The fine folks at Metal Hammer always produce great features for their magazine, and they just posted a new feature they did recently in which they stuffed Slipknot's Corey Taylor and Lamb of God's Randy Blythe in a room together to talk shop, and talk about where metal is today and where it's going in the future.
There were a lot of interesting points made during the discussion. Here are some highlights.
Both Corey and Randy are not into what they call "iTunes metal"
Corey: “I think there’s a reaction to what I call ‘iTunes metal’. Randy and I have been talking about this for years: the dudes who write music, but they’re not listening to it, they’re looking at it on a fucking grid. It’s lined up, it’s too perfect, you might as well just autotune it all.”
Randy: “Cut-paste! Cut-paste! Cut-paste!”
Randy is quick to point out though that he is very much for "the democratization of the recording process" which allows bands to record at home on the cheap.
Corey's advice for young bands, when asked:
My advice is always the same: get in front of an audience. Learn to play, learn to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid of mistakes; mistakes are the best ways to find those cool ideas. And the young bands that we’re talking about, you can tell that that’s what they’ve done, they’ve played together, they’ve gelled together.
Corey on mainstream celebrities wearing metal shirts (like Kim Kardashian rocking Morbid Angel)
“I’m in two minds about that. There’s a part of it that makes me want to set fire to whole fields. There’s also a part of me that’s like, ‘Fucking right! Good! More people should know who Morbid Angel are!”
Randy on what it means to be underground:
“I wonder about the validity of the term ‘underground’. When you can download anything from any era of music, like, even if you’re in the middle of an Indonesian jungle – which I’ve done – how underground is that? Underground used to mean you had to search and hunt and use word of mouth. You had to go to some fucking sketchy shithole with a heroin junkie running the register in order to find something. Now you can go on Amazon and find any record. That’s not very underground.”
The whole piece is worth a read, and you can do so here.
