Jered Threatin’s masterful illusion has become the biggest “metal” story of 2018. But while his stunning viral campaign has bewildered many, no one has really picked up on the bigger picture of exactly what Threatin was able to pull off.
Aside from successfully booking a European tour with no band, no music, and no fans, Threatin has exposed the hideous and uncomfortable truth about both the music industry and the decline of metal as a whole. He has proved what we at DMU have been writing about for a long time: that the quality of music has nothing to do with gaining the support of music industry executives and today’s metal press. And worse, both the industry and the mainstream metal press are so desperate for a payout that they’ll shamelessly elevate a ridiculous gimmick instead of pursing and developing talent. If you still have the foolish dreams of achieving success in guitar based music, or being a career musician, take heed to whats between the lines of the Threatin story.
While you’ve probably heard if you’re following any of the major music blogs, Jered Threatin is a Photoshop wiz who created a band without members or even music. By buying Facebook likes, creating fake albums, and masterfully editing YouTube videos into showing them playing in front of a huge crowd, Threatin gave a number of foreign booking agents the pretense of having a real band with a real fan base. A European tour was booked, but promoters quickly discovered Threatin’s “band” was completely unable to sell tickets or draw fans.
MetalSucks is obsessed with Threatin. Much like Trump has successfully trolled the liberal mainstream media and completely dominated over 90% of their press, Threatin has maddened the MetalSucks editors into a hysteria of obsession and outrage about his success. The tabloid blog has released over twenty articles about him in a one month period including the most read story on the site all year. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and others have since followed suit, and even BBC news has picked up the story in recent days.
Ultimately, the mainstream of metal’s press has spent over a decade chasing gossip, flavor of the week political ideology, and dinosaur artists from the 70s 80s and 90s and completely abandoned everyone playing metal in the 2010s. You’re more likely to read about the “birthday” of an album from thirty years ago then you are to read about anyone revilement today. Thus no band of this decade has been properly developed/pushed, and has thus never made it anywhere.
This is also how the music industry works as a whole. As illustrated many times in the past, record executives aren’t willing to bet on guitar based music because it’s a risky investment. Yet, they’ll likely bet on Jered Threatin because he’s a story and people are gullible. Think about the band Ghost Bath; they’ve signed on to Metal Blade Records solely based on a fake news Kim Kelly/Vice News story about them being form China (they’re white bois from Minnesota). Despite being completely devoid of talent and favorable reviews, they’ve got an album on Metal Blade and have been touring the world.
In complete and brutal honesty, Jered Threatin is a master of P/R and record executives should salivate at the opportunity to add him to their ranks of suits. He’ll have a great career in the music business if he chooses although the music business is likely to remain in decline as the world around us crumbles. Heck, may even get some cash behind him as a musician and get some songs/shows out before a small tribe of gullible normies. Just look at where a few dollars has gotten bands like Liturgy and Orgy.
So if you feel like “metal is dead” or “things are creatively stagnant,” it’s because of metal’s “journalists” and their hopeless greed for money. Threatin proves that they’d rather promote a non-band than a good band and/or a hard working band. It’s laughable and somewhat depressing.
Finally — and this is the most important lesson — don’t try to be a career musician. You’ll spend your life in poverty and disappointment. It’s better to understand this now than to spend twenty years on the road just to see everyone give the spotlight to a gimmick like Jered Threatin.
Tags: fake, Jared Threatin, jered threatin, journalism, metal journalism, music business, music industry, Threatin
hah, this is great! I never knew about it as I rarely look at shit sites that pretend to like metal.
You know, this Threatin dude reminds me of the mastermind (whoever it is/whoever they are), that created Andrew WK. see -> http://what-happened-to-awk.weebly.com/index.html
It is one of those conspiracies (a theory? or hidden fact?) about corporate rock music, like how Paul McCartney died in a car crash on 1966.
A guy who looked / sounded very similar, had some minor plastic surgery, and a few weeks later, Fake Paul, Faul McCartney appeared. http://www.billyshears.com/ , https://archive.org/details/PaulIsDeadTheRottenApple77488x360MOV , https://archive.org/details/TheWingedBeatle2012ExtendedVersion
Did you know that MJ was black once?
dinosaur artists from the 70’s 80’s and 90’s and completely abandoned everyone playing metal in the 2010’s. You’re more likely to read about the “birthday” of an album from 30 years ago then you are to read about anyone revilement today. Thus no band of this decade has been properly developed/pushed, and has thus never made it anywhere.
Oh fuck off. Classic album birthdays are an important cultural touchstone of metal: reverence for history. Though I do agree with the notion of keeping the future alive (as long as it isn’t shitty hardcore).
