What Eighties Thrash Metal Taught Me About Creativity
When I was thirteen I discovered Heavy Metal. This is the story of how one song changed everything I thought I knew about generating ideas.
It was 1988 and I was 14 years old. The majority of the kids at school were listening to techno and acid house. It wasn’t that I hated the music necessarily but just that I had a strong reaction against whatever the “cool kids” were into. That reaction took the form of me getting into Heavy Metal. In a big way. I grew my hair, bought a denim jacket and asked my mum to sew a bunch of patches onto it. It looked a bit like this.
I’m not quite sure what the rest of the congregation thought when I wore this as I sat in the front row of church every Sunday but hey, I’d found the thing that I was “into”.
This was obviously back in the days before the internet. No Rdio. No Spotify. No instant downloads. When we wanted to check out new music, we swapped records. Myself and the other 2 or 3 Metal fans would trade LPs at school, carrying plastic bags sized for 12" albums. Skulking around with those felt like wearing a badge on honor. We liked the fact that we were different. Indeed, I remember one day the headmaster came into our 5th year common room one day to castigate us for our behavior and made special mention (while looking me directly in the eye) that some of our appearances were a disgrace. I knew I must have been doing something right.
I had always been into drawing and our Art classes were the happiest times at school. I knew I wanted to do something creatively. I figured I could maybe do album cover art but I knew I wasn’t technically gifted enough to be the next Roger Dean or Derek Riggs. But I had the things that I was good at and I stuck to them.
Saturday mornings were always the same. We would take the short bus ride into the next town to visit the local record store. Back then there was really no way to know exactly what new music would be the best bet. There was a weekly Metal magazine and the short reviews in there were something to go on. But ultimately decisions on what albums to buy were generally taken based on three criteria:
- How cool was the album cover art.
- How cool were the song titles.
- How cool did the band look on the back.
Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” emphatically ranked as “very cool” in all three of those categories.
This was the first time I’d ever looked at an album cover and actually felt physical repulsion. It was incredibly powerful.
So was the music. I had walked out of Stereo One that day with a truly groundbreaking album. One that pushed the boundaries of what music could be. It was astonishing. Listening to that album coincided with a point in my life where I was really questioning what I wanted to do with my life. When the inevitable “what to you want to do when you grow up?” questions were asked I always had had an answer. “Architect”. “Draughtsman”. “Artist”. I was a hair’s breadth away from leaving school and actually being “grown up”. Now that the time was upon me, I wasn’t so sure. I had toyed with the idea of further education in English and History and maybe even Political Science. I didn’t know it then but the reason for my slump was that I had been living off my reserves. I had found my comfort zone creatively and was happy to stay there. With that, however, came similar looking work and few new ideas. It had become boring and stale.
I dropped the needle on the vinyl and listened to the whole album from start to finish. It only took 29 minutes to blaze through all 10 tracks. It was completely brutal yet melodic and I hadn’t heard anything with the same amount of polish that Rick Rubin brought to the production.
I could go on all day about how Reign In Blood made me feel, inspired me and generally made me sit up and think. But there was one track in particular that really made me understand what I needed to shake me from my creative lethargy.
Track 10.
The last track on the album. “Raining Blood”. This track in particular captures the spirit of the entire record.
The song lasts 4 minutes and 14 seconds. Subtract the spooky sounding thunder and lightning sound effects at the start and the finish, you are left with 2 minutes and 50 seconds of music. Contained within that time you have:
- 4 verses
- 5 tempo changes
- 8 different riffs
- And one….truly f͈͉̬a͓ͅc̡̥̭͉̜͢͝e͏͔̣͔ ̴̶͍͕͍̠̙ͅm̷̬͉̙͡e͚̪͠l̛̗̲͈͍̤̹͚̲t̩̯͉̠̲̙i̢̥͓̝͖͇͎̭̪n͍͘ͅg҉̛͈̳͙͙͘ guitar solo
That’s a lot of ideas to fit into less than 3 minutes. That’s enough ideas to fill half an album if you decided to stretch them out. In fact, if you were Metallica, you probably did.
What struck me about the construction of this song was how the songwriters had poured absolutely everything they had into those 3 minutes, Every idea they had was utilized and burned through in the blink of an eye. They were all great ideas, which could have justifiably been saved and revisited and recycled for later songs. But they didn’t. Every amazing riff, line, tempo change and note sequence was dropped into one song.
When they generated ideas, they used them and gave them away. They didn’t pick away at them until there was nothing left. As they used those ideas up they were forced to generate new ones. The result was an album that defined a genre of music and provided a base from which pretty much every speed/thrash/death metal band has been built on.
This is was an incredibly powerful concept. The creative staleness I had been feeling was because I had been riffing on an idea ad infinitum. I had taken the core of an idea and watered it down into endless variations on a theme. I needed to let go of those ideas in order to be forced to generate new ones. I believe this is where true innovation comes from. Sometimes the forest needs to be burned to the ground so that new life can grow. Each time I feel like I have hit a creative wall I ask myself what Slayer would do. Generally the answer to pushing through the block is letting go of an idea that I am holding on to that just doesn’t work. When I let that go I can feel free to re-imagine and regenerate and push some boundaries in the same manner that those 4 guys from the Bay Area did.
