“The Philosopher”

Paul Masvidal is driving when he sees the lights blinking in an empty lot. 

Something about it feels off. 

Beside him in the car is Death guitarist and frontman, Chuck Schuldiner.

They’re driving around after rehearsals, looking for something to eat. Chuck’s been sleeping on Paul’s couch during the sessions. 

They’re still mulling over a name for the record they’ve been rehearsing.

The car slows as they approach the strange, blinking lights.

They pull over and step out. They’re not ready for the scene in front of them.

A motorcycle accident. 

The woman’s already dead. The man’s only half-alive.

Nobody has a phone. The others at the scene go to find a payphone. Chuck and Paul stay. 

The two of them alone in the dark with the bodies.

Chuck suddenly knows what to call the album.

Human.

Death’s debut, Scream Bloody Gore, had been built on exactly this kind of imagery… Dismemberment, rotting bodies… Gore for gore’s sake. 

Chuck had written most of it at 17. Shock music. Designed to disturb and provoke.

Human was a different animal.

The concept of “death” stopped being abstract to Chuck when his older brother Frank died. Chuck was just nine at the time.

Chuck spent the next decade writing about corpses and carnage. Literally creating a metal subgenre based on the unique sounds and growls he and his band were making.

And Chuck was not one to remain static. 

Death’s second and third albums, Leprosy (1988) and Spiritual Healing (1990) were massive leaps forward sonically from their predecessor. 

He was already moving far from the genre he had birthed and defined.

By 1991, he was ready to take that evolution even further. 

It’s unclear whether Chuck know that Paul Masvidal, the guitarist standing beside him at the accident, was gay.

It would be years before Masvidal came out publicly. 

But it’s unlikely the Cynic guitarist had missed the lyrics, “I celebrate a faggot’s death”, on Death’s debut album, Scream Bloody Gore. 

Lyrics that Chuck would later admit were embarrassing and provocative for the sake of it.

The fact that Chuck was sleeping on Masvidal’s couch during the Human sessions says a lot about these two men. Their respect for each other as musicians, sure. Perhaps something more than that.

As they stood together, watching a stranger die, Chuck knew he wasn’t writing about death as a spectacle anymore. 

He was writing about what it meant to be alive. To be human.

In 1991, Chuck recruited Cynic guitarist Paul Masvidal and drummer Sean Reinert for the recording of Death’s follow-up to Spiritual Healing (1990).

Masvidal and Chuck had been pen pals since before the recording of Scream Bloody Gore. 

Masvidal had even skipped his own high school graduation to fill in for Chuck on a Mexican tour and had done European dates during Spiritual Healing. 

Most importantly, Chuck trusted him:

Chuck was open in ways that surprised people. While the death metal scene demanded black leather and a specific kind of menace, Chuck actively pushed back. 

The lineup he assembled, Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert from Cynic (on guitar and drums, respectively) and Steve DiGiorgio on fretless bass, gave Human a quality none of Death's previous records had. 

Paul and Sean would show up to rehearsals in white or neon t-shirts and headbands. According to Masvidal, Chuck “encouraged the hell out of that.” 

He wanted musicians who weren’t pigeonholed. People who could help him become something the scene hadn't seen yet.

Human was released in October 1991.

Then Masvidal and Reinert went back to Cynic.

But their departure seems to have tweaked a nerve.

Something in Chuck curdled.

Chuck began writing the follow-up to Human.

This album, Individual Thought Patterns, would be released in 1993. 

He’d recruited a new lineup: Gene Hoglan from Dark Angel on drums and Andy LaRocque from King Diamond on lead guitar (the latter flew in specifically for his solo parts, having barely heard the songs before he arrived.)

The mood was different to Human. That album had been driven by vindication: revenge on bandmates who'd played Europe without Chuck during the Spiritual Healing tour. 

Individual Thought Patterns was driven by something darker. 

Two disastrous tours in a row. A series of unstable lineups. A developing reputation for abandoning tours midway.

Chuck felt cornered. 

But he decided to steer into the skid and make the album he wanted to make.

Half the record, he told Terrorizer magazine, was a concept about “people that I have to deal with” in the music business. People he called “pure evil.” 

He didn't name names. 

The album’s closing track, “The Philosopher”, opens with a twisting, tapped lead. It’s a reflective lick that establishes the song’s “pensive” mood from the outset.

Tasteful drum fills complement these intro notes. Gene Hoglan has some of the most precise drumming in metal (hence his nickname, “The Atomic Clock”.) This tight precision throughout “The Philosopher” gives the other musicians space to experiment inside the song.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the song’s basslines. 