Good day Boys, Are there anytime certain Normal V-Bucks on-line sites there is established that literally give you V-Bucks until you begin making you spend with the card bucks
Excellent article.
Yes the industry is driven by greedy fools, and more importantly, the fans at large are more and more ignorant, and I feel that indeed most “journalists” like to keep it that way, entertaining readers with stupid jokes and gossip and clickbait shit raher than informing them and raising their level of artistic knowledge. You guys at DMU know it all to well, and you write about it and I agree with you most of the time. I would just say that too strict an elitist attitude may not effectively contribute to curb an “excessively stagnant” metal landscape.
Now, is Metal really “dying”? I keep hearing that, but if you look closely it is simply not true. I even find it amazing that so many artists out there are crafting fantastic records despite knowing all too well that there is little chance they will ever “make it”.
I’m thinking of Brendan Sloan, who creates amazing music under the moniker of Convulsing, Blake Connally, who keeps moving forward with his Infernal Coil project. I’m thinking of countless bands who are pushing metal forward, Car Bomb, Chaos Echoes, Hissing, Baring Teeth, Thoren… When do you guys at DMU ever acknowledge the greatness? Never. You prefer endlessly spitting on DsO for having “ruined” your preciuous little sacred Black Metal, which is quite a stupid thing to do when you consider the momentum the band has created and the legions of bands that have been inspired by them. Juts an example. I’m not gonna talk Meshuggah, but the principle si the same. You guys simply don’t get it.
The problem here is pretty simple: most journalists don’t do their job. On the one hand there is Metal Sucks and the gossip world, on the other DMU and the ultra elitist circles. Both approaches seem to me equally inefficient. One craves clicks and panders to the lowest instincts, the other shuts itself away in an ivory towaer of its own making, in love with its theories and historical, uhm, “perspectives” revisionism.
In between I’d say you have Angry Metal Guy and others such as NCS, Invisible Oranges and Toilet ov Hell who try to do their job as journalists and honestly document creativity and assess quality of the metal being made right here right now. My understanding is that they do not make a cent out of it (what the fuk do you mean by “hopeless greed for money”??
Great metal, like any great art deso not come easy. And because metal is one of the greates art forms in music today, one with the highets degree of vitality and comitment, it needs to be promoted adequately. But I feel that the promo machine is not adequately designed for that. Metal is not pop. Neither is it contemporary music, nor is it jazz. Each of those worlds work differently. yet Metal has more in common with classical and jazz than with pop.
That is why we need talented advocates of great metal. We need visionaries, we need wizards. We need people able to engage readers and open them up to stuff that is not necessarily “comfy”, that does not always delivers “instant gratification”, that often requires a little effort to fully appreciate.
And importantly we need to acknowledge where the people stand in their journey of discovery. For example, in 2018, one of the most beloved bands within the more “elitist” circles of metaldom would be Slugdge, something I’m personnally not too happy about. But that is the reality. That is what the fans out there have decided and those fans are generally not the “crowd” enamoured with the latest Ghost.
The question is, should bands such as Slugdge be despised or on the contray supported? What do you think? I suggest that the topic should be at the very least discussed openly. If metal is dying, it is certainly not from a lack of creativity, it is from a lack of talented advocates of creativity.
Thank you for reading. Looking forward to your comments.
https://www.deathmetal.org/review/slugdge-esoteric-malacology-2018/ Review of idiotic and boring band Slugdge.
The issue is that you don’t understand what makes good metal. Car Bomb is just hardcore with jazz freedom and arrangements and does nothing that hasn’t been seen a million times before.
There are few bands and we do our best at covering those that deserve to be covered while sacrificing hours due to the horde of terrible bands.
Also you confuse quantity with quality. DsO started one of the more idiotic movements in BM and have inspired even more useless bands. What metal needs is a smaller pool of bands making better music. All those sites you mentioned praise mediocrity and the same nonsense as Metalsucks.
Slugdge is praised because modern people love irony. Tempering something not easily palatable like metal with irony removes its teeth and allows an audience to imagine the band as cool, fun loving guys that maybe would be your friends. Because modern people cannot forge relationships with people in the real world, they will fawn over a band from across the planet who they hope will think like them, and they can have a tenuous relationship with someone they’ll never meet, which is the safest form of connection possible, and in doing so they can make light of dangerous concepts together and ignore the reality that actual metal is trying to preach. No one likes Slugdge because of their music.
