Fuck Your Scene

Now I appreciate that I am not known for tolerance, particularly of things I don't like. The older I get (and just having celebrated a birthday I am another year more cantankerous and single minded I guess) the less time I have for things that fall outside of my sphere of interest.
Maybe this is because the world gets smaller with more and more commitments from real life - work, home, partners, needy pets, what have you and as such I find myself digging in my heels and resisting things more and more.
As the good lady frequently says, I'm stubborn and if I don't want to do something, I wouldn't.
So anyway tonight I find myself back on the radio with Mr Glew.
The Midweek Alternative is covering for another show and as such we have a mammoth four hours to cover so this week I get 8 tracks as well as battling words with Grifter who are guesting.
After my initial foray into co-hosting/hanging around the studio and it's follow up were incredibly metal for an alternative show I wanted to go back on and just prove to the airwaves of Exeter that I am more than 'The Metal Guy'.
Why?
Well, despite it being my primary source of earache for 23 years and counting I have wider tastes - I was at school when the rave scene was well under way in the early nineties and whilst I can't say that I ever stood in a warehouse with a glowstick some of this rubbed off and personally I think that The Prodigy's early works like Experience and Music For The Jilted Generation stand head and shoulders above their transformation into Dance/Rock hybrid; I listen to Tom Waits and Johnny Cash; I have an album of Industrial Gabba, I love the early works of The Pet Shop Boys, I think one of the best bands I have seen at a festival has been Chemical Brothers... there are skeletons in my metal closet for sure.



The reason I feel for this is because the world was a more open minded place when I was discovering music and I feel that the decline of this largely lies with the popular media/press.
Over the past decade and a bit everything has been pigeonholed into genres - I mean let's stick with what the blog is about: Metal/Rock.
Today we have:
Metal
Thrash
Death
Black
Metalcore
Hardcore
Post Hardcore
Progressive (Prog)
Industrial
Nu Metal
Mathcore
Djent
Stoner
Doom
Sludge
Punk
Post Punk
New Wave
Indie
Shoegaze
Drone
Ambient
Goth
Nu Goth
Rap Metal
Grunge
Post Grunge
Ska

Fuck it there are probably a lot more, but after a while it ceases to be of interest and in reality, despite how much bile I spit into the ether there is no such thing as good or bad music, it comes down to personal taste. Yes, I think some of my friends have dreadful tastes in music, but as long as they can tell me why they like it you have to respect that.

However music journalists seem so desperate to succinctly sum everything up in a soundbite you can Tweet or whatever that it has become lazy and full of bullshit classifications that encapsulate a 'genre'. This is crap.
Machine Head, deftones, Fear Factory, Korn and Slipknot are all bands that sound very, very different yet foudn themselves lumped as 'Nu Metal' in the late nineties, despite two of those bands existing before the genre was invented.
Christ I remember Kerrap! Magazine trying to call deftones 'Power Metal' back in 96/97 - this didn't catch on and now that tag is given to widdly eurotrash bands whose singers can only be heard by dogs.

What does is it artificially creates a scene where people associate and identify with a look and an attitude first and the music second. My friends growing up were a mix of Goths, Punks, Chavs, Public School kids, Townies what have you. We had our connecting points, we had our drop off point.
We all went to Reading Festival (back when it was good) and you had a great and eclectic mix of music. One year we saw deftones, Monster Magnet, The Prodigy, The Beastie Boys, The Dwarves etc some people went and saw The Specials, it was great.
Nowadays we have specialist tours like Defending The Faith, Share The Welt and so on and it's full of individual clones, everyone rebelling by wearing Hot Topic clothing, sporting bad tattoos and a face full of shit.
Of course I sound old and 'it's my thing' but I couldn't care less if the music was any good - Bring Me The Horizon, Bleeding Through, Avenged Sevenfold for example, all these bands have huge followings but I fail to find any redeeming features - identikit bands, identikit looks and promoters fill a tour of four bands with nothing different. I was bemoaning last time I went to a gig that I rarely bother with support bands these days as they have such shit support. I am actively missing Machine Head this December because two of the above bands are in support along with the execrable Devildriver.
And all of these kids don't like stuff that's not Metalz...
It's sad and it permeates through society - bands getting booed off or being pelted with stuff because they 'don't belong a bill'. Sure some of them deserve it.
Festivals have also started mimicking the same stance.
The moaning about bands not belonging on Download - even about Linkin Park for fucks sake, yes they aren't good but they fit the classification - I will tell you hands down now that one of the best bands I have seen at the Hallowed Ground of Donington has been Pendulum.


A prime example of this negativity produced by Genrification is well timed as Grifter are coming in tonight. For years they laboured under the Stoner rock tag and as such they were constantly compared to the masters of the genres Kyuss. Well newsflash Grifter sound nothing like Kyuss, don't really listen or like them particularly and their connection lies with Black Sabbath so for years reviewers got it wrong and passed on the wrong impression to potential fans.

My point tonight is that the world was a much more fun place when it was less narrowly defined and I shall be using the pioneering touring festival founded by Jane's Addiction frontman Perry 'Drug Dustbin' Farrell back in the early nineties where the idea was peace and open mindedness an as such show cased some of the finest and most vibrant alternative acts I have heard in my life time.
And as such I shall be playing:

1. Jane's Addiction 'Just Because'
2. L7 'Pretend We're Dead'
3. Beastie Boys 'Intergalatic'
4. Stone Temple Pilots 'Interstate Love Song'
5. Moby 'Comon Baby'
6. Living Colour 'Cult Of Personality'
7. Nine Inch Nails 'Head Like A Hole'
8. Cypress Hill '(Rock) Superstar '

All very different bands and still falling under the Alt. Rock tag, I could have pushed it further to make my point but the likelihood I would either be preaching to the converted or the attention span of those I'm targeting would have gone.
In a world of instant gratification it is easy to flick to the section that says Metal (Or Wiggaslam, Cuntrock, Whatever) but sometimes in order to appreciate what you have you have to take a look around at other things too.

So what am I saying?
If you love The Metal let it go?
Maybe...
Or maybe my own narrow mindedness is saying my way is better, or that it's just that the metal scene has failed to throw up anything new that appeals in the last few years, but I don't want to go to a gig and see four clone bands and have to care about the fact that I'm not wearing the right shirt or name checking some douchebag band who are the in thing.
I'm sorry but I'm too old and too stuck in my ways to give a shit about what is troo or kvelt, whether it's Britney Spears or Bathory, if I like it, I like it and there's not a thing you can do to convince me otherwise.