PC/AHC: 1950s death metal

I had this image the other day of 1950s James Dean-esque street toughs headbanging to death metal. Would it have been possible to have a type of music like that in the '50s? And how much of a fan base would it have? I imagine the guys who kept packs of cigarettes rolled up in their sleeve would be into it.
 
Like the genre exists today (with extremely distorted guitars)? No. An extreme music that would be considered the 50s version of death metal? Maybe. After all, rockabilly and 50s rock 'n roll and (especially Like Wray's song "Rumble), and some of the distorted guitar playing of Junior Barnard, and Guitar Slim, were considered pretty extreme for their time. Like death metal is considered violent in most cases (with the exception of maybe some melodic death metal, like Carcass' music), "Rumble" by Link Wray was actually banned from airplay by a significant number of radio stations, due to the fact that it was considered to be music that would incite violence.

 
If this style got bigger then it was the Garage Rock sound of the late fifty's how would that effect the later formation of Punk?
 
You need a base to build the style on first. You need that fusion of 70s metal with punk rock that made thrash metal, and then you need to make it more "evil" by tuning the guitars down and using death growls. Death growls aren't hard if you know what you're doing (think of Batman's voice in The Dark Knight and try and sing like that, that's how I learned to do it), and according to some sources were used in ancient Nordic music, not to mention recording techniques can mess with the human voice to make all sorts of messed up sounds.

So basically you need rock music earlier than the late 40s. Which means the context it will emerge in will be different (the Roaring 20s/Great Depression?), the music it will inspire will be different, everything will be different.

Maybe after WWII TTL, you end up with something like death metal in the late 50s. But death metal as we know it is guaranteed to be controversial. The vast majority of the genre revels in lyrics and imagery which is either extremely violent, anti-religious/Satanic, or both. That's not something your "50s badass" types would be listening to IMO (thrash metal, though?), that's music for the fringes of society (maybe a young Charles Manson might like it, so instead of making Beatles ripoff music he becomes an ATL Varg Vikernes). If "Louie Louie" was considered obscene in the 60s, what would society think about something an ATL version of Morbid Angel or Cannibal Corpse in that era? Any record label putting out music like that would be subject to obscenity investigations.

Of course, this era with its hugely divergent history of rock, blues, and jazz might end up with some strange stuff, so maybe the first "death metal" more sounds like Atheist at their most avant-garde and "jazzy" more than anything else. But that's still pretty damn extreme.

Like the genre exists today (with extremely distorted guitars)? No. An extreme music that would be considered the 50s version of death metal? Maybe. After all, rockabilly and 50s rock 'n roll and (especially Like Wray's song "Rumble), and some of the distorted guitar playing of Junior Barnard, and Guitar Slim, were considered pretty extreme for their time. Like death metal is considered violent in most cases (with the exception of maybe some melodic death metal, like Carcass' music), "Rumble" by Link Wray was actually banned from airplay by a significant number of radio stations, due to the fact that it was considered to be music that would incite violence.

Carcass is a very bad example to use, if only for their name. But even Heartwork and Swansong would be considered violent to anyone who doesn't know better. Link Wray was indeed pretty extreme for his era though.
 
For music to "work" for a person doesn't it need to be new but not too new?

(and of course what's new will be different for each person)
 
There was a trend of dead teen lover ballads. And previous to that, traditional music was rife with murder ballads. Your grandparents were more f'd up than black and white movies pretended.


Other than that, the closest you get is Shock Rock and the morbid. It was more like the Late Night Movie show with its horror host. It was about theatrics. And that lead to Arthur Brown. And then came Alice Cooper. But it isn't "metal". I suppose you could merge Garage Rock with that. All this isn't the 50s. That's the 60s. You've got "Louie, Louie" for Garage Rock in the 50s, and even that's from 1957.



 
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Actually, Jesus Christ, you might be able to pull this off. Converge the influence of morbid subject matter, which was present as an entity, with the harder edge of Garage Rock, and you get something like it. You can probably find some band that did that at the time, but just never got popular. There's a lot of that. If you get deep into music, you notice all the groups that recorded one album on some local label, or did the record-it-yourself thing and never got signed but some indie label released it 50 years later in a collection.
 
I have noted this before (and even used it as an element in my stories), but the Finnish band Viikate ("Scythe") sounds a lot like rock music from an alternate timeline, with its mix of surf guitars, metal elements and Finnish schlagers. Dark and heavy, but something one could imagine evolving from a 1950s background. I think it comes close to what the OP is suggesting.

Consider these examples:


 
There was a trend of dead teen lover ballads. And previous to that, traditional music was rife with murder ballads. Your grandparents were more f'd up than black and white movies pretended.

Well, there is this
nightofthehunter.jpg

But was not successful at the Box office. People were not quite ready for real dark.

But _Stagger Lee_ predated WWI for the Murder ballads and other predated the ACW
 
Maybe if you could get the influence of William S. Burroughs, specifically Naked Lunch, to infiltrate pop culture at an earlier date(OTL was 1959), it could give rise to something thematically similar to death metal. But for a 1950s deadline, you'd need the novel to come out earlier, and be more well-known to the general public, which might mean having to avoid the censorship controversies.

So, Burroughs publishes something like Naked Lunch a few years earlier, with the ejaculatiory asphyxiation and female-torsos-for-dinner scenes edited out or at least toned down. I think the actual sound of death metal is still be kind of hard to move back to the 1950s, though.
 
You can get an approximate if you avoid the "lightness", "joy" common to the Rock scene of the era. That does not refer to anything saccharine or weak. Metal has been an evolution towards the minimalist, like grinding a piece of steel like a sander, which music of the era was not. Even when it was heavy, it wasn't as heavy as death metal.
 
How would the vocals become popularized though? I listen to more deathcore and stuff, which is derived from death metal

How long have we as humans been making “metal screams”?
 
What, no mention of Screaming Lord Sutch?

He was doing 'Shock Rock' as early as 1964.. and you have to admit he was paving the ground for what came afterwards..

 
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