All hail the Devil's Chord!

Tritone. The Devil’s Interval. Augmented fourth. It’s a musical interval that spans three whole tones and was known as diabolus in musica for much of the mid-section of the last millennium. The Church was nervous that it caused demonic ecstasies and banned it for a long time. Now it’s everywhere: Rush’s “YYZ,” Liszt’s “Dante Sonata,” most of King Crimson’s albums, West Side Story, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the theme music to the Simpsons. Appropriately, its most comfortable home is heavy metal. Metal-influence Jimi Hendrix used it in “Purple Haze,” Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath” (called the first modern metal song by a certain reader of this blog) is all over it, as is Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And I’m sure most of you know that Slayer even has an album called Diabolus in Musica. What does this all mean? Probably that Satan likes to rock out but isn’t too uppity to enjoy a good musical or classic science fiction film. What about the store? Well, even though we love the Taschen Icons: Devils book and the crazy Krampus postcard collection, Subterranean Books is not and never will be a Satanic bookstore…officially…yet.