But Steele didn’t care about the death metal part he just wanted the doom. The genre was a self-serious mashup of death metal and doom that left little room for outsized personalities like Steele. Goth metal, then still in its infancy, was made popular in the early ’90s by “The Peaceville Three,” which included My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema, all from Northern England. In that same interview, he reveals that the song has some verisimilitude: “It’s about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over,” a reference to his 1989 suicide attempt. But Steele made an industry of synthesizing the ironic with the sublimely earnest. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is a send-up of the goth-girl archetype (”She’s got a date at midnight with Nosferatu/Oh, baby, Lily Munster ain’t got nothing on you”), the title referring to the only thing a Little Miss Scare-All could ever truly fear: the roots of her hair showing. The vampire of South Brooklyn, who shoveled shit between band practices, cut both a relatable and controversial figure. It was, he later told an interviewer for the deluxe reissue of his band Type O Negative’s landmark third album, Bloody Kisses, about “the ultimate goth girl” who was “in love with herself.” And for three hours, while sitting in traffic waiting to unload a truckful of excrement, he composed a song in his head. He was an archetype for the brooding, hypermasculine metalhead that crawled out of the primordial ooze. Steele looked like a more Nordic Undertaker, or Glenn Danzig but a foot taller.
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