asgeir said:
Vættur, how old are you?
- Asgeir
Well, if he says the Black album is old, it means he's not that old.
That was also "old" for me, and I'm 24. AJFA came out when I was, what, 6 years old? So many of us who grew up in the US in the 1990s got exposed to heavy metal for the first time with the Metallica Black album. That was 1991, if I'm correct. I was only 10 years old. For us it wasn't that bad. There were better bands, but if you're around my age, the time you began to really discriminate about music was near high school. By early/mid 1990s the American metal scene really fell apart, and what we grew up with was European bands. That is, if you really were a metalhead.
Those of us who didn't listen to European bands generally gravitated towards sort of nu-metalish or alternative bands here in the US. I didn't, but plenty of my friends did. There's never really an either / or to musical tastes, but for a long time it felt that way. A lot of the times those bands that sort of lost it in the 1990s... Metallica, Mercyful Fate... were useful to us because with those really crappy 90s albums came an interest in older stuff. And from there you work on your roots and expand...
In the end, I got into what I consider the bread and butter of my metal collection, black metal and death metal and so forth, through Paradise Lost in the mid 1990s, which was a doom metal band (haha, mighty doom metal, which lasted like 3-4 years as a genre). AND ALL THAT STARTED WITH METALLICA BLACK ALBUM! HUZZAH! And also Chaos A.D. from Sepultura.
So yeah, Black album seems old for a lot of us. Even those of us in our mid 20s or so, 1991 seems like a long time ago. Obviously labeling Black album as "old" Metallica isn't really accurate, considering their 1980s discography. I guess the generation that's growing up now really has no links to the 1980s; so even stuff in the 1990s begins to seem distant.