker 01 So, when we get to the second wave of black metal, we're talking early 90s.
59:54 Speaker 01 We've gone through thrash, we've gone through grindcore, we've gone through death metal. So, these bands from Norway kind of found that the death metal, even though you know it's intense music and all that, but as time is going, it's getting too polished. It's getting too...
1:00:19 Rick Rubin? For who?
1:00:21 Speaker 01 For people who are into extreme music, I guess. And then, they start kind of rebelling against what metal has become and start thinking what metal should be is what bands like Venom put down.
1:00:37 Rick Rubin? I see.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 And what this band we just heard, Bathory, or Celtic Frost, like this is what metal should be. It shouldn't be singing about helping the environment and it should be about...
1:00:51 Speaker 01 Darkness, it should be about Satanism, it should be ugly. So there was this guy named Euronomus from a band called Mayhem. And he had this record store. And that's where people used to gather and that's kind of where the early black metal. Scene in Norway kind of started was, you know, people gathering at this record store. Where, you know, he was this very extreme metal kind of guy. And Mayhem had this singer. His name was Dead. So they had recorded, I guess, some early stuff with this guy. This guy, you know, is a troubled kind of person, so he ends up.
1:01:35 Speaker 01 Shooting himself, kills himself. This guy Euronomus comes in and finds. That his singer has killed himself. Takes pictures of it. Like with the blood scattered all over the walls. Skull. Fragments on the floor. And uses it as like a cover for the album.
1:02:01 Speaker 01 So these kinds of crazy fucking stories start coming out of Norway. So this guy Euronomus. Is also himself eventually murdered. By a guy from a band called Bersam. Was name is Bar Vickers. So you have these. Stories coming out of Norway about this scene.
1:02:29 Rick Rubin? Where the bands are killing each other.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 And burning churches. They're taking the satanic cafe to a whole.
1:02:35 Rick Rubin? Yeah, they're really living the.
1:02:37 Speaker 01 They're really living this shit, just taking the shock and the extreme.
1:02:43 Speaker 01 Of it to another level and also their recordings were purposely like done lo-fi like, well, here's a song from a band called Dark Throne. Now, not all these bands were burning churches. They were in the scene and there was people in the scene that were doing that. Yeah. I mean, I have a friend from one of these bands. He wasn't burning churches, but the scene that they were around, this kind of stuff was going on. So there's a few really respected bands that were from the early part of this scene that, you know, they carry weight in the metal world. And this is early 90s. In Norway. Yeah.
1:03:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, early 90s Norway. There's a song called "Transylvanian Hunger" by Dark Throne.
1:03:47 Speaker 01 One thing you'll notice is that the music is kind of beautiful. Yeah.
1:03:54 Speaker 01 It sounds like industrial music, but it's melodic.
1:04:19 Speaker 01 It's atmospheric.
1:04:30 Speaker 01 It puts you in a trance, in a dark trance.
1:04:40 Speaker 01 It sounds like we're listening to it through a wall. You know, like it's leaking through the sound coming from somewhere else. There's probably one mic in the room.
1:05:28 Rick Rubin? The lo-fi aspect is really interesting.
1:05:32 Speaker 01 It makes you really have to listen to it.
1:05:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:05:36 Speaker 01 To figure it out, to see what's going on.
1:05:57 Speaker 01 There's this "I don't give a shit what you think about it" kind of vibe about it.
1:06:17 Rick Rubin? Vocals sound more like storytelling.
1:06:29 Speaker 01 And the music is always dark.
1:06:34 Rick Rubin? Does it always not change? Like this has like no rhythm changes there?
1:06:39 Speaker 01 Well, just like the Tampa death metal.
1:06:43 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:06:43 Speaker 01 You hear each band does it their own way.
1:06:46 Rick Rubin? I see.
1:06:54 Speaker 01 And it doesn't mean every Darkstone song sounds just like this, because Darkstone has different vibes to them too, but this is one of their more really classic black metal songs.
1:07:06 Speaker 01 And then you have "Mayhem",
1:07:13 Speaker 01 This album is called "De Mysteris Dom Satanas."
1:07:18 Rick Rubin? And this is the guy who ran the record store.
1:07:23 Speaker 01 Who ran the record store.
1:07:25 Rick Rubin? Took the pictures of the singer who died.
1:07:29 Speaker 01 Used it as an album cover.
1:07:30 Rick Rubin? And gets murdered.
1:07:32 Speaker 01 And then he gets murdered by the guy in a band called Burzum. But on this track, the guy on Burzum is playing bass. This album doesn't come out until after this murder has happened. So this is a song called "Funeral Fog."
