Extreme Metal's Bankable Antics #1: To microplastic or not to microplastic?

 

How can one fight pollution with pollution? By way of capitalism, of course! In this blog series, I intend to discuss paradoxical or ironic situations within extreme metal culture which stem from the market pressures specific to that kind of music. This Cattle Decapitation piece of synthetic merchandise is a perfect example of that.

A few years ago, my significant other showed me a neat "all-over print" Cattle Decapitation shirt she had previously purchased. The shirt was designed after "The Anthropocene Extinction", an album graphically exploring the bleak results of human littering and pollution. She had regrets about buying it, not so much for the music it refers to (although we both have some qualms about that too!), but rather for the textile being polyester. She explained that synthetic clothes deteriorate with every wash and thus produce small plastic particles which then go in the water and pollute the oceans. Paradoxically, this was a case of a band calling out plastic pollution, yet actually contributing to microplastics in water in the process. How did we get there?

Cattle Decapitation started out in the late-1990s as an underground death metal band leaning towards goregrind. The first few releases had a poor sound quality in comparison with the band's current standard, and the old-school drumming was handled by Dave Astor of Pathology fame until their second Metal Blade release
Humanure (2004). Of that line-up, only Travis Ryan remains today as vocalist extraordinaire. In the first decade of this century, Cattle Decapitation made a name for itself among death metal fans, mostly due to their outrageous album covers and by openly stating their vegetarianism. While the music already had a unique manic edge, the band no doubt was building on a provocative brand to market themselves. 

The 2009 landmark album The Harvest Floor saw Cattle Decapitation's first experimentation with the creepy melodic vocals that the band is known for. Artistically, the band also took numerous risks such as producing with Billy Anderson, who typically engineers sludge or experimental albums rather than death metal. Various vocal and instrumental contributions from guest artists also color the otherwise very brutal songs on the record. For all these reasons, I still value The Harvest Floor as Cattle Decapitation's ultimate musical achievement. With later albums, the band grew even more in popularity, embracing fully the melodic screeches into choruses, throwing more black metal riffs in the equation and fattening their sound with Dave Otero producing their albums.

But looking back in time, the early 2000s were crucial in cementing the band's business model, Cattle Decapitation as a cultural product. It was a decade of massive touring packages where death metal and metalcore/hardcore subgenres co-existed. Of this essentially North American phenomenon, a strong catalytic event was no doubt the Summer Slaughter Tour. Cattle Decapitation notably was part of the very first 2007 bill, along with other bands who would then be either labeled or perceived as belonging to the "core" scene (Ion Dissonance, Beneath the Massacre, The Faceless, etc.). Like The Black Dahlia Murder, who headlined the 2008 European edition of the Summer Slaughter, Cattle Decapitation would continue to tour and evolve within this younger market where bands had tons of flashy merchandise designs to sell. If one did not bother to listen to Cattle Decapitation's music, the band could fool them into thinking they were playing deathcore based solely on their marketing strategies.

At this point, Cattle Decapitation has released 8 albums on Metal Blade Records, the biggest in the game in America. The band has put out hundreds of merch designs and sold immeasurable amounts of it online and at shows. The vast majority of their merchandising is likely handled by the label in collaboration with Indie Merch Store, with little direct involvement from the band members. While I don't doubt that the band does indeed contribute merchandise ideas, my strong guess is that the "all-over" shirts were a Metal Blade initiative (I've seen some for Behemoth too, for instance). Whoever did it, it's clear that Cattle Decapitation merchandise sells, and that this operation is far removed from the artistic process and message behind the music. 

Just like punk when it became popular, Cattle Decapitation is somewhat victim of its success by the inherent paradox created. A band with an environmental message cannot sustain any degree of concrete activism while also engaging in the very materialistic metal business. Indeed, being successful as a band almost fatally involves an insane amount of plane tickets, jewel cases, laser discs, single-use water bottles and "stuff" with bloody logos on it. In this sense, a synthetic T-shirt calling out microplastic pollution is an unsurprising turn of events. It tells more about the incredible market pressures that famous bands go through, increasingly delegating the business aspect until at least some of it becomes out of their hands. If anyone was to ever realize the absurdity of the shirt design in question, it would have been Travis Ryan or Josh Elmore. I wonder if the contradiction was ever brought to their attention.

On that note, I leave you with the very promising "We Eat Our Young" from the upcoming Terrasite album. How timely!