no country for old wainds
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- Nov 23, 2002
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it's totally applicable to death and black metal imo. pick a random obscure album from the early/mid-90s and ten random albums from this decade and the former would have a great chance of outperforming all of the latter.
this always happens to artistic movements though, the longer the classics/blueprints are established the bigger their shadow looms, it becomes tougher and tougher to step out of that shadow while also staying true to their spirit - as great music requires you to do. and obviously, the imagination and passion that motivates artists to create entire new and distinct movements that will endure for a quarter of a century or more is huge, the amount required for other bands to build on those initial bursts is paltry in comparison. unless you're actually there riding that first wave of inspiration it's much tougher to do that wave justice.
it's also true that the more established a genre becomes, the more it becomes ripe to be exploited commercially, packaged for consumption, until it no longer packs such a subversive punch. this is particularly true of DM/BM - these genres were designed by passionate anti-conformists to oppose populist ideologies, but they've more or less been assimilated into the mainstream at this point. i'm not sure new generations are capable of experiencing quite the same shock, awe, subversive thrill that people must've felt when hearing this stuff 20 or 30 years ago.
for similar reasons, i'm not sure today's environment cultivates the same sense of ambition and purpose - most bands can no longer sincerely view themselves as having as much unpredictability, shock value, otherworldliness as the bands they're influenced by, let alone view themselves as being part of an extreme, important, exclusive revolutionary movement rising up against mainstream values. a crucial aspect of the DM/BM classics' motivation in particular has been lost.
the internet has accelerated these processes by making the genres far more widely available and accepted - it's a shame you don't get many bands being forged off the back of reading a few mysterious and alluring magazine articles and hearing a few cassettes anymore. there's too much knowledge these days from all parties; not enough obsession, imagination, instinct. worst of all, there's the bands with no passion OR knowledge who are just bandwagon-jumping, and that's become particularly prevalent since mainstream publications started widely covering metal.
there are always exceptions of course. my personal feeling is that there's tons of good modern metal, but not much that's 'great'. whether that means metal is *dying* is subject to debate, that's not a topic that interests me that much - i'll keep listening to it even if the answer's yes, long as i'm still enjoying myself.
