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.
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