1:08:07 Speaker 01 You hear the mood of it.
1:08:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 Like you, from the first song to this song, there is a mood that black metal sets. Kind of a dark, atmospheric, melodic.
1:08:25 Rick Rubin? To me, it feels like the speed is incidental. Yes, they're playing fast.
1:08:32 Rick Rubin? But it's not really about the speed. It's like, it creates this...
1:08:37 Speaker 01 Atmosphere.
1:08:38 Rick Rubin? Atmosphere.
1:08:58 Speaker 01 So this album came out after the guitar player was murdered. And the guy who murdered him is in jail now.
1:09:09 Speaker 01 But the scene is moving forward.
1:09:15 Speaker 01 Without them, there's other bands that are forming, there's other bands that are, you know, people are talking about.
1:10:03 Speaker 04 How much would you say you listen to this music?
1:10:06 Speaker 01 A lot.
1:10:08 Speaker 01 Especially when I first discovered it.
1:10:10 Speaker 04 Yeah. And would you listen like an album over and over again?
1:10:13 Speaker 01 Yes. Or bands over and over. It's all I listened to when I first discovered it.
1:10:38 Speaker 01 There's something really beautiful about it.
1:10:48 Speaker 01 The melodies of the guitars.
1:10:54 Speaker 01 Brings pictures in your mind, and it also matches where they come from.
1:11:05 Speaker 04 None of the parts are important, it's the whole.
1:11:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:11:33 Rick Rubin? How old were you when you were listening to this a lot?
1:11:37 Speaker 01 Uh, in my twenties.
1:11:53 Speaker 01 Here, I'll play you a song from Burzum, the guy who murdered the guitar player from this band, who's actually playing the bass on this track.
1:12:18 Speaker 01 You see how they're different?
1:12:20 Rick Rubin? Right away.
1:12:24 Speaker 01 Song called "Lost Wisdom."
1:12:51 Rick Rubin? It's not as lo-fi and it has more dynamics.
1:13:09 Speaker 01 How do you feel about those vocals?
1:13:15 Rick Rubin? He memes it more than King Diamond.
1:14:11 Rick Rubin? What's wild about this music is that after hearing Mayhem, this kinda sounds like pop music. In comparison.
1:14:19 Speaker 01 Once again, this is one track from Burzum.
1:14:25 Rick Rubin? When you start listening to it,
1:14:32 Rick Rubin? the subtleties of it become really important.
1:14:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:14:36 Rick Rubin? The subtle differences.
1:14:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:14:41 Speaker 01 They belong together, but they're different.
1:14:44 Rick Rubin? Yes.
1:14:44 Speaker 01 They're related.
1:14:57 Speaker 01 And then, there is a band, again out of Norway, called Immortal. It's a song called "The Sun No Longer Rises."
1:15:32 Speaker 01 I mean, listen to the melodickness, though, of it.
1:15:34 Rick Rubin? I hear it.
1:15:37 Rick Rubin? It's more orchestral.
1:15:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:15:45 Speaker 01 It's really beautiful.
1:17:08 Speaker 01 It's really cool. The devil's moving fucking fast, the demon's rise. The rock of the black is falling, moving forth. And the ice is off once. Tell the eternal woods, they'll wait for me. Battle makes clear.
1:18:27 Speaker 01 So fucking intense.
1:19:12 Speaker 01 Like, they come from cold countries, and you feel the coldness.
1:19:20 Rick Rubin? It's truly original new music, and I probably feel like you felt maybe when you first heard Slayer, where I can't say I like it, but I can see I'm gonna wanna come back and listen to it more because...
1:19:34 Speaker 01 Try it again.
1:19:35 Rick Rubin? Not even try it again. I feel like it holds secrets. I can get glimpses of it, but it's not available on the face.
1:19:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:45 Rick Rubin? It sounds like the music is hidden inside that.
1:19:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, because of the production.
1:19:51 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:19:52 Speaker 01 You know?
1:19:53 Rick Rubin? Very cool.
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1:21:27 Speaker 01 One more band from this genre is a band called Satyricon. This song's called "Mother North."
1:23:33 Speaker 01 Like, people always will ask me, "Well, what's the difference between death metal and black metal?" Do you hear it?
1:23:38 Rick Rubin? Completely different.
1:23:39 Speaker 01 Completely different.
1:23:40 Rick Rubin? Completely different.
1:23:45 Rick Rubin? This sounds like church music to me. Avant-garde church music.
