Over the past year, Opeth frontman and guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt has pretty openly admitted he's not in touch with modern metal and has no interest in making another heavy record for the time being. Both respectable opinions! An artist has to create what makes them happy, right? Forced art generally isn't awesome.
Åkerfeldt recently told Full Metal Jackie he feels lost in the modern metal scene and doesn't really understand what's being called "metal" anymore. To us, it's obvious and a statement like that probably seems kind of silly and lazy, but think about it- Åkerfeldt is 40 now. He's got kids. He's seeing One Direction and letting us know all about the concert. He doesn't exactly have the time to keep up with metal in the capacity a lot of us do.
"I'm sort of lost about metal, especially since I've done some interviews where I've just said what I thought, and people get upset, because they have different opinions on what metal really is. And, for me, I think I might be too old, to be honest, to understand [laughs] what the younger generation thinks that metal really is these days."
That and he touches on what used to be metal versus what is metal. It's kind of a "this is true metal and this isn't" statement, but in a mature adult way that actually makes a lot of sense.
"I grew up with the '70s and '80s hard rock and metal bands, so those bands, to me, were very diverse and [they had] lots of things going on in their music, and they were metal bands in my book, but I'm not sure if they would come across as a metal band in the climate of today, basically. But I think metal, to me, has become a bit of an attitude as well — a question of attitude — and I think we have still that attitude intact. Like, we're a bit, for lack of a better word, rebellious. [laughs]"
Hey, if we're getting things like Pale Communion out of this rebellion, I'm all for it.
[via Blabbermouth]
