Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity

Album: Slow, Deep And Hard (1991)
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Songfacts®:

  • Rarely does a title explain the meaning of a song as well as this one. Type O Negative lead singer Peter Steele wrote it about his longtime girlfriend who he found out was cheating on him. He didn't handle it well, and in this song, he lashes out.
  • "Unsuccessfully Coping..." is the first song on Slow, Deep And Hard, the debut album by Type O Negative, a New York City band that was led by the 6' 8" Steele until 2010, when he died of heart failure at 48. At the time, they were more hardcore than goth, with Steele doing a lot of screaming. They also had day jobs, which they quit when their 1993 album Bloody Kisses, with more melody and less screamo, put them on the map.

    Before forming the band, Steele was in a hardcore metal band called Carnivore.
  • The song runs 12:39 and is broken into three sections. A version edited to 6:41 was released as a single. It's not even close the strangest song on the album: "The Misinterpretation Of Silence And Its Disastrous Consequences" is 64 seconds of tape hiss at very low volume. The band wanted listeners to turn it up and then get blasted by the next song.

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