1:23:48 Speaker 01 To some extent, it is kind of religious music, but the religion that Satan isn't.
1:23:54 Rick Rubin? I don't know if that's true, though. Like, I understand that's the K-Fan, but I don't hear that. I hear, like, classical, devotional church music in there.
1:24:10 Speaker 01 It's very serious.
1:24:18 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:24:18 Speaker 01 It stays very serious. It doesn't leave.
1:24:24 Rick Rubin? You know, it's like Ali was the prince of darkness.
1:24:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:28 Rick Rubin? And Black Sabbath was the original satanic band. And then before the show, he would get on his knees and pray to Jesus.
1:24:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:36 Rick Rubin? So it's like, it's almost like to accept the conceit of Satan, you have to be a believer to start, you know?
1:24:56 Rick Rubin? It sounds very orchestral. It's amazing. Is it only guitars or are there keyboards?
1:25:00 Speaker 01 There is keyboards in the back of it.
1:25:06 Rick Rubin? It sounds uplifting.
1:25:08 Speaker 01 The singer of this band is a very, very close friend of mine.
1:25:11 Rick Rubin? It's amazing. It's amazing.
1:25:14 Speaker 01 And let me tell you, these guys, they're really smart guys. Guys who play death metal, black metal, when you meet them.
1:25:22 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:25:23 Speaker 01 They're really smart.
1:25:25 Rick Rubin? It's intellectual. You can hear it.
1:25:27 Speaker 01 Yes. It's very intellectual and they are very intellectual people.
1:25:31 Rick Rubin? They are not messing around.
1:25:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:57 Speaker 01 So, yeah, that's the black metal.
1:26:13 Speaker 01 When I listen to metal these days, it's usually black metal. I still, I really love the genre.
1:26:24 Speaker 01 And then the theatrics, like the way these bands look.
1:26:29 Speaker 01 They have like face paint, they have like, it's very kind of inspired by Kiss, you could say, but the demon.
1:26:46 Speaker 01 It's just different versions of, they call it corpse paint.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 It comes from Kiss, it comes from King Diamond, early Celtic Frost used to do it.
1:27:00 Rick Rubin? The face paint?
1:27:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, like they would have like black under their eyes, but their face would be white.
1:27:19 Speaker 01 As a guy growing up with the heavy metal, with the thrash music, with the death metal music. By the time we get into the 90s, yes, there is that black metal coming out of Norway. But then there is also bands that are mixing groove with metal.
1:27:40 Rick Rubin? What do you call the genre?
1:27:42 Speaker 01 I mean, some people would call it groove metal at first, but groove metal evolved into, you could say, you know, goes into industrial metal, goes into new metal.
1:27:53 Rick Rubin? I see.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 You wouldn't call Pantera a new metal band, but Pantera was doing a groovy version of heavy metal in the early 90s, like a song like this called "A New Level."
1:28:52 Speaker 01 The different sounds about it.
1:28:56 Rick Rubin? Closer to system.
1:28:58 Speaker 01 Well, I was very inspired by bands like this.
1:29:22 Speaker 01 Bands have already done the fat stuff, bands have already done the thrash stuff, the extreme death metal, the growling.
1:29:34 Speaker 01 When I get to the point where I'm doing what I'm doing,
1:29:40 Speaker 01 what can I do that's new? You know, I don't wanna, I love all these bands.
1:29:45 Rick Rubin? Yeah, but you don't wanna repeat it.
1:29:46 Speaker 01 But I don't wanna copy it.
1:29:47 Rick Rubin? Of course.
1:29:48 Speaker 01 So you start, you know, in a band like Pantera, you start hearing funky kind of groovy, bouncy type of beat.
1:30:02 Rick Rubin? And these riffs sound like they could also be on a Soundgarden record, you know?
1:30:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, they were coming out around the same time.
1:30:11 Rick Rubin? Drumming's more metal here. Soundgarden is different, it's more rock. But the guitar is not so radically different.
1:30:24 Speaker 01 So you have this, which Pantera is Pantera. I don't know, what genre do you put? They're metal, they're groove metal, but you know, at the end of the day, they're Pantera. They do what Pantera does. A lot of bands are inspired by what they do, but some bands, you kinda can't put them exactly in that one genre.
1:30:52 Speaker 01 And then you got, you know, you start going into industrial.
1:31:04 Speaker 01 Industrial started as, you could say, industrial, but then bands like Ministry started putting guitars to drum machine.
1:31:58 Rick Rubin? It's in the conversation for sure.
