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I'm just a (brutal death metal) girl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oXn9aVkBlo

. . .

The vocal cover is one of YouTube’s strangest phenomenons. Why people would want to post videos of themselves essentially doing karaoke is beyond me, as karaoke is embarrassing even under great inebriation. But, no, sober people vocalize, record, and upload without shame. Such is life.

One subset of vocal covers, however, is charming: little girl/young woman doing scary death metal vocals. I won’t post multiple videos of that; you can waste that time on your own. However, I will post one video above that I stumbled across that made me feel strangely better about the world.

It’s a compilation by SmooneGrri, an 18 year-old girl in the Netherlands. (She’s posted a bunch of vocal covers in full, but the compilation, which is entertaining and well-edited, is really all you need to see.) She’s been doing death metal-style vocals for two years now, and is self-taught. Here’s the track list of songs she’s covering:


Waking The Cadaver – Terminate with Extreme Prejudice
Torsofuck – Pussy Mutilation
Dying Fetus – Epidemic of Hate
Devourment – Babykiller
Necroblaspheme – Sanctified in Nonsense
Begging For Incest – Postmortem Facefuck
Implosive Disgorgence – Chapter 2
Suffocate Bastard – All Humanity Lost
Misericordiam – Obsessive Compulsive

I wonder how she’s negotiating the obvious gender issues at play.

She’s covering brutal/slam death metal, with which I’m only tangentially familiar. I don’t care for the music — those are some awful, awful band names/song titles — but what draws me to this video is that this girl is making truly disgusting sounds with her voice. She can’t possibly have social reinforcement for sounding like Regan from The Exorcist. (If only that were the next teen trend.) So she’s discovered this extremely male-dominated, often misogynistic music on her own, and wants to make her mark in it. (I’m sure there are parallels in gangsta rap.)  Strange, but kind of cool.

She’s looking for a band.  Her contact info is on her YouTube page.

— Cosmo Lee