The Wall Street Journal has an article today titled "Cookie Monsters of Death-Metal Music" by Jim Fusilli, which is about how a certain style of death metal vocalizing is actually called "Cookie Monster" vocals! "We have nothing to do with it," the article quotes Ellen Lewis, vice president of corporate communications at Sesame Workshop. "What is it?" You know you have a good VP of corporate communications when they immediately distance themselves from anything associated with death metal!

The article continues:

To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner [Vice President of Roadrunner Records], who signed some of the sub-genre's biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, "it's got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they're gargling glass."

And:

The term is considered derogatory by some metal fans, but it's an apt description. Issued like machine-gun fire, death-metal vocals are low, guttural and aggressive, with no subtlety, no melody and very little modulation. But unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally frenetic Cookie Monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled soul, as if they were the narrator's voice on a tour of Dante's seventh circle of hell.

I can't link to the article because WSJ content is pay-only. I just imagine a bunch of scary-looking death metal singers with cookies spraying out the sides of their mouth, also like Cookie Monster. This renews my interest in reading Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore by Albert Mudrian and John Peel (Feral House). American Hardcore and Lexicon Devil look good too.