1:32:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:04 Speaker 01 But the way it moves is groovy.
1:32:41 Speaker 01 So they're one of the first bands to bring in that industrial vibe, but give the heavy metal or punk rock flavor to it, you know?
1:32:55 Speaker 01 The aggression.
1:33:06 Speaker 01 Sounds of samples of drills and...
1:33:18 Rick Rubin? It's like heavy metal for people who grew up on electronic and dance music.
1:33:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:37 Speaker 07 We're gonna rip this motherfucker off. We're gonna tear this motherfucker down.
1:33:47 Speaker 07 Very interesting.
1:34:09 Speaker 01 These are bands now experimenting, bringing different things into heavy metal and bringing heavy metal into different things.
1:34:28 Speaker 01 Mixing genres, mixing influences, fusion of different things.
1:34:36 Rick Rubin? It's not like black metal, but it's as new as black metal.
1:34:40 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:34:41 Rick Rubin? Just in a different direction.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 At the time, yes.
1:34:50 Speaker 01 "The Skinny Puppy" you wouldn't consider a metal band, but a song like this...
1:35:05 Speaker 01 ...called "Fascist Jockage".
1:35:20 Speaker 02 These are the best!
1:35:24 Speaker 02 This is the end of us! War's on! Night on! Run away! To compose!
1:35:33 Speaker 02 Free is what? Beast of us? Fear! Aryan yahoo!
1:35:41 Speaker 02 Newshads liver! Nurse's sweet farmers! Present! Well! Killing us! Fast! Present!
1:35:53 Speaker 01 Both of these bands in their earlier years didn't really have guitars, but these are kinda later records that they started bringing in guitars and bringing in the heavy metal punk hardcore energy mixed with the industrial.
1:36:50 Speaker 01 You can't mention these bands without mentioning Killing Joke. You know Killing Joke?
1:36:56 Rick Rubin? Yeah, English band.
1:36:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, English band.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 You could say that what Black Metal Venom Motorhead is to that genre, Killing Joke would probably be to this genre of metal, even though Killing Joke was not a metal band. But a song like this...
1:37:23 Speaker 01 "The Weight", Metallica covered this.
1:37:30 Speaker 01 But this was in the early 80s.
1:38:03 Speaker 01 It's not metal.
1:38:04 Rick Rubin? No, they were considered like a post-punk.
1:38:07 Speaker 01 Post-punk, but...
1:38:09 Rick Rubin? Hard new wave.
1:38:10 Speaker 01 But you hear the guitars mixed with the very... Electronic kind of drum.
1:38:17 Rick Rubin? Very close to industrial music.
1:38:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 And then, you know, you gotta mention, uh... Nine Inch Nails in this conversation with industrial. Song called "Wish".
1:38:43 Speaker 01 So all this shit came out before what I guess people would call new metal.
1:38:56 Speaker 01 Pretty aggressive.
1:39:33 Speaker 01 This song started seeing commercial success.
1:39:44 Speaker 01 Once grunge came around, and a lot of those speed metal, thrash bands, were not putting out their best stuff in the early 90s, mid 90s. We'd already heard it, it'd already been done, and they were not, kinda, putting out their best records, in my opinion. And even the death metal bands after a while were, kinda, like, by the mid 90s, it was, kinda, like... It's just, okay, what else? And then you see bands like this, that were coming out.
1:40:21 Speaker 01 I think there was bands like us, but the first time... This is where I'm gonna start getting into nu metal. Okay. The first time I heard Korn,
1:40:36 Speaker 01 I was like, "This is something that's heavy, but it's heavy in a way that's not done the way that I've listened to heavy all these years."
1:40:48 Speaker 01 You felt a heaviness from the groove more than you did from the speed, or the, you know? Because we'd already been through all the speed and all the fucking fastness, and all the blast beats and all that. So, for a generation that, kinda, lived through that, grew up with that, then you hear...
1:41:16 Speaker 01 Just bringing it with a fucking, heavy, heavy bounce.
1:41:31 Speaker 01 And this was pretty much where, I guess you could say, nu metal started.
1:41:55 Speaker 01 There was something fresh about it.
1:42:02 Rick Rubin? It's unlike anything that came before.
1:42:05 Speaker 01 No, it was only own thing, downtuned guitars.
1:42:11 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:42:13 Speaker 01 It's not going fast, but it's...
1:42:19 Speaker 01 It hits you in the chest, you know, it's just got a groove to it.
1:42:29 Rick Rubin? And it's related to industrial too.
