Bizarre Musical Genres That Shouldn't Exist
Do you think you're a weird, esoteric little snowflake because you listen to folk metal or polka-rap? Please. Compared to some of the ridiculous musical styles out there, your tastes are no more left-field than the middle-aged dad down the road who hasn't listened to anything new since the Beatles broke up. Here are some of the most bizarre music genres yet invented, just in case you ever decide to become a TRUE weird music fan:
Danger Music
People love to call music like punk, metal, or whatever Limp Bizkit was supposed to be "dangerous," simply because it's loud and the kids (at one point) liked it. But not a single one of those audio scapegoats can compete with "danger music:" tunage so potentially damaging, virtually none of it has ever been performed. Basically, the typical danger music piece is more evil prank than musical score, in that directs the performer to do something extremely harmful to themselves while performing the song. The tune "Music For A Revolution," for example, instructs us to play the song, and then to gouge out our own eyes five years later. And you thought "Stairway To Heaven" built slowly to its climax.
Other "songs" include the performer throwing bombs into the audience, driving a bulldozer through the stage, screaming bloody murder indefinitely, or simply playing louder and louder until the audience literally poops themselves. This rarely happens though, as most danger music shows get cancelled before they start, for the same reason you'd cancel an organized public murder. Too bad, because we would've loved to see someone crawl inside a live whale's privates in the name of rock n' roll. (Yes, that's an actual Danger Music tune. You gotta hear the solo.)
Unblack Metal
Just about everyone knows what black metal is: screeching, distorted vocals, pounding, lightning-fast drums, super-loud guitars, amazing solos, and more Satan than Hell itself. Well now, meet unblack metal, which is everything we just mentioned, only now Satan has gotten behind us and we are embracing the Lord. Unblack metal artists play loud, angry, fast metal, oftentimes with indecipherable screaming or Cookie Monster growls in place of pretty singing, only their lyrics concern Jesus, Christianity, salvation, Revelations, being saved, and anything else that a church would hear and approve. Don't play Horde's "Invert The Inverted Cross," thinking you'd summon the devil or anything. Not with lyrics like "Christ stormed the gates of Hell / To take the keys thereof / Now the keys of death and Hades / Belong to the eternal one," anyway.
Depending on which band you talk to, unblack metal exists for one of two reasons. Some just plain like the music, while others feel they ARE Christ entering Hell, co-opting the evil music around them and defeating it within, armed with words of love. Because the very best way to praise the Lord is to do it so incoherently that the world's greatest codebreaker can't crack you, and so ear-splittingly loud that even the gods of another solar system could hear you.
Splittercore/Extratone
There comes a point where dance music just can't get any faster, right? Once it hits the human limit of being able to bounce to the beat without immediately toppling over like a drunken bridesmaid, that's got to be it, you'd think. Tell that to the Splittercore crowd, who regularly enjoy (we think) music that hits 600 beats per minute. For reference, one of the fastest Metallica songs of all-time, "Fight Fire With Fire," never rises above 180 beats per minute. And that's already near-impossible to mosh to, so imagine trying to do so when sped up three times over, and then some. As you might expect, the sound of 600 BPM is both incredibly angry and virtually atonal—the stupidly loud beats blend together so much, you're not so much dancing to music as you are to the sounds of war.
But hey, if splittercore is somehow too boring for you, there's always extratone, which is splittercore amped up to over one-thousand beats per minute. A thousand! That is somehow physically possible for a computer to create, despite sounding less like music and more like a swarm of angry rattlesnakes. There are videos of songs that claim to reach upward of 15,000 beats per minute too, but honestly? After the first couple thousand beats, it literally sounds the same. Could you tell the difference between 200-degree heat and 215? Probably not. Such is extratone versus extra-extratone.
Pirate Metal
The idea of singing about pirates is all well and good, but what if that's literally the only thing you sing about? That's pirate metal in a rum-soaked nutshell: power metal where every single song is from the perspective for a stereotypical, y'arr-matey pirate. They sing of wenches, rum, pillaging, death on the high seas, rum, war, rum, sailing, rum, peg-legs, rum, walking the plank, and beer, usually while dressed in their best Captain Jack Sparrow cosplay outfit. This is just in case you forgot that a band called the Skull Branded Pirates, singing about how awesome it is to be a pirate, might be acting like pirates.
This genre started almost by accident in 1987, when a band called Running Wild tired of their political messages going over everyone's head, and decided instead to write songs about history. The pirate stuff caught on best of all, and a movement was born. While their version of piracy and war was actually very accurate to how things really were back then, subsequent pirate bands like the SBP, Alestorm, and Swashbuckle have basically ignored that in favor of recreating the almost-entirely fictional brand of piracy that TV, movies, and novels have given us for decades. Which is fine, because you can sing more about rum that way.
Impossible Music (Black MIDI)
Impossible Music is exactly that: music that humans cannot physically perform unless fifty pianists come together to play fifty different parts of the same song at once. Otherwise, you pretty much need to plug the notes into a MIDI file and watch them come flying down. (The name "Black MIDI comes from how, if you wrote these songs with actual musical notation, there would be so many notes the paper would almost be pure black.)
The calmest sections of an Impossible Song might use a dozen keys at once, which is already barely possible for two hands to pull off (maybe with a tongue and a big toe to help along). Usually, however, you're using almost the entire keyboard at once, in a super-fast style that even the swiftest of human hands couldn't keep pace with for more than two seconds. The song "Bad Apple," for example, purports to use 8.49 million notes, which would be insane enough if the track were two years long. But they somehow stick all that into four and a half minutes. After three minutes, the sheer number of notes is such that it actually freezes the MIDI file (it's not your computer, don't smash it out of frustration). It's quite impressive, as far as musical genres go, but honestly? You'd get a more coherent, danceable tune by dropping 25 cats onto your piano and lacing the keys with catnip.