Car Bomb is a very talented band who is at heart a kind of progressive nu-metal band like Sikth, but in being such a thing can only be as good as nu-metal is. They however have the same compositional flaw as every modern metal band where any riff can appear in any song and no particular track has a unified direction. Their best traits are that they have created a presence that despite being culled from multiple overabused bands resembles somehow their own particular sound, and they are the only band I can think of that commands tempo shifting to the point of severe audience manipulation- a quality that I would much like to see explored by more focused bands.
Baring Teeth is another act that discovered the dissonance of tritones and forces songs out of textures rather than concrete melodic ideas.
All of the modern bands force superficialities over actual compositional direction. That is why DMU cannot support them.
Possibly for a large majority but this site seems this prejudice makes it impossible for this site to find out about anything good. For instance I’ve been following Ectovoid since their demo, yet DMU just found out about them. I knew first because I will still check out new bands. The best of 2018 article missed over such a large swathe of good releases I doubt they’re even aware of what is even going on with death metal anymore.
whoa. obviously your right since you heard about a band before dmu covered them. I kiss your feet and vow to correct the errors of my ways
That is a total bitch response and my original comment wasn’t even directed towards you, cunt.
who is the more foolish, the fool or the fool who responds to his comment
meh. I gave up doing that as much as you still do.
Also, not everybody searches for as many new bands like you, (eg. scouring sites like bandcamp, reverbnation, soundclick, soundcloud, etc), because we are busy masturbating ourselves to death.
I went and read the “Review of idiotic and boring band Slugdge”. It turns out it was more nuanced and interesting than what you led me to believe, so thanks to Creed Braddock for the effort. Passing judgments is easy and, let’s face it, a fun thing to do. Trying to articulate why you think something has value or not is more difficut and when you guys do t, it is fantastic. Case in point, even if you think that “DsO started one of the more idiotic movements in BM and have inspired even more useless bands” it sounds compleetly gratuitous and is useless to me. It feels like the dislike of DsO around here is some brotehrhood thing that ties the cognoscenti together rather than something stemming from strong aesthetic principles, althoug I may have missed it. It feels to me like you guys have a very “conservative” approach to art in general, and I do suppose that you also hate modern art, contemporary/modern music and so on, which you all consider either “formless” or “degenerate”. For example, what do you think of Klee? Picasso? In music, does Stravinsky tickle your fancy? How about Ligeti? Feldman? Nancarrow?
“The issue is that you don’t understand what makes good metal”. Well that is a useless, condescending thing to say that only shows your limitations. Anyone well versed in any topic never ever says things like that. Only the pedant with half knowledge do, because they are scared shitless of being exposed. You know that. So cut the crap.
Truth is that like in any area other than dogmatic ones such as religion and politics, what makes good metal evolves all the time, and that anyone who claims to have established a set of standards to judge what is good is bound to stay stuck in the past, in his/her habits and in nostalgia. Only the artist who challenge the accepted standards achieve greatness, for example Beethoven or Wagner. On the other hand, oure academic composers such as Saint Saëns are mostly forgotten, save for a few pieces.
“What metal needs is a smaller pool of bands making better music”. No. What metal needs is more and more bands who have the freedom to explore and some up with ideas. Greatness comes from a vast pool of people who work and collaborate and compete. Otherwise what you get is a soviet style composers guild, where greatness is defined by a committee, which only leads to stagnant academic art, with every official composer following a predefined set of rules to a t. Dead art, dead music. I shudder to think of someone like you as Director of Music.
Thanks anyway for answering. Good food for thought. And sorry for the typos, it’s hard to reread myself in this box.
1) Slugdge was already reviewed and dismantled much more eloquently by Creed who has written some of our best pieces. It isn’t passing judgement but really just a quick sentence in how it compares to the Suffocations,Morbid Angels and Dismembers of the world, which is not very good. The standards have been set by the better bands featured on the DLA and everything else is judged on that level. If a band isn’t good, we quickly identify why it isn’t and move on in hope of finding a glimmer of brilliance.
2) DsO is a can of worms that has varied from album to album but maintains the following weaknesses. This is derived from the metalcore school of composition in that sonic intensity is favoured above all else. Incessant hyper activity that lacks dynamics in its constant need to impress on a technical and aural level as heard by the brickwalled productions and the technical ability constantly on display. Composition is secondary as the dissonant texture is placed above all else. The band want to achieve microtonality but without using microtonality so they go through simple jazz tropes like later Gorguts and Cynic to emulate this effect while ignoring the quality of their riffs and melodies. Take any melody hum it out loud and most of them are either a mess or cheesy pop melodies. Worst of all is that the band tries to paint an image like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack (who is also terrible) instead of focusing on the composition. What are the songs trying to convey apart from this image? How does one riff lead to another? How do you create melodies with a defined combination of notes and techniques? Where is the journey in the song? How does each song start with an idea and develop to achieve some form of conclusion? These are the questions we ask when listening to music and DsO have not produced results because all those elements do not concern them and the reason we adore such an extreme form of music are for those feelings. Where is the rebellion against cold modernity that Suffocation communicated? Where are the morbid truths revealed by Obituary, where is the romanticism of Burzum? DsO have no soul and seek only to impress through bombast rather than actual composition.
