Remembering Chuck Schuldiner

Ten years ago death metal pioneer Chuck Schuldiner lost his battle with cancer. As the fervor surrounding recent Death and Control Denied reissues clearly demonstrates, the man’s legacy has only continued to grow in the intervening years.

There are several great remembrances floating around today — I particularly recommend NPR’s “Death is Never Finished” and this Sunyata post on Death live at Coney Island High in 1998 — but Decibel has a long history of honoring Schuldiner as well, from Chris Dick’s uber-excellent oral history of Death and our Death tribute T-shirt to the historical context of Schuldiner’s contributions laid out in Editor-in-Chief Albert Mudrian’s landmark Choosing Death.

Perhaps Chuck himself summed his own life up best, however, during the intro to “Symbolic” below — a song “about life,” Schuldiner explained — at a Los Angeles show many years ago now: “We’re a bunch of stubborn fucking bastards and I’ll tell you what — you can’t kill metal!” RIP!