CANNIBAL CORPSE Bassist: Metalcore Bands Have Opened Doors For Death Metal Scene

Way Too Loud! recently conducted and interview with CANNIBAL CORPSE members Alex Webster and George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher during the Metal Blade 25th Anniversary Tour. A couple of excerpts follow:

Way Too Loud!: After Sounds Of The Underground, has anyone talked to you about doing any more support tours? I'd love to see that, where you scare the headliners!

Alex Webster: We've had a little bit of interest from some people, but nothing has panned out yet to anything that we've been supporting since then. We've done a few festivals in Europe, but other than that, we've been headlining since that tour. It does seem to open up some doors though, because some people have been talking to us about doing some things, where before, it was hard to get anybody even to think about having us open for them. It's been tough. If you look at our tour history, very rarely have we done supporting tours. There's probably been less than five tours where we were the support band, as opposed to being the headliner. Our first two tours that we did were headliners, so right off the bat we were headlining.

Way Too Loud!: Is there any chance with LAMB OF GOD? The reason why I'm asking is because they opened up for you in? Was it 2000?

Alex: 2001. LAMB OF GOD, DIMMU BORGIR and THE HAUNTED opened for us on a North American tour. I think except for THE HAUNTED, all those bands are bigger than us now, which is cool by us, and we would be happy to open for any band that's bigger than us, even if they haven't been around for long, just because you want to introduce your music to new fans and all that. LAMB OF GOD have asked about having us open for them, but the timing didn't work out. They were a band that did ask about it. I think it would be great! I would love to open for those guys. We really appreciate that they've had us in mind, even though the scheduling didn't work out in the past.

Way Too Loud!: From the appearance of things, metalcore seems to have helped out every kind of real metal there is. Do you guys think that you've benefitted from this?

Alex: Any kind of metal we support, even if we don't necessarily listen to it a whole lot. A lot of the metalcore bands are pretty good. I think they have enough of an element of death metal to them that they've helped attract fans to the death metal scene. Like if you have metalcore bands occasionally doing a tour with a death metal band, it's kind of a fan exchange, where the fans of one scene can learn about the music of another, and I think it's positive because those fans wouldn't have made death metal a first stop. It wouldn't have been their first choice to check out death metal, but once they've had a chance to see a band like us like at Sound Of The Underground or whatever, it got them more interested in death metal. If those bands didn't exist, then Sounds Of The Underground probably wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't have done that tour, so we wouldn't have had that chance. I definitely think that metalcore bands have probably opened some doors for the death metal scene, and maybe the black metal scene as well.

Way Too Loud!: That makes me wonder about something. Do you think now, even death metal bands themselves are changing. I think it was a guy from Vile who said he liked the music, but even though he was playing it, he never liked the lyrics, and he really wanted to go in a more positive direction. It almost seems like there's a couple, I guess it already has been done actually, death metal bands doing stuff that's positive, and in a different direction.

Alex: I guess if you look at bands like NAPALM DEATH, at one point those guys those guys sounded very much like a death metal band, and they still do have a lot of elements of death metal to their sound, even though most people would call them a grindcore band. Especially around "Harmony Corruption", they sounded very similar to death metal on some of their riffs, but they always had lyrics that were political, and some of them were proudly positive lyrics. I'm not that familiar with their stuff, but I know none of it was gore. I think the music and the lyrics can be separate, but in our opinion, if you ask any of the members in the band, we've always felt that really dark and negative lyrics were the way to go for the kind of music we're doing. It just seemed appropriate for the riffing style we have. The style of riffing is dark, aggressive and violent, and there's nothing else that we felt would fit well. The music and the lyrics had to be match, and to us, the music was violent, so the lyrics had to be violent. But if someone else wants to do it in a different way, that's fine. There's no rules in music. There might be some rules in death metal, on how you define it, and that's OK, but in general, if someone wants to take some sounds from death metal and us it for something, and try and make positive lyrics on top of it, we're not going to complain about that.

George: Some people feel, that somebody who is not a part of the scene, or who looks different that comes to shows, they feel that their… you know… Like most people would say "mall" kids or "mallcore" kids, or whatever you want to call them, they see those kids wearing their shirts, and they feel like the one band that hasn't sold out, that hasn't turned their back on their music is more popular, unfortunately they see that band as selling out. That's not our fault at all. We don't control who comes to our shows. We want everybody to come to our shows, we don't care if it's Joe Schmoe or some kid in a hospital. We have a very diverse audiences. I know that tonight we'll have a diverse audience, and of course part of that is because we have a diverse bill, there's bands that aren't pure death metal on this bill, but some people feel like their little thing has been taken away. It used to be SLAYER — nobody knew who they were, now SLAYER's huge! People feel betrayed by that. To me, I've always thought that if you're going to feel that way, then you should just listen to the band. If the band sounds like they've turned their back on you and you don't like them anymore, that's fine because everyone else likes them now. What I would always say about bands that I liked that were getting bigger, I started seeing more kids wearing their shirts, and I'd think "They stink now!" But people feel like their little things been taken away. I used to try and get all my friends to listen to KREATOR, because all my friends used to listen to BON JOVI and all this crap, and I was like "Listen to this! KREATOR!" Then a few of my friends would listen to it with me, and then more and more people started listening to it, and you want them to listen to it. Not me, but some people feel like their little things been taken away. You wanted everybody to love them — why don't you like this, it's the best thing ever? But when everybody else likes it, then it's not the best thing ever. We know a guy who likes only the band's first demo ever. "Only their first demo, the rest is shit!" (Laughs) C'mon, it's like dude, what are you talking about? It's ridiculous.

Read the entire interview at www.waytooloud.com.