3) I am waiting for you to expose me. On modernity and contemporary art: these artists sought to rebel from the set standards and invented new forms of expression to do so. That would mean for bands like Car Bomb and the like to completely drop metal and and to start exploring from scratch which was what a lot of modern and then contemporary painters did and most of them found new aesthetics and managed to escape from the narrative completely but in doing so dropped any form of narrative completely and it all feels more like a teenager disobeying his parents than any actual attempt at creating something transcendent. Wagner and Beethoven understood their predecessors and they did not reject them but sought to take certain ideas further while slowly introducing new ones. Think of Slayer,Judas Priest and Mercyful Fate. Slayer sounded similar at first but brought new ideas based from their idols works and pushed them forwards. So it’s not a question of being closed minded but paying attention to quality and continuously searching what can be done with all the previous information rather than trying to start from scratch.
4) That is very fallacious logic from your part as you are insisting axiomatically that all great music was born from a large pool of artists. I can understand such a thought because it is true in many fields like in sports where a greater pool to choose from allows for a greater chance of having more extraordinary athletes, like the level in football(soccer) compared to something like field hockey. Yet in metal this phenomenon has not translated at all. We are no at a point in time where all the greatest records have been released more than 20 years ago at a time where the music was at its most underground. Theories for this:
No labels trying to make money.
Only those who actively sought good music could obtain it.
The average level of playing was lower due to the lack of available material before the internet age and thus bands had to concentrate more on the songwriting to mask the low level of musicianship.
Nowadays there are so many bands that can be downloaded in the blink of an eye and that since there is no investment in time or money to look up new bands, music has become disposable and with the constant bombardment of bands through online media, only those with a gimmick that separates from the rest will get noticed.
Hope this answers your questions.
Nick
Thanks for the response, Nick, very much appreciated. I’m chewing on your words, and will be keeping them in mind in the future. I agree with a lot of what you say, actually. No surprise here, otherwise I would not even be a regular reader.
Slugdge, I don’t want to discuss, because frankly I don’t care. The review dismantled it in a very interesting way. DsO I’m not that much of a connoisseur actually, but I do respect highly Gorguts and Luc Lemay speaks highly of them. Still I agree that one of the most puzzling aspects of that band is the juxtaposition of very sweeet melodies, post-rock like, with completely insane chaos. Many bands do that nowadays, such as Rolo Tomassi, which i’m not very fond of, precisely because of the annoying switching between sugary pop and sorta demonic BM. But everyone can hear that the girl is insecure and her shrieking does not carry true weight.
I do not think I said that “all great music was born from a large pool of artists”. Only a bunch of very gifted artists help art move forward. Still, those individuals are nurtured in an environment and they will thrive all the more better if there are more possibilities around.
Indeed, “only those bands with a gimmick that separates from the rest will get noticed”. Slugdge would be a fine example of that. And before them, Cannibal Corpse. And yes, increasing musicianship is often detrimental to songwriting quality.
Where i’m a little surprised is when I listen to the bands you guys deem worthy of praise (I’m referring to your’s and Brett’s end of year articles). Some bands, you can’t fuck with, Judas Priest, Master, Satan… Others are kinda boring OSDM. Others, such as Therion, man, what can I say? I liked them, and now they… I cannot. It has become stale. In short, I’m not always perticularly wowed, and I get it, maybe being wowed is not the point, I do listen to contemporary music and often you need to work your way through tough stuff. But hey, this is metal, right? I want it to be at least exciting.
So where is the way forward? Who are the Suffocations of today? I see Convulsing doing great stuff. And in BM, many icelandic bands are amazing. Svartidauði. Guðveiki. And there’s Veilburner. And Chaos Echoes. Are they gimmicky? Do they lack songwriting chops? Honestly, I don’t care, I find that they bring something exciting to the table.
Since you seem to revere Sammath, I’m listening to Godless Arrogance now, and I find it a tad overwhelming. To me it illustrates quite well what you were saying about “sonic intensity favoured above all else and “incessant hyper activity that lacks dynamics”. I don’t dislike it, I simply don’t quite see how it exemplifies your position about composition, chaining of phrasal riffs and so on. And I certainly don’t feel that they are at the level of a Suffocation.
