Yeah, I know.  It took me a long time to come to the point.  But if I’d tried to put all this into one long post, you’d have gone back to the bong, that six-pack of PBR, or the latest episode of Metalocalypse before finishing.  If you’ve stumbled on this site for the first time today, what follows will make (slightly) more sense if you read Part 1 and Part 2.

Just about anything packaged that you buy to eat or drink comes with a label that identifies the ingredients.  Often, one of the components will be vaguely described as “natural flavors” or “artificial flavor.”  Turns out there are companies you’ve never heard of that generate mountainous piles of cash manufacturing flavor additives for food and beverage makers. Some of those flavor additives are made using natural ingredients and some are synthesized from stuff you would never think of putting in your mouth. Those companies are constantly searching for new flavors that might become a hit with consumers and sometimes all they try to do is mimic flavors that have already become a hit. They identify chemical compounds that when mixed together in the right formula produce a taste that people already like and will keep buying — at least til they get tired of it.

My favorite example from the New Yorker article that prompted these posts is the flavor company that was being paid to analyze dips made from natural ingredients and then develop chemical compounds that could be injected into a “slurry” of starch, oil, and salt to create stuff that tastes (for example) like guacamole. Or the makers of energy drinks trying to capitalize on the popularity of Red Bull by having the flavorists intentionally make their shit taste bad, because that’s what consumers have been conditioned to believe energy drinks are supposed to taste like.  So what does this have to do with metal?

Well, what happens in the world of flavoring also happens throughout our consumer-driven culture, including even extreme metal.  There are more extreme metal bands churning out music today than I can ever remember.  But a lot of those bands are just slurry.  They latch on to some popular style — the easier to play, the better (e.g., deathcore) — they figure out the formula, and they crank out some tunes to stick up on MySpace. As in all things, it’s easier to copy than to create, easier to ride on the backs of the herd in whatever direction the herd is heading than to go your own way. Amazingly, some of these bands actually develop a following and get signed to some label.  Sooner or later, most of them will sink beneath the waves like weighted corpses.

Some bands have got a little more talent than the slurry, plus the smarts to realize that “growth” or “evolution” in their music is necessary to make them stand out from the crowd and save them from oblivion.  So they tweak their sound by adding some new components to their formula.  Problem is, those new components often sound exactly like what they are — forced and artificial, tweaking for the sake of tweaking, mixing and matching known flavors in an effort to come up with something that tastes different.

And then there are the true innovators, the ones that really deserve to be called artists, the bands that develop their own distinctive sound and style of playing, the ones that genuinely contribute something fresh to the musical landscape.  Even those true innovators are building on what others have previously done.  No shame in that.  Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”  That’s the kind of metal most of us are constantly looking for. We may have to wade through a sea of slurry to find it, but it’s a revelation when it comes.

In the first part of this post, courtesy of Raffi Khatchadourian’s article in The New Yorker, I introduced you to Givaudan, the biggest manufacturer of flavors and fragrances in the world.  (For those of you who already knew about Givaudan, hot shit!).  This company and others like it manufacture flavors for addition to processed food and beverages.  They are constantly searching for new flavors, mixing and matching the chemical building blocks of known tastes, as well as mimicking existing flavors that are proven favorites with the livestock consumers.  Take Red Bull and other energy drinks, for example.

People in the flavor business use the term “white spaces” as a label for combinations of flavor attributes that consumers enjoy but that aren’t available in an existing product.  Mr. Katchadourian writes:

Fewer and fewer beverage companies develop new flavors on their own, even as they are fiercely engaged in what can only be called The Great Flavor Rush.  The fight over white spaces in the supermarket aisles has grown so furious that grocery shelves are lined with bottles promoting baroque exoticism: energy drinks and waters laced with kiwi-dragonfruit, or hibiscus-orange, or jackfruit-guava, or agave-melon, or clove-cardamon-cinnamon.

