Recent years has seen people begin to question where the rock stars have gone. Those big personalities, who explode into your brain and make you sure you never forget them. Thirty years ago, they seemed to grow on trees. Axl Rose, Ozzy Osbourne, John Bonham and co meant that if you wanted a hellraiser, there was never one too far away. Sadly, they have either gotten old, got fat or died and there is some truth in the idea that they were never replaced. There are still hard partying musicians out there, but none of them grab the headlines in the way these legends did.
Everything is Awesome
Music is a funny old business. Heavy metal is a genre that sits outside the mainstream and 99% of the time, relishes in that fact. We embrace our difference and we love it. That is until something like the Grammy Awards comes along and gets metal horribly wrong. They don’t get us, so they just go with the safest option, this year that was Tenacious D, and hand them a trophy, before ushering the whole thing off stage and breathing a sigh of relief. Should we care? No, of course not. Do we care? Well sadly, a glance around the internet suggests some of us do.
A Defence of Nu-Metal
Over the last few years, nu-metal has become the music industries whipping boy. Articles like this one, are a common sight on my Twitter feed, while even I have been knowing to throw the occasional barb in its direction. Yet, is that really fair? Is nu-metal the giant pile of shit we all like to make it out to be? No. No it really bloody isn’t.
The Curious World of Marilyn Manson
Being Marilyn Manson must be weird. I mean you only have to look at a picture of the bloke to figure that out. Throw in the countless rumours, which have swirled around him since he burst onto the music scene (I’m pretty sure he still has all his ribs), a love of absinthe and an image that is part Voldemort and you end up with a musician whose world probably resembles The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet that is not even the half of it, because this is also a man who has given us one hell of a collection of music since the release of his debut, Portrait of an American Family, in 1994.
Top 20 Albums of the Year: Number 5 to Number 1
Happy New Year to everyone reading and as we enter the new year, I can cap off the last with my top five albums of 2014. If you missed the first three parts, you can find them here, here and here. Enjoy.
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Top 20 Albums of the Year: Number 15 to Number 11
Onto part two of my albums of the year countdown, where we shall go from number fifteen to number eleven. If for whatever reason you missed part one, shame on you, you can find it here.
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Top 20 Albums of the Year: Number 20 to Number 16
So over the next few days I will be putting up my top 20 albums of the year. I initially had a shortlist of 65 albums, so cutting it down to 20 was incredibly hard. I will maybe put a few honourable mentions at the end, but we shall see how we get along. As usual, all my own opinion, don’t bother telling me I’m wrong, blah blah blah.
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Christmas Number One
The annual get so and so to Christmas Number One, has become almost as big a tradition as turkey or drunk argumentative relatives. Ever since the Rage Against the Machine campaign knocked Cowell and co off of the top spot, it has become somewhat fashionable to push an alternative band towards the top of the charts. This year the always wonderful Iron Maiden are the chosen band. Now quite frankly, I would love Iron Maiden to get only their second UK number one single, they damn well deserve it, but do we really need to care about Christmas Number One?
Why Heavy Metal is Awesome!
So yesterday the Daily Mail once again ran an idiotic article about the suicide of a young teenage boy, I’m not even going to bother linking to it, because they don’t deserve the one click that would get them. That story is obviously tragic and I don’t want to belittle that. However, the Daily Mail chose to focus on the fact the young man was listening to Slipknot and was a ‘hardcore rock’ fan. Now quite frankly, I am fed up of this kind of shit. I think we all are. However, I have written about these problems before, more times than I count. So, rather than focusing on calling the Daily Mail cunts, which they are, I have decided instead to write about 5 ways that heavy metal is awesome. Because in shit times, we should focus on the positives.
The Metallica Question
So Metallica will once again make their way over to our shores in the summer of 2015. This time they will grace Reading with their presence and as usual there is a lot of people very happy about it, but a more vocal group of people pissed off. Why? Because of the feeling that Metallica have over saturated the UK with festival headline slots. In the last four years they have played Download, Sonisphere and Glastonbury, all with only one new song and the pile of steaming shite that was Lulu. People are apparently fed up of Metallica and want someone new to take the spot.
Ramblings About Wrestling 