The scream of the crop

The origin of the ''tortured throat scream" or ''angry hell voice" is as hotly contested as anything else in the history of heavy metal.

Does it derive from the ''death grunt" -- the subhuman ultra-low-frequency belch developed by Florida bands such as Death and Morbid Angel in the mid-'80s? Or is it an importation from hardcore punk, whose unskilled ragings were funneled into metal by Metallica, Slayer, and their brethren?

On these matters there will never be tribal accord.

What is beyond dispute is that the scream is now part of metal's official language. For the modern metal vocalist, the ability to scream like a fiend night after night is just part of the job. And so we come to ''The Zen of Screaming" (Loudmouth), an instructional DVD for ''extreme singers" presented by voice coach Melissa Cross. Her clients are the cream of the scream scene: Lamb of God, God Forbid, Shadows Fall, All That Remains . . . Even the maverick Andrew W.K., whose thunderous party music sounds like ''Bohemian Rhapsody" performed by British skinheads, is a devoted follower of Cross.

''Don't you want to be the best you can possibly be?!" he roars at the camera. ''Wouldn't you do whatever you possibly could to improve your voice, to improve your screaming?!"

Testimonials from satisfied customers are an important part of this product: Intercut with the lessons are a series of gruff encomiums (''She's a genius, man . . . a vocal genius") from today's hardest-working screamers, worn out and wild-eyed young men, greasy with road-funk, filmed backstage or on the tour bus or -- in the case of Mike Ski from the A.K.A.'s -- hunched in a small padded van. You can smell the sweat.

In 50 years, students of metal will be able to watch ''The Zen of Screaming" for a precise understanding of the currently prevailing conditions.

''You have to have control of your pipes at all times," glowers God Forbid vocalist Byron Davis, '''cause that's your livelihood, and if you don't, it's gonna show. Doin' this [expletive] every day, playin' shows every day, if your technique is wack, you're not gonna have the endurance."

''For a long time," Ian Christe, author of ''Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal," says via e-mail, ''screams were a generational thing that split the newer bands from the old-timers like Dio or Judas Priest who sounded like opera singers."

Opera is not the word that would be invoked to describe today's screamers. Indeed, on the DVD, Freddy Cricien of New York's Madball declares, ''We're no Pavarottis," with a mix of defiance and rue. (The meekness of the huge-armed Cricien before the petite Cross is one of the DVD's highlights.)

But contained within the scream is an ideal of total expression, total authenticity, that comes more from punk rock and hardcore than from metal. Pantera's bazooka-throated Philip Anselmo, who in the '90s took the scream out from the underground and into stadiums, was more often compared with Black Flag-era Henry Rollins than he was to the breast beaters of the old school. Heavy metal had changed: The singer's job was no longer to raise the rippling flag of his voice over a war-torn medieval landscape, like Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, but to tell you extremely urgent things about himself, his mind, his pressing need to beat you up.

And yet the scream has its own virtuosity: Anselmo's remains the gold standard, a flayed roar, almost chordal at moments, in which words are somehow distinctly enunciated and melodies carried. In the Anselmo-scream, the metalhead's urge to disappear into the textures of his music, to be consumed with heaviness until all he can do is belch pure noise, met the bark of hardcore's self-affirmation cult.

All of this is present in Cross's pupils, and she -- a small, red-haired woman dressed in flower-patterned silks -- seems to understand the tradition that she is working in. She has grasped that the primary interest of the screamers is not technique but its absence. So she bases her teaching method not on the application of lessons, but on the removal of barriers.

''I'm not your mother," she warns, ''and I don't have a bunch of rules about singing and screaming. . . . What I've got for you is a way to be in the moment with your voice."

Singing is singing, of course, and even the gruffest metalhead must warm up his pipes with an exercise called French Doorbell. Still, Cross's emphasis is on ''being who you are."

To this end, she has evolved her own jargon. Students are encouraged to sing ''above the pencil," with an imaginary pencil in the mouth, using the bones of the face and skull as a reverb chamber. (Randall Blythe, of Lamb of God, complains that a humming exercise is making his ears itch. ''That's good!" says Cross.) She teaches them the ''by-the-way" breath, a quick sip of air (as opposed to a huge, drawling gasp) to keep the lungs -- those bellows of metal fire -- topped up.

She also distinguishes between ''heat," which is putting ''a bit of a crunch" on a note, and ''fire," which is the shaggy, atonal blurt much used by, say, Slipknot. And when necessary, she deploys common sense: ''If you're hoarse, you need to shut up." For the screamers, it seems to work like a charm. ''Ever since she told me how to do it right," testifies Phil Labonte from All That Remains, ''I haven't lost my voice ever."

So now they can do it night after night -- but how long will their services be required? Might we soon tire of the scream? Albert Mudrian, author of ''Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore" and editor in chief of Decibel magazine, has detected the beginnings of scream-assimilation.

''Across the board," says Mudrian, ''there's a lot more screaming than there used to be. The interesting thing is that you can now hear it in pop songs. It's fairly common -- in half of the verse, or the bridge, there'll be some dude just lettin' it rip! So the scream has permeated the culture to that extent."

The wheel turns, and the vast natural cycle of heavy metal throws up its phenomena. A return to more overtly ''technical" singing may be overdue: Look for ''The Zen of Long, High Notes" somewhere around 2008.