Chuck Schuldiner: "I hate categories, categories suck".

Interview: Viva 2 / Germany
Article: Video Interview with Death
Conducted by: Virus (Metal TV broadcast)
Transcribed by: EmptyWords
Published: fall 1998

PART I

Chuck - I hate categories, categories suck. You know, categories are okay if you go to the grocery store and you want to go to the vegetable departement and the meat departement but for music… you know metal is metal, and all those categories screwed a lot of people up because it, it like, made people kinda scared to listen to a certain type of metal because they heard rumors about that kind of metal. If you’re metal you’re metal. If you have long hair, you sweat your ass off, you play fast, melodic, guess what, you’re metal. And some people are scared to admit that, at least in America especially they’re scared of that term “heavy metal”. But for us we all grew up on heavy metal. We all grew up on Metallica and Iron Maiden and Slayer and Raven, Exciter and Judas Priest, Kiss, Sabbath.

Part II

Chuck - I think it’s good to catch people off guard. You know it’s good to be unpredictable. Life’s too predictable sometimes. It’s nice when all of a sudden you hear out of nowhere that a band’s getting back together. You know, as a fan I was thrilled to hear Kiss was getting back together. Not that we’re Kiss, but you know to fans, a fan is a fan and I think it’s great that people are like wow, you know, Death is getting back together, and blablabla, and there’s a lot of rumors and talk about it, and it made for good hype, you know, a lot of people were surprised and it just worked out that way. It wasn’t something I planned it was something that felt right at the time.