American music as an industry peaked in 1995, when thanks to the new hip-hop boom, CDs fully taking off, and a record number of Generation X consumers buying music, record sales went through the roof. However, right after that point, something went wrong.
22 CommentsTags: record labels, recording industry, vinyl
We know that hipsters served as the implement of tearing down metal because once you infiltrate a genre with consciously inauthentic people, it becomes easy to separate aesthetic from its cause, and therefore you make the genre into wallpaper that you can apply to any template, especially the rock/pop variety.
10 CommentsTags: ad busters, christy wampole, douglas haddow, hipsters, ironism, new york times
Metalheads suffer greatly for the pain of having a genre that has suffered a coup. At some point, rock assimilated metal, and became modern metalcore: MTV song structure, hardcore style riffs, emo vocals, maybe an occasional metal riff, but basically just pop metal like pop punk was to crustcore and hardcore.
3 Comments
Style gives voice to content, which means that the wrong style can distort content and present it incoherently, which is a problem since disorganization creates all the bad music in the world. Metalheads also suffer from popularity, since we do not understand it, so when one type of metal style becomes popular, the tendency is to incorporate it even if it does not fit.
No CommentsTags: betrayer, death metal, poland
We should probably discuss an unpopular relationship: how much of underground music, and wider 1980s and 1990s subculture, came from the unexceptional suburbs.
21 CommentsTags: glenn danzig, misfits, suburbia, underground music
For most albums, you can write a shorthand review: needed more time in the oven. That is, they have the right elements, but in the wrong order, and the transitions do not make enough sense to be powerful, which results in a chaotic feeling with moments of “wow, this is pretty good.”
5 CommentsTags: cadaver, death metal
Speed metal never went away; it went underground and combined its many different veins. Mekong Delta mix in some Voivod with their Helstar and Coroner, maybe throw in some Slayer and later progressive old school death metal.
No CommentsTags: mekong delta, progressive metal, Speed Metal
The official narrative in all things exist to sell people products, whether ideological or commercial, and so always consists of half-truths, namely some things that are facts, but carefully leaving out others to let your mind fill in the rest as is convenient for the sellers.
10 CommentsTags: andres segovia, Classical, classical guitar, rock
Garage-level bands are usually condemned to the usage of the same rudimentary forms which causes their music to be dominated by the distorted guitar which constitutes the common ground for metal, hardcore, grind and oi. But at the same time there is often a struggle to somehow project desired message into those almost universal, objective structures with only small variations, just as Hellhammer was struggling with confinements of the form, despite being wholly avant-garde in its visions. And it seems that if there is truly a will, it will successfully color those rudimentary structures with desired character.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, lord of evil, nsbm
Pandering to the aging millennials who still blight the black metal scene, USBM: A Revolution of Identity in American Black Metal attempts apologize for writing a book about “racist and misogynist bands” while simultaneously attempting to celebrate the same “racist and misogynist” bands. This baffling move should ensure that both USBM fans and SJW posers alike take a hard pass on buying a book that hates the very scene it features while also hating the values it claims to propagate.
20 CommentsTags: Black Metal, social justice, USBM