Steve DiGiorgio’s fretless performance on the song is show-stealing. The bass lurches, rumbles and growls beneath the vocal and guitar lines, adding an extra layer of musicality, groove and “jazziness” to the song. It becomes an additional voice in the song, perhaps that of the eponymous philosopher, slinking in and out, attempting to pontificate over Chuck’s growls.

The song opens with the question of reality versus perceived reality. 

Chuck asks the philosopher if he feels what Chuck feels, sees what Chuck sees?

If the philosopher thinks that his experience and his thoughts are the same as Chuck’s, he’s living in a “dream world”, not reality.

Chuck has nothing but contempt for this figure:

Things get even more personal in the second verse: 

For years, that lyric was read as an attack against religious hypocrites. Televangelists. The pseudo-intellectual death metal critics Chuck had grown to despise. 

But in an interview with Terrorizer, he described “The Philosopher” as being about the “pure evil” he saw in certain people from his professional life.

He was careful not to point a finger.

It wasn’t until years later that the suspicions held by the metal underground were confirmed.

“The Philosopher” was about Paul Masvidal.

Masvidal denied it for years.

Rumours circulated from the moment the album dropped in 1993, prompted by Chuck’s aforementioned Terrorizer interview. Chuck was bitter that Masvidal (and Sean Reinert) had abandoned Death for their own band, Cynic.

Matt Harvey (frontman of Gruesome) even described the song as a “documented ‘call out’” that Schuldiner wrote specifically about his former guitarist. 

For nearly a decade, Masvidal denied it publicly. 

Then he came out.

Not long after, Sean Reinert came out too.

The lyric became undeniably specific. 

Chuck had written it in 1993.

But Paul hadn't come out publicly until 2014… 21 years after the album was released.

Which means Chuck was the first to “out” him.

The man who encouraged Paul to “be himself” and wear white or multicoloured t-shirts when the whole scene demanded black leather… the man who felt regrets over his earlier, "provocative" homophobic slurs…

That same man weaponised Paul’s sexuality for revenge.

Chuck was in a paranoid spiral. Burned by his manager, cornered by the press, convinced that everyone he surrounded himself with was “pure evil”. 

He was lashing out at anyone he felt had wronged him or diminished him. Paul’s decision to frame himself as someone merely “loaning his services” seems to have landed as a betrayal. 

As if Paul was denying that what they'd built together had meant anything.

Chuck felt things intensely. That’s what made him such a successful artist. But he also used his art as a way to express and channel these feelings back into the world.

Paul Masvidal would go on to describe Chuck as “an older brother.” He joined the “Death to All” tribute tours, which featured a rotating line-up of ex-Death members and special guests performing Death classics.

As recently as 2025, Paul would continue to describe Chuck as “a true embodiment of an artist just trying to work through shit”, a vessel for something larger than himself, processing pain the only way he knew how (Into the Void: Life, Death and Heavy Metal, episode 4).

That doesn’t seem like the language of someone who felt permanently wronged.

It’s clear Chuck was always trying to turn pain into something.

He named his band after his dead brother. 

He stood over a dying stranger in the dark and named a record after his experience. 

He wrote this same record with two men whose sexuality he later weaponised.

Chuck was always processing pain. 

Sometimes he took the wrong approach.

The Human European tour with Masvidal and Reinert had ended in total chaos.

The manager stole the money, the band was stranded and Chuck was fighting with everybody. 

A promoter held their equipment hostage and wouldn’t release it until someone paid for the shows that never happened.

Paul had to call the promoter himself and explain that he and Sean were “not like really in the band.” 

The gear got released and shipped to Chuck’s warehouse in Orlando. 

The last time Paul and Sean saw Chuck Schuldiner was when they drove up to collect their things.

Two years later, Individual Thought Patterns was released. 

The closing track, “The Philosopher”, fades out, pointing toward something unresolved.

The Father of Death Metal died a few years later, just 34 years old, broke and without health insurance.

He spent his final years fighting an insurance company that decided his brain tumour was a pre-existing condition. 

Begging for treatments. Fundraising to stay alive.

“The Philosopher” stayed on Death’s setlist until the end. 

He was vague in interviews about the song’s subject matter. 

He almost never spoke about it.

Neither did Paul.

A final note. At the beginning of this piece, I touched on the death of Frank Schuldiner, Chuck’s older brother.

Chuck never got over being “abandoned” by his brother. It’s the reason he messed up so many European tours… he simply hated being away from his family for too long.

He felt this same abandonment after Masvidal and Reinert “abandoned” Death to go back to their own band, Cynic. 

And so he lashed out. 

Most people see Chuck as this progressive, forward-thinking metal visionary. The true “Philosopher”. 

And he was.

But he too had his flaws. 

Until next time.

Horns up 🤘

Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media