See, I really love music in general, I’ve been brought up in a very musical environment and yes I did rebel against conventional ways and yes I may still have a lot of that rebelliousness in me. Great compoosers were rebels themselves most of the time. I do not lmit myself to the Romatic era though. I find much to love in earlier periods and even moreso in more modern ones. I like to think that metal can derive inspiration from more than the romantic era. Stravinsky and Bartok would be two prime examples. Messiaen as well. And there are bands working in that direction, such as Thoren.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts (if you feel inclined to share them, of course).
“Only the artist who challenge the accepted standards achieve greatness, for example Beethoven or Wagner. On the other hand, oure academic composers such as Saint Saëns are mostly forgotten, save for a few pieces.”
–Let’s be real here, the reason people other than music scholars can name any Beethoven works other than Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, and Symphonies 5 and 9 is because his best work was the ninth symphony meaning there had to be eight before it. Likewise, can anyone recognize any Wagner work other than “Flight of the Valkyries”? You’d probably get more people recognizing “Danse Macabre” and “Danse Bacchanale” than any Wagner work that wasn’t featured in Apocalypse Now; hell, you’d probably get more people recognizing those two than any movement of any Beethoven symphony other than “Ode to Joy” or movement 1 of Symphony 5.
As far as the question of “what makes good metal”, the key lies in what Segovia had to say about Flamenco:
“I love the flamenco, but the *true* flamenco, not the flamenco heard these days. The flamenco guitarist of today has removed his attention from the ideals of yesterday, when this noble art was prized for a depth of emotion, which could be produced by a certain simplicity of approach. Today’s guitarists are more theatrical, they want to show their technique, to dazzle the public with pyrotechnics. And so they not only insert chords not belonging to the true flamenco, but they also emphasize the rapid scale passages, tremolos, and so forth.”
Nowadays, everyone wants to show off that new new and totally unique chord progression and that wanky little time signature, but everyone has forgotten about what made metal great — the drive of a logical sequence of dark melodic riffs. As long as everyone is trying to impress their guitar teachers, they’re not going to make good metal — if you want to make good music in that vein, take up classical guitar. Metal is ultimately a folk tradition insofar as it doesn’t really value virtuosity, but rather expression built from simple fundamentals. “Moving forwards” is a dumb illusion; the key to making metal “better” is for people to go back and listen to “I.N.R.I.”, “Hell Awaits”, “Stained Class”, and “To Mega Therion” and remember what this stuff is.
Let’s not get lost arguing about Saint Saëns, a composer that I do not care much for. To me, he is a great craftsman, a genius craftsman, even, and yet he fails to move me. Carnaval des animaux is fun, probably because he did it as light piece (he was a humorous man after all). The rest lacks true inspiration despite dazzling technique. Much like Dream Theater. As Iannis Metaxas wrote in his review for Cruel Magic, “the application of classical theory creates pristine and perfect compositions, yet, in metal the transgression of these rules of harmony fosters abrasiveness on the sound, making the final result dark and malevolent”. And those records you mentioned, “I.N.R.I.”, “Hell Awaits”, “Stained Class”, and “To Mega Therion” are indeed great examples of that. You don’t accept the idea of “moving forward”, something I can accept if you mean that there is no “progress” in art like in technology or science. yet there definitely is “evolution”. Those bands you mentioned are evolutions of rock. And you may agree at least on the idea that art does evolve, since true artists constantlt strive to find new ways to express what they feel and reach transcendence.
Dear Nicholas,
It seems my response, which was awaiting moderation this morning, was not deemed suitable for DMU. Could you resend it to me with, possibly, the reason for not publishing it. That would help me not repeat the same mistake.
Yours truly,
FL
I have just found the time to publish and to respond your well constructed respone. Here at DMU we respect good and well formulated responses no matter the opinion and genuinely encourage such debate.
It almost made me laugh. But I still need to know what’s this about? did you already knew about this or you just learned about what happened and started gloating that you where right all along? We already know about this type of shit, since arena bands and such, it’s not even funny anymore. We want to discover bands, we want to form a decent community, not just rant about everything and shit on the already shat.
Yes. DMU should be a great place to find stuff. It often is. But it’s also a place that too often feels like it shits on everything and everyone under the sun. In doing so, DMU does not realize 1- readers go away 2- the shitting habit becomes as tedious as the overpraising seen at other sites 3- cred is decreased rather than increased. With all due respect.