Coming up with the next big thing – we all know that’s the grand prize in our consumer-driven culture.  But if you can’t pull that off, mimicking the current big thing is not bad for second place.  Wouldn’t you know it, those same rules hold true in the flavor bidness.  Mr. Katchadourian:

[Michelle] Hagen [of Givaudan] told me that her favorite white-space flavor – the one she wished she had created – was Red Bull, because it succeeded in getting consumers to embrace the surreal.  The co-founder of Red Bull, Dietrich Mateschitz, acknowledges that the company went out of its way to develop a flavor that was unorthodox.  (“Some people say medicine never tastes good,” he told me.  “You can translate this into our taste philosophy.”)  . . .

“Have you ever tasted such a crazy flavor?” Hagen said.  “What is it?  There is nothing like it, and every once in a while you come across a flavor that is not especially balanced but for some reason it takes off.”  Today, it is virtually impossible to market an energy drink that does not have the same unbalanced characteristics that Red Bull has.  “It scores terribly when you put it in front of consumers who don’t drink it as an energy drink,” a salesman for one of the top flavor houses told me.  “But the spiky note in there defines ‘energy.’  So when I build energy flavors with our client it has got to taste bad.  If you give the consumer a great-tasting orange flavor for an energy drink, their liking drops way down, because it doesn’t have that ‘energy note’ they expect.”

Well, you can probably see where I’m going with this, since the title of this post is “Metaphors.”  But as predictable as it may be, you’ll have to wait til tomorrow to see where we conclude.

I read shit most of you wouldn’t go near in a hazmat suit.  Don’t ask me why.  But every now and then I come across something that makes it worthwhile, and I’m here to share it with you.

Case in point:  The Nov 23 issue of The New Yorker includes an article by one Raffi Khatchadourian called “The Taste Makers.”  And he means that literally.  It focuses on a Swiss company (with at least one factory in the U.S.) called Givaudan — the largest manufacturer of flavors and fragrances in the world.  There’s so much fascinating shit in this article, I had a nut-busting time figuring out where to draw the line in sharing it with you.  But in this multi-part post, I’ll give you the highlights and explain what (in my twisted way of thinking) this has to do with extreme metal.

Givaudan generates nearly $4 billion of revenue per year, more than half of which comes from creating and selling flavor additives to manufacturers of processed food and drink (for example, Coke and Snapple).  The business is highly secretive, in large part because the manufacturers don’t want the livestock you to know that outside labs supply them with flavors for their products.

Part of what Givaudan does is to break natural flavors down into their molecular components and then mix and match them to create new flavors that can then become the foundation of new beverages or foods.  (Wait til you hear about Red Bull and almost all other “energy” drinks in Part 2 of this post!)

Givaudan also creates artificial flavors that closely resemble the flavors of natural products such as lemons. Or vanilla.  Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor and that thousands of tons of vanillin (the chemical compound that’s the primary extract from the vanilla bean) are synthesized from industrial petrochemicals and waste from the production of wood pulp?  Did you know, as Japanese scientists have shown, that it’s even possible to extract vanillin from cow dung? Now you do.  You’re welcome.

As Mr. Khatchadourian writes:

Givaudan’s many scientists often refer to food as “the application,” as if it were composed of malleable lines of computer code; from this perspective, adding a flavor is as simple as updating software. . . .  “Most of the food-and-beverage companies have become marketing-and-distribution companies,” a flavor company executive told me, only somewhat in jest.  I understood what he meant when, in one of his laboratories, I saw a number of his colleagues working on a tasteless “slurry,” consisting largely of starch, oil, and salt, which a client was hoping to transform into a marketable product.  The client had asked the flavor company’s in-house chef to develop various dips, such as guacamole, using fresh ingredients; after settling on the best recipes, the company’s flavorists mimicked them chemically, with an eye toward injecting the flavor compounds into the slurry in the most stable and cost-effective way.

Yum yum.  Dig in!

More of this fascinating shit tomorrow, and then we can talk about why – in addition to being bat-shit scary — it’s a good metaphor for a lot of “manufactured” metal music (among other things).