New York City metal icon Peter Steele, circa 2006. Steele passed away April 14, 2010, at the age of 48.
In the mid-’80s, New York City’s outer boroughs and Long Island were producing some of the most exciting hardcore and heavy metal bands in the world: Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, Crumbsuckers, Suffocation, Sick of it All, Agnostic Front, Warzone, Judge…
Perhaps the most exciting of them all, though, was Carnivore, the three-piece band fronted by Brooklyn garbage man Peter Steele—born Petrus T. Ratajczyk—which combined hardcore, metal, punk and hard rock to create songs of stunning impact and brutal nihilism. Steele’s voice was like nothing else in the scene. Where most metal bands were fronted by screechers, and most hardcore bands led by barkers, Steele was a basso with a rich croon that could be elevated to a pulse-quickening roar, and could be used to both comic and horrifying effects—oftentimes in the same song, sometimes in the same lyric. Carnivore’s songs, released on two classic albums (repacked as an essential single disc), were gratuitous, shocking—featuring titles like “God Is Dead,” “Jesus Hitler” and “Race War”—but also fist-in-the-air anthemic, sing-along catchy. They transcended their genre and their scene—no mean feat in a New York subculture that was often violently split among “skins” and “hairs”: hardcore enthusiasts and metal heads, respectively.
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Carnivore broke up after the release of their second album, 1987’s Retaliation, and soon afterward, Steele formed Type O Negative, which took the hook-heavy punk-metal of Carnivore and married it with goth and darkwave influences, and found a larger audience in the process. Not lost in the transition were Steele’s vitriolic, jaw-dropping, very funny lyrics. E.g., perhaps the most well-known Type O Negative song, “Unsuccessfully Coping With the Natural Beauty of Infidelity,” from the band’s 1991 debut, Slow Deep and Hard, offered a chorus that went, “I know you’re fucking someone else.” And it’s a hell of a song. Nearly 13 minutes long, it’s a grinding metal dirge with explosive melodies that borrow from, and mutilate, bubblegum pop.
Type O would cover artists like Seals & Crofts and Neil Young, and Steele himself loved the depressive autumnal folk of Red House Painters, and all those colorful tones (and many more) informed Type O’s magnificent, wholly unique sound.
At the center of it all, of course, was Steele’s unforgettable voice, one of the great wonders of heavy metal. The only real comparison is Glenn Danzig, though Steele’s dark, dry sense of humor draws a clear distinction between the two (Danzig is a ferocious vocalist but known to be a bit humorless). Furthermore, the diminutive Danzig would likely cower in the shadow of Steele, who stood a muscled 6-foot-7, tattooed, with waist-length hair. Many metal bands owe a sartorial debt to Vikings or medieval warriors, but the imposing Steele appeared to be a living, breathing reincarnation of those alpha men. (His looks did not go unnoticed by those outside the metal scene: Steele posed for Playgirl in 1995, reportedly unaware that the vast majority of the magazine’s readership was not women, a fact that supposedly embarrassed Steele when he learned of it, and prompted him to write the song “I Like Goils” in 2003, lest anyone get the wrong idea.)
Type O went on to release six studio albums after the stone classic Slow Deep and Hard, and Carnivore reformed in 2006. And always, from the very first moments of the very first Carnivore song, Steele continued to be one of heavy metal’s most beloved and iconic figures and a true New York giant.
Steele reportedly passed away late last night, April 14, 2010, of heart failure. He was 48 years old.
