If you love heavy metal, help destroy it
When metal is between generations, it always falls back to its roots as loud angry rock for people who have basically never found a direction in life and want it to be someone else's fault.
Those people, called Crowdists, make any genre into generic crap because they're trying to use it as a means toward justifying themselves, so the pander and avoid any clear direction because they have no direction, and having direction is offensive to those without direction. That's why we have nu-metal (hip-hop, alternative and metal) and metalcore (post-punk and technical death metal) which are essentially carnival music, aiming to distract with radical diversity because it has no goal or anything to communicate except "it's not my fault, I'm horny and stoned and life sucks."
As we see metal magazines fail, bands fail, labels fail, and the large demographic who recently got attracted to metal start to lose attention and drift back toward their indie roots, people around us are going to start bemoaning the death of metal. Don't buy it. It's like a fat man watching the pounds slip away: we need the excess to die so we can move again.
Metal "died" in 1994, got replaced by a bunch of stand-ins from the indie rock and punk movements, and now is losing those fairweather friends so it can resume attracting quality people. Smart, powerful, independent-minded people do not jump into genres full of sheep because they know their music will get lost in the hordes of idiots clamoring for their 15 minutes of pseudo-fame.
Let the "inbetween generation" of metal (1995-2009) die a sordid, HIV-patient death. The rebirth is around the corner.
On watching the metal disaster play out
If you want good metal, you don't want to support metal -- you want to support only the good metal, otherwise the genre gets awash in mediocre stuff. Those mediocre bands, labels, magazines, etc. are starting to give up and go back to indie and punk, which is awesome. Cheer the fail of this intermediate, dying genre. For more information, see Assimilation.
this reminds me of the genric, different-not-because-it-happened-organically-but-just-because-we-needed-something-new genre of "electro house" that congealed from the (purer, more original) tribal/trance genres. those genres, worthy of interest, rose too far aboveground, the masses took note then "made it their" own and sucked all the personality out of it. as a twin daughter of a different genre, i feel your pain.
ReplyDeleteand like you, as a dj, when these generic, in-between trends emerge, i just sit them out. when you've been into a certain scene long enough you gain the courage and insight to know when to do that. good for you.