1:42:31 Speaker 01 Well, that's why I played industrial first.
1:42:36 Rick Rubin? It's post-industrial.
1:42:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:41 Speaker 01 It's a fusion of a lot of different things. There's hip-hop involved.
1:42:45 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:43:09 Rick Rubin? This is kinda raging.
1:43:11 Speaker 01 Well, rage kinda had an influence on those new metal bands. Because of the hip-hop or build-ups like this.
1:43:23 Speaker 01 So, it was all kinda happening at the same time. The way you can kinda compare how the Black Sabbath sound was happening from the late psychedelic stuff from the late 60s.
1:43:36 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:43:37 Speaker 01 It was something that was kinda happening that kinda trickled into, one thing trickled into the other, into the other, and like, you know?
1:43:46 Rick Rubin? In each case, it's like someone has an idea of a new variation on something that's kind of around.
1:43:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, and builds on it.
1:43:57 Rick Rubin? Yeah, I felt that when, because I know Trent was really influenced by ministry.
1:44:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:05 Rick Rubin? Trent had a different thing about him. Like, I didn't like industrial music, but his songwriting was so good that it transcended industrial.
1:44:14 Rick Rubin? And then I grew to like the music.
1:44:16 Speaker 01 There was more songwriting, I think, involved with Nine Inch Nails. And you would say it's more commercial than ministry.
1:44:27 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:44:28 Speaker 01 Especially stuff that came later on. Deftones is another band from the new metal scene. One's called Seven Words.
1:45:51 Speaker 01 We had metal, and in the 80s, metal was actually, you know, played on MTV and was, kinda had commercial success, especially with the hair metal bands and the glam bands and all that.
1:46:05 Speaker 01 Aside from Metallica and, I mean Slayer never became a huge commercial success.
1:46:26 Speaker 01 So, heavy metal had its thing in the 80s and then in the 90s grunge came and wiped out all of that.
1:46:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:46:36 Speaker 01 And yeah, you had death metal, you had black metal, but these were not commercial kind of genres. New metal came out, which we never called it new metal, but these bands came out and Korn, Deftones, us, Slipknot started getting popular. We were playing the Ozfest to the point where we headlined the Ozfest at one point. I feel like, you know, new metal gets a bad rap because it became a cookie cutter thing where every label wanted their new metal band at some point and it.
1:47:13 Rick Rubin? It's just because it got so popular.
1:47:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, it got really popular, but the bands that I'm playing right now and I'll, I guess, include our own band in that thing. We were all doing something original and mixing things with metal that weren't being done before. So, when people, you know, talk shit about new metal and oh, you know, it got all really popular and all this stuff, it's, it got popular, one, because it was good at first. At first it was and then it became, every band wanted to try to sound like Korn, every band wanted to try to sound like the Deftones.
1:47:52 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:47:53 Speaker 01 Or Slipknot.
1:47:54 Rick Rubin? I felt like System came up in the wave of new metal, but it sounded nothing like any of the other new metal bands from the beginning.
1:48:04 Speaker 01 I was trying to mix things with metal that even all these, like, it wasn't like, why does it just gotta be like industrial, why can't I mix the Beach Boys and the Beatles and all this stuff?
1:48:14 Rick Rubin? Mm-hmm.
1:48:14 Speaker 01 And the Armenian music and Arabic music and all, everything I know, why can't I mix anything with rock or metal? If it feels right and it feels like they belong together and in my head, like, it's all the stuff that was natural to me to love and it came out of me.
1:48:35 Speaker 01 In a natural way to where I wrote song like a song like Atwa. That has very like Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, then it comes in with this heavy fucking thing and then goes back into Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel. And then another thing that we did that I don't think you heard from any of these bands that I just played for you today. Were vocal harmonies.
1:48:59 Rick Rubin? Nobody had vocal harmonies.
1:49:01 Speaker 01 Not very many that I could think of.
1:49:03 Rick Rubin? No, only System.
1:49:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, in in heavy metal music.
1:49:06 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:49:06 Speaker 01 So us bands that were coming out out of the Sunset Strip. In the mid 90s, late 90s. I think we were doing something unique. I always saw System as a very avant garde, abstract kind of band. It's interesting that people caught on to it. It's hooky. I write hooky stuff.
1:49:28 Rick Rubin? Yeah, but it wasn't obvious from the beginning that it was gonna catch on, certainly not in the way that it has. Most people didn't get it.
1:49:37 Speaker 01 No.
