I know you are, but at the same time, its something that bears repeating.
I love the internet and think it will be the greatest invention I see in my lifetime.
That being said though, people who lived in the underground music community pre-internet went through a whole different experience when it came to discovering new bands, and how folks heard about anything.
this is sooooooo true. Literally if you were not a person who ventured out and looked for music....you would never know about anything getting released asides for buying a metal mag at the grocery store....yes. There were more magazines back then. The Eagle Foods I worked at carried this great thrash metal magazine and there were all sorts of different metal mags. That is how you pretty much found out with what was coming out if you were lucky. Not everything though was in there.
Like jason said...Pink Bubbles and stuff were unknown here in the states. I was a die hard Helloween fan and I had no clue they existed till 97, when I got back into metal and the internet existed. I even collected Kerrang and Metal Hammer and a few other UK magazines and they didnt even mention them but then again I wasnt getting them a lot when those came out. I was just getting into hardcore / punk.
While most of the magazines covered Megadeth, Slayer, Metallica and the Bay Area scene as well. It was almost impossible to read about US bands. You never saw articles on Omen, Brocas Helm, and stuff. It was mostly the euro bands and bigger selling US band.
Then get into actually finding these releases. Luckily there was Crows Nest and Music Wharehouse in the burbs. They had a great cassette section with tons of stuff.
This was the only way really to get you music....there was no distros to order from or things like that unless you ordered out of classified ads in the back of some zines. There were so many times when I would be at a store and come across another album by a band I liked that I didnt know existed because there was no Metal Archives. You just kind of came across things.
So I think this is where a lot of this stems from with the back and forth about the dark days of metal. Also dont forget....after 1990 a lot of the bands who were putting out quality stuff for years started to get stale....while most people who are getting into this stuff currently dont get it how we did...imagine having a band like Nuclear Assault suddenly writing a slower song / ballad...back then it was shocking because you only knew them as a thrash band. Also back then there was less people open to bands trying new stuff. You were into "metal" or "glam / commercial metal". There was not really an inbetween back then.
It is great that people are getting into metal and looking back and getting older bands. I think it causes a problem when people start talking like they were there and they were not. Times were much much different than they are now. Totally different climate in music back then.
