What Irks…
2 comments so far (is that a lot?)
Written by Andrew Ian Dodge on June 9, 2010
One of my perennial irks in popular culture involves, not surprisingly, music. My other obsession besides politics, in case you don’t know is music both as a reviewer and a songwriter.
I loath it when bands attempt to “re-invent themselves” to try and be “modern. Its alright when Madonna, Christina Aguilera or Kylie Minogue do it as they are involved in the most ephemeral of genres, pop. And lets face it, their fans expect them to be up to date with whatever is trendy and hip.
Bands from the 80′s were especially guilty of this with disastrous results. Stadium rockers Def Leppard released the “modern” sounding Slang that was so bad it almost killed the band. Winger did a similar thing and it did kill the band for quite a long time. Poison even tried to get “serious” and introspective on their album “Native Tongue” which was bloody awful. Glamsters Poison doing a serious album and expecting people to believe it? Motley Crue tried it with “Motley Crue” while Vince Neil was off doing his own thing. MC was a great album, but it wasn’t Motley Crue. Needless to say it didn’t sell to well.
Even the mighty Metallica did it several times with ”Load” and “Reload”, that were topped in awfulness by St. Anger. This atonal piece of rubbish was so bad that Metallica fans have tried to forget it was ever made. So bad was the album that people referred to it as St. Anguish. I still have nightmares about the awful clang of Lars Ulrich’s drum kit (or was he just playing trash cans).
Why do rockers feel the need to re-invent themselves and turn off their old fans (except for die-hards)? Do they really think a bunch of aging rockers will appeal to younger rock fans by completely re-doing their sound? When they were young did they like to be patronized by their parent’s favourite bands? Few bands have gotten away with band-wagon jumping, although lots of bands have tried it.
If you have to do it, have a side-project. Fans of bands don’t want to listen to their ole’ perennial hip & trendy and new. If they want to hear they will seek out the new style of band. If you do something well why re-invent the wheel and risk being called a “sell-out” or as happens in most cases making a complete arse of yourselves.
Now there are bands that “evolve” like Opeth and Anathema to name two. However in these cases the bands “evolved” over time and did it gracefully. It wasn’t one album to the next, but a gradual thing that introduced fans to the new sound over a period of albums.
Something that is related, but slightly different is bands that like to do “collaborations” with new hipper musicians. They release a new album full of their old songs “re-mixed” or “re-recorded” with someone completely inappropriate.
Def Leppard ties up with Taylor Swift resulted in some bloody awful versions of their songs. Hip-Hop versions of great rock and metal songs are rarely good and smack of a band trying to squeeze every inch of income from their tracks. This is not bad in principle, because we all need to make money, but sometimes quality control is rather lax.
So please guys stick to what you do best and keep your band’s name on quality material.
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Comments (2)
Roger
June 9th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Hey – in defense of Load, and even (to a lesser degree…) ReLoad – those were pretty good albums! Not the traditional Metallica sound, but still pretty heavy. I don't think they were so much a reinvention as an evolution to a more refined, almost blues-based sound.
I do, however, agree that St. Anger SUCKED.
Lagwolf
June 10th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
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Roger, Load was not that bad but it started a downward drift that ultimately led to St Anger. It showed a band that was sort of listless and directionless.
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