1:49:38 Rick Rubin? I remember, you know, going to K-Rock and playing it for Kevin Weatherly and him saying, we will never play this band on our station. No matter what happens, we will never play this band.
1:49:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and a year later, he was playing it every fucking hour on the hour.
1:49:54 Rick Rubin? Number one on the station one year later. But that was the level of resistance because it was so different.
1:50:01 Speaker 01 You know, the new metal thing is it's cool that it happened because it helped us be part of something that was kind of moving momentum wise and we were kind of going along with the wave. You can call us alternative metal.
1:50:19 Rick Rubin? I think that's fair.
1:50:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I'm fine with that more than I am with new metal, but you know, people want to put us in a genre and that's what it is, but I think there is things that we do that only we do.
1:50:31 Rick Rubin? For sure. Oh, absolutely. Good and bad.
1:50:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess so.
1:50:38 Speaker 01 And we're getting out of the new metal thing.
1:50:43 Speaker 01 First Slipknot album.
1:51:07 Speaker 01 Groovy, but heavy as fuck. With samples in the back, I mean, just meshing it all together.
1:51:40 Speaker 01 Death metal vibes.
1:51:44 Speaker 01 Just mixing the death metal, the groove. They're doing a lot of different stuff too, man.
1:51:49 Rick Rubin? Yeah, and they also had the theatrical stage show.
1:51:53 Speaker 01 They came out after us. We were already moved to the Ausfest main stage at that point. But then they came out and they were on the second stage and you can't ignore them.
1:52:07 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:52:07 Speaker 01 And they just skyrocketed. Like, once they got a chance to be seen on that Ausfest, I mean, it became what everyone just started talking about, was Slipknot.
1:52:21 Rick Rubin? Cause no one had ever seen anything like it before.
1:52:27 Speaker 01 It was good, though. The music was like, heavy. It wasn't just their look, it wasn't just the masks. Like, there was something really heavy about this shit.
1:52:56 Speaker 01 They were definitely part of the evolution of metal. And now you see so many fucking bands wearing masks. Like, that's one thing I don't really understand. Like, right now, lately, like, metal, like, there's so many bands that wear fucking masks. And I'm like, it's kinda like what hair metal used to be, in a way, where it's like, everyone's doing it now, you know? So, two more bands, wait. One of these bands, I remember I was sitting with Joey from Slipknot, God rest his soul. And we were sitting in a hotel and he was like, "Dude, have you ever heard of the Dillinger Escape Plan?" And I was like, "No." He's like, "You gotta listen to this band."
1:53:39 Speaker 01 So we went through all these genres and now the last two bands I'm gonna play are, kind of bring a very technical musicianship, prog, math metal is what people start calling it. So here's Dillinger Escape Plan with Sugar Coated Sour.
1:54:29 Speaker 01 Chaos. But the musicianship.
1:54:45 Speaker 01 Jazz.
1:55:28 Speaker 01 Look where we started.
1:55:31 Speaker 01 And now we're like to this. Wild.
1:55:40 Speaker 01 This wouldn't have existed if all the other stuff didn't happen.
1:55:46 Rick Rubin? And also, things like "yes" didn't exist, you know? This is definitely a descendant of "yes."
1:55:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's all, all kinds of shit going on here.
1:56:05 Speaker 01 So these are all late 90s.
1:56:27 Speaker 01 So from late 60s psychedelic, new wave, British heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, industrial metal, new metal, we get into the late 90s. To me, this is one of the heaviest bands ever out of Sweden. It's hard to out-heavy Meshuggah.
1:56:58 Speaker 01 This is new millennium Cyanide Christ.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 Every riff is on a different one.
1:58:17 Rick Rubin? It's so groovy that you don't lose it.
1:58:20 Speaker 01 No.
1:58:21 Rick Rubin? It's not hard to listen to math.
1:58:23 Speaker 01 No.
1:58:24 Rick Rubin? It feels straightforward even though it's complicated.
1:58:28 Speaker 01 That symbol keeps it straightforward. But there's all this shit happening in between that symbol.
1:58:40 Speaker 01 Very groovy.
1:58:41 Rick Rubin? Yeah, headbanger.
1:58:42 Speaker 01 You can bob your head to it.
1:58:43 Rick Rubin? Easy.
1:58:44 Speaker 01 But it's that symbol that you're bobbing your head to.
1:58:51 Rick Rubin? Also, the rhythm of the vocal in between the guitars is really interesting too.
1:59:44 Speaker 01 I once asked them, I was like, "What does your new album sound like?" And they said, "Seasickness."
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