There's 'Metal' and there's 'Metal' and the 'Metal' scene is fucked: Part 2

Part Two: The Bands

It seems that the last post in this blog got 600% more readers in a day than anything else I have written since July. Some agreed with what I said and some didn't and some people really got their knickers in a twist about it.
I guess that is exactly what I hoped for by writing these pieces. At the very least to voice my opinion and provoke thought and discussion in others.

Todays piece is slightly different and is focusing on "the bands" and the fans relationship with them. Despite the metal scene seeming stronger than ever it is still a bit fucked.

We, as music fans are now luckier than ever to have the widest possible choice of music and bands available to us twenty four hours a day and at the click of a button.
It's a whole new world compared to what some of us grew up with and far from having to hunt out new and interesting bands in many ways we are now bombarded with new bands to try to get into or to give a fair listen but its getting harder and harder to see the forest for the trees.

When I was first getting into music of my own (as opposed to having music thrust upon me by my father, Dire Straits mostly) I felt like I had entered a new and exciting place and the currency in this foreign land was the cassette.
The cassette was probably one of the greatest inventions of all time for moulding the musical tastes of two generations and opening the gateways to a sonic landscape that would be imprinted on most of your memories till you die or lose your marbles.

I am not proud to say that I shoplifted cassettes on a few occasions when I was at high school and ran the risk of this becoming an all to regular occurrence as my appetite for new music grew bigger and bigger.
By the time the school bell rang for lunch I already had my Grandad's coat on, a huge sheepskin that nearly drowned me in its size and was as essential to me as a tuxedo was to James Bond when it came to my mission.
I had the lunch hour to get out of school and get to town then back before the second bell. So at a brisk pace I would head straight for John Menzies (and then when that shut down it was Woolworths) hoping not to bump into any of my friend's parents on the way.
This coat was my accomplice and its sleeves a secret weapon. I don't know when it was I realised you could fit a ten pack of TDK D-90's up each sleeve but when I did I was a changed boy.

The 90 minute cassette was the key to everything you see. You could give them to your mates still in the wrapper and they came back with this amazing and fresh new music on it. The song titles crudely scribbled on the back card (or exquisitely written and illustrated in the case of one of my ex girlfriends) and the bands logo scrawled in biro and a little smudged on the spine.

At school we couldn't afford to go out and buy every new metal release that came out so we worked as a team. "I bought Legion by Deicide last week so you lot hand over your cassettes and I'll copy them tonight. Countdown To Extinction is out in a month. Whose turn is it to by the CD?".
It was piracy, it was the beginning of file sharing and maybe we all had a hand in what was to come. We were starting to kill the industry slowly before, in ten years it would fall apart completely with the downloading trend.

We were only buying a few albums a month between us, maybe three. On a good month as many as five or six but they were the only releases we even knew about that existed and even then they would have to be special orders at the Braintree Our Price store because they didn't really stock much metal.

We couldn't hear the bands either. We read RAW and KERRANG and saw the bands, read their opinions etc. We had no idea what they sounded like. You had to pay real close attention to what tee shirts they were wearing in the photos and make educated guesses as to the sound of the band and really hope you were right. The Our Price returns policy was less than friendly to spotty long haired kids.
"Well this guy who looks like the singer is wearing an Overkill shirt and the band are on the same label as Sodom. Do we buy it?".

Is it better now? Is it better that we have instant access to a band, their back catalogue and their life story? The problem is we now have the instant option to make up our minds wether we like it or not.
After all it was just a click of a button, you haven't invested anything in this band yet. You haven't had to put the time and thought into what they were probably like and you haven't had to buy the record just because it was on ROADRACER records and you liked other bands on that label so lets hope this was a good one. You just click, listen to thirty seconds and think "Nah!" and then that band are gone from your life. Its one hell of a tough audition for a band that can't plead their case.

This takes me back to the cassette. Pretty much all of my favourite albums ever written where of a certain length. You would get an album per side of a D-90 and maybe a couple of extra tracks of something else at the end just to fill the space.
To me this seemed perfect and what helped make it that way was the fact that cassettes were actually rubbish in a good way.

