6/13/2023 0 Comments Dark crypt music youtube![]() I will do everything I can to support good music, and by doing so I will piss on the marketing machine that floods us with mindless drivel and calls it music. I will support the underground, I will hunt for new bands to love and buy their CDs and write them good reviews. ![]() I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I hereby swear allegiance to Metal. And we have to hang together, or we will be condemned to suckjob radio music. This is the Underground, the metal nation. It’s the mechanism that lets us find out about new bands, and hear their music, and buy it even though we would never be able to get the CDs we want at Best Buy. It’s band pages and mp3 downloads and online CD stores like The End and Dark Symphonies and even Century Media. It’s this site and the BNR metal pages and and the metal-observer and a dozen other websites. Where is the vaunted Underground these days? It’s here, it’s online. Things are different, but I think they’re better, so I ain’t gonna be an old Moustache Pete here. Lots of old fogeys like me will sit around and insist that this isn’t an underground, we had a good underground in the old days and blah blah blah. Right here, right now, you are in the underground. When the big metal boom came in the late 80’s/early 90’s (followed by the big metal bust shortly thereafter) it almost killed the underground. It was fanzines and shows and tape-traders and word of mouth. In the old days the underground was small, and a real effort to get into and stay in touch with. Which brings me to the much-hallowed Underground. If you like one song by a metal band, you’ll like the rest of the CD. That’s one of the reasons metalheads prize our music, and why we can buy albums we’ve never heard without fear: metal bands write their own music. How many pop ‘artists’ write their own material? Don’t make me laugh. Now I can buy a Madonna CD and be pretty sure of quality, because she’s an artist who cares about her product and takes a hand in most of the music she records, which is more than can be said for the legions of soulless dancing muppets that fill our airwaves. ![]() For instance, and I’ll come clean here: I like Madonna, and I have several of her albums. The whole thing is a colossal bait and switch: one good song to get your wallet out, and an album that’s just filler tracks to take up space and create a CD as a marketing artifact, not really important as music. Pop ‘musicians’ cannot rely on that kind of loyalty, because they can’t stand behind their product. So they have a carefully selected single, written by a professional, to put out on the radio and sucker people into buying the CD.Īnd that’s the crux of the matter: they don’t want you to be able to hear the whole CD without paying for it because then you will know how bad it is! If I download mp3s from a band I like, even a whole album worth, I will still buy the CD in order to support the band because I am a metal fan, and we’re like that. After all the effort and money invested, record companies could care less if the music sucks – too much has been put into it for that, it’s irrelevant. Performers are groomed and hyped and pushed on the general public through the omnipresent medium of radio. This is marketing, people, and image is more important than anything else. Songwriting skills or musical ability are not as important as how good they will look on the CD case. Acts are selected for various traits, with telegenic qualities and attractiveness as a performer high on the list. Executives do not meet in solemn conclave in black robes and work out how to keep underground music underground, they simply do what they do. Record-company evil is a conspiracy of effect. That’s really what the mp3 flap is all about – not about threatening record-company profits with bandited CDs, but exposing the abysmal quality of the product for all to see. The Axis is evil because of what it does, and I don’t mean exploiting artists, I mean foisting crappy music on us because it’s profitable. I’ve been thinking and I’ve decided, being a self-important prick, to share my thoughts here. You see, I’ve been thinking about the underground, and the Internet, and the AOR radio tyranny of mass-marketed pop music. The furor these days over Kazaa and MP3s on the internet is more symptomatic of big record company interests than any concern for artists, and it’s part of the age of evil. No, I don’t mean the terrorist Axis of Evil, I mean the big record companies and their unholy union with the press, radio, and the staggering revenant called MTV.
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