Stuff

I could not have said this better myself, aside from the fact that I don't like Cannibal Corpse, boo hoo me.

Anyway, I applaud what the MS guys are doing, and of course there's no doubt in my mind that Metallica is going to show up somewhere on that list. It got me thinking. The "Here's how (band) killed (genre)" madlib can't be very hard to work out: (band) did (style) so well and so originally, and none of their sucessors get that. All they want to do is imitate (band) without realizing that (band) took (genre) and made it, well, one hesitates to use the word "mainstream." Popular, then, and overly so.

But you can't take a "mainstream" genre and do that much more with it, sadly, because all the sheeple zombie chart people want are watered down three-minute cookie-cutter verse-verse-chorus songs with no originality whatsoever.

And the flip side to that, which is what every metalhead who's not selling out is doing, is downtuning more and more and making their lyrics more and more offensive, because every time someone crosses the line it's not "go back to the sane side of the line," it's "let's redraw the line a little further away now."

See, every single person out there making music today thinks of music simply on one axis: a "mainstream" vs "indie" axis. There are more axes to consider: "original" vs "pathetic clone" and "bad" vs "good." Now, it sickens me that a guy who couldn't cope with his problems and blew his brains out has become the icon of 90s music, and I've written enough about that. What about the 00s? What song made in the last 10 years is still going to be on the radio 30 years from now?

I really should put together a formula, something like (frequency of airplay)/(number of good songs they have) X (number of clones you hear on top 40 stations)/(originality)= how much I hate any given band, except of course that AC/DC would score rather highly on this, and that is highly unfortunate because I unabashedly love their no-nonsense three-chord anthems that they keep rerecording and putting on new albums under different names. Metallica would come out fairly close to 1, intriguingly. Pink Floyd would be near zero because the second fraction would be so fantastically low.

Hrm. I'm going to keep this model until I realize it doesn't work for someone other than AC/DC.