As soon as I bought CD's the one thing that came with them was perhaps leading towards the bands downfall. It was the ability to skip tracks. You would maybe skip to the tracks you liked, miss out the ones that didn't get going very quickly and then go back to that one you really liked the first time.
When I got given a copy of Kin by Xentrix I have to say I didn't really like it on first listen but it was a cassette, that meant it was an absolute pain in the arse to skip tracks rewinding and fast forwarding and missing the beginning of the one you wanted to hear. What this lead to for me was that every album I got I would listen to from start to finish. It had a chance to impress me and would normally be heard again in forty five minutes after I had listened to whatever was on side two (in this case I think it was Sacred Reich).
In actuality a lot of the albums I thought were incredible on the first listen probably fell by the wayside pretty quickly and the ones that were slow burners, growing on you I probably still listen to today.
All of this seems to be about the same thing to me. Investing your time in a band. It made you loyal, you were more of a fan when you listened to the whole albums because you put the hours in too.

I think bands were guilty of making it harder to really get into some of their music too.
With the death of the cassette and vinyl formats the bands were free from the time constraints of those mediums. At this point bands started making longer albums to fill the seventy minutes they had at their disposal. Maybe in many cases this stopped bands from trimming the fat and lead to albums having more "filler" tracks just to pad out the length.
There are few albums of one hour plus in my collection I can actually listen too all the way through. It's not to say they are bad albums but even if I love the band I struggle. I love mashed potatoe but after the three hundredth spoonful of the same flavour I am pretty sick of it.

So what is the answer for the future of the metal scene and music in general? Who knows?
The internet has played a massive part in destroying it and now it has to play a part in rebuilding it into something bigger and better.
We do have to face the fact that there are a lot of bad bands out there. I'm not judging, when I was young I was in some pretty bad bands and some of you may think the bands I am in now are terrible.
The problem is with that amount of choice it is harder to find the good ones amongst the pile and we have to get back to investing that same time and effort in hunting them out as we did before.
Possibly the real key to investing your time in bands is to step away from the computer and start really showing your support for the somewhat floundering unsigned scene (there are more bands and gigs than ever but in many towns attendance is at an all time low). Your new favourite band may be playing in your local pub and you will never know.
Maybe the album format is dead and it would be better to release singles or EPs more regularly, giving people something they can listen too right through and that showcases only your absolute best work and not your best four songs and ten that you had to put on to fill time.

I don't know. I am a musician and I am facing these questions everyday and wondering where we go from here. We will work it out but its easier to work it out together than alone.

Tonight before you shut down your computer (or leave it on overnight downloading the latest episodes of Dexter or The Walking Dead) why not go to a facebook page of a random band you have never heard before and listen to three songs in there entirety. Make up your mind then. Who knows they could be shit but they just might be the best thing you have heard this year.

There's 'Metal' and there's 'Metal' and the 'Metal' scene is fucked: Part 1

Part One: The Fans

I like to think of myself as an open minded person most of the time and I love music. All types of music. Music is great.
I listen to most genres of music and my tastes are varied although I have never really got the dance music and rave scene (but if you want to take speed and go to what is basically a disco then be my guest).

One of the genres I probably owe the most to is metal. Heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, you name it. I listen to many bands in each category and pretty much worship a few. It is the music I spend most of my time around these days and I am lucky enough to make a living from it now by combining playing in bands with producing bands from this genre in my recording studio.

On the whole it looks like the metal scene is as popular as it has ever been, maybe it is even bigger now than it was in its glory days of the eighties and nineties. After all, we used to have Donnington Monsters Of Rock each year which was amazing. One day, one stage, eight or so bands and it was cool.
Now we have Download, Sonisphere, Hammerfest, Bloodstock, Hard Rock Hell, Hevy and loads more grass roots, home grown smaller events.

All of the festivals mentioned above are run over a weekend providing multiple stages and probably around one hundred bands at each. The crowds for some of these are huge. Much bigger than Donnington ever was.

Surely this means that metal now is huge, it's massive, there are millions of metal fans out there right? Well you know what? I am not so sure.

You see, there is 'metal' and there is 'metal'. And they are completely different and more importantly the fans of the two are like different fucking species.

I am not just looking back on my teenage years with rose tinted spectacles and dreaming of the days before Metallica turned shit, Sepultura didn't cite fucking Korn as an influence (Roots Bloody Roots can fuck off) and we could all rely on Tommy Vance and Krusher to raise our spirits when the rain started and we were waiting for a band that was running late. Metal was different then in a much more important way than we could have imagined.

The problem is that on the whole (and some people will spit their snakebite and black out all over their screen as they read this) metal is for chavs.
There, I said it. And its true. You know it and don't want to admit it but you know I am right. Its for chavs.

