Youth & Rust STANDARD

Page 1

• • • • • • April 11, 2014 • Volume 1 • Issue 1 • If it never freezes here, it never really thaws either.

Yo Sick Kizmet32 Chelsea Watt Steve Horvath Alex Matuszczak Give Up • Pahnl www.youthandrust.com

THEEEYYYY’RE BAAAAAACK NOSTALGIA AND REUNION CULTURE IN METAL

If you’re a metal fan today, reunions have become a fact of life. Bands once long thought interred are rising from their slumber to record a “STUNNING RETURN TO FORM” and embark on live tours with increasing regularity. While this procession from beyond the musical grave may seem like a great idea, I have unfortunate news: It stinks and its ruining Metal. Something is rotten in the Steel Republic these days, and its name is reunion mania. Often crass, embarrassing and hollow, this accelerating phenomenon warrants a look. Why, you ask? This glut of re-animated bands is symptomatic of much of what is wrong with metal and other underground music these days. Reunion announcements used to be pretty rare things in Metal. Bands and their fans were largely focused on new and exciting developments and pushing forward throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Recent years have seen us all become victims of changes. It seems like every other week I hear about some gatecrashing reunion announcement. It’s also become a standard now for large metal fests to feature at least one huge reunion in order to rank in the minds of fans. Our culture as a whole has become increasingly focused on rehashing the past rather than investing in a vibrant present. Fashion trends are obliquely retroactive in increasingly shrinking circles. Film and television are perhaps the most severe indicators of this trend. Hollywood has settled into a masturbatory catatonic state of remake after remake, in some cases even remaking remakes (Spider Man, Superman, etc). One of the problems with this closed loop of creation is that it is largely devoid of any new creativity or honest addition to a genre. Ever a step-cousin to Heavy Metal, horror films are the best example of this. The endless horror remakes currently on offer seek vainly to evoke the essence of a genre but are merely diluting it into pablum through clean, precise imitation. The process is akin to an illiterate person precisely recreating words written on a page, ignorant to their actual meaning. The root causes of why this prevailing retro-vision has become the order of the day

by

DAVE KRISTIANSEN

Image by Sarde Hardie is for the cultural theorists to determine. One thing that is clear is that Heavy Metal is no exception. It is due to Metal’s acute retro obsession that reunion culture has achieved critical mass. Like any other subculture, Metal revolves around authenticity. Being real and true are paramount. To be half-hearted or insincere is to be a poser, or in modern parlance, a hipster. As with culture as a whole, Metal is increasingly looking backwards for cultural currency. The result is an opaque default to “old school” aesthetics as the prevailing way to achieve authenticity. Cue a massive swell of Metal fans aching to hurriedly patch up their vests and reenact their perceptions of a past they probably never experienced in the first place. One no longer has to be invested in a subculture in order to lay claim to it. Knowledge of and access to the entire history of Heavy Metal music was once reserved for people actively involved in its livelihood. One had to commit to time spent trading and absorbing letters, fanzines and records and tapes in order to access the real

deal. And before we continue: This isn’t a chest-thumping circle-jerk about the “good old days”. There were just as many shit bands then as there are now. Plus that shit took HOURS UPON HOURS and a lot of the time you got ripped off in the end. Things have changed. Now any budding Warrior of Ice can easily circumvent that barrier via the internet. The dissolving of the ritual and tradition of material involvement in Metal has quite frankly made the genre stupider. There’s an intangible wisdom that comes from sifting through years of good and bad music that is slowly disappearing. Couple that with a contextless desire for “old-school” authenticity and you’ve got a perfect market for

“OLD SCHOOL NWOBHM LEGENDS BACK FROM THE GRAVE” or what-fucking-ever have you. Continues on back page...


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