These are not your ordinary chavs but none the less they are exactly the same. They have gotten rid of the burberry (but probably still have it at home somewhere just in case it becomes popular again) and have asked their Mum to keep hold of their gold chain and sovereign ring for safe keeping.

Metal has become so fashionable and popular that the kids at Download this year who were going crazy for "Children Of Boredom" or "Mullet For Duncan Bannatyne" were listening to "Dizzee Rascal" and "The Streets" a few months ago and in essence what is wrong with that. A change of heart, a new taste in music isn't a bad thing is it?

Maybe in this case it is. Because the thing that sets them apart from the other metal or alternative fans is that deep down they are still chavs and they carry that attitude with them.

The same guys that were down Liquid necking Bacardi Breezers and trying to finger drunk girls are now at metal festivals. But something deep down hasn't changed in them because they are at Download but they are still drinking WKD Blue, starting fights and trying it on with any girl within a hundred yard radius and when she says no she is a cunt, lezza and slag.

You can change the jeans for the skinniest ones you can find and get some shitty neck tattoos delicately framed by the Toni and Guy hair cut you are sporting but your attitude and intolerance is like a shining beacon casting a soft Burberry patterned glow that shines off your lip ring and through your flesh tunnels.

Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in the pit. I used to go crazy in the mosh pit but would probably keel over after ten minutes these days and I used to come home battered, bruised and aching but it was all good clean fun. We all used to push and shove and get a few bruised ribs every now and again but one thing we all had in common is we were there for a good time. A mosh pit was just that, not an excuse to fight. Some shows were tougher than others and you felt a little intimidated on a rare occasion but you mostly felt pretty safe.

Remember that big meat head guy in the Slayer shirt who just kept pushing you and pushing you? We were all in that situation once or twice. Well what happened when he actually pushed you a bit too hard and there was a gap behind you in the crowd and you hit the deck with a bump? That's right, he looked horrified, bent down, picked you up, said sorry, dusted you off, smiled.............. and then pushed you again.

In the last few years since the chavs have taken over the metal scene I have seen numerous mosh pits that I wouldn't go in (and I am not a small guy) because of the gang of Oli Sykes clones that are taking it in turns to land a few snidey punches on an unsuspecting fan and then standing back and laughing. These tough guys not only punch and kick people when their back is turned but also see young girls as fair game for a smack in the back of the head. And what happens when someone gets knocked down? They get left, trampled and kicked.

Ok, this is a generalisation and not everyone who listens to Bring Me The Horizon is a complete wanker and would kick a seventeen year old girls teeth in. But some of them would.

It's no surprise that the metal (and goth) scene has often attracted people who were outsiders and had more problems than the middle east. It was because those people felt safest within a crowd of metallers and because they knew that they wouldn't be judged for whatever issues they had going on.
The kids who got bullied at school by the really popular kids often became metal heads or goths. I have met a lot of people with physical and mental disabilities who really felt safe to be themselves for the first time in their lives when they started going to metal shows and became a part of that scene.

In America the same thing happened but much earlier than it did here. The Yanks don't really have chavs as such but in the mid nineties the "jocks" and "meat heads" found their own fight club at shows for bands like Coal Chamber and Drowning Pool. The same guys that were out in Iraq singing "Let the bodies hit the floor" while shooting the face of a civilian would go back home and kick the shit out of the skinny long haired kid in the Megadeth tee while downing a few brewskis with their buds. This still exists but now they have their own meat head buddies on stage in the form of Five Finger Death Punch.

So the chavs have taken over Donnington, Monsters Of Rock is long gone and Dio can't save us now. Mainstream metal has become the home of the very people who don't understand what the metal community is all about.

Metal WAS a community, we used to all look out for each other, we took care of our own, if someone fell in the pit they got picked up and the lyrics to Denim and Leather really meant something.
It was an attitude and a way of life. It was a philosophy and an outlet for frustration and for some, most importantly it was a refuge from the shitty things they had to deal with every day.
We are now as much of a minority as we ever where. Regardless of the fact that one hundred thousand people attend Download, whats left of the real metal community now congregates every year in Derby at Bloodstock where we are safe from being judged by people for not having the "right" tattoos or skinny enough jeans and we don't worry about getting bottles of piss hurled at our heads.
We wont be laughed at in the crowd by a group of floppy fringed guys with swallow tattoos on their necks or hearts on their arms because we are fat, disabled, nerdy or just plain don't look like we fit in and don't straighten our hair.

The metal scene is fucked........... long live metal!!!