I hardly follow the Finnish metal scene at all at the moment. I'm more interested in traditional '80s heavy metal, and I'm still a little scared of black metal and death metal and their provocative imagery.
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
When I was in high school, I listened to a lot of death metal bands.
Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.
I think that the mere fact that I'm doing it ought to inspire someone. In junior high school the counselor suggested that I focus on wood shop and metal shop.
That's why I think it hurt us, whereas these other bands [I'm assuming he means the other Big 3 -Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica] they kept doing their thing, just METAL. METAL. METAL. METAL. We didn't do that, we took a little but of a turn.
Each metal has a certain power, which is different from metal to metal, of setting the electric fluid in motion.
There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.
With Pantera, we lived through so many trend-of-the-day situations - when grunge was huge, we were still a heavy metal band; when hip-hop started getting incorporated into metal, we stuck to our guns and remained a heavy metal band very purposefully.
There's real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it's a nation they would fight for. It's not diluted by pop culture.
My attitude was always, if you are a huge metal fan, the more dedicated and more obsessive a metal fan you are, then why wouldn't you like more metal, widen your net, and include hair metal?
It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door.
Bands like Metallica never sat around and said, 'We're speed metal,' or 'We're thrash metal.' If it feels good at the end of the day, to me, that's metal.
Black metal - especially from the '90s - contains a certain production aesthetic that keys you into the emotive content. You feel it more intimately than, say, technical death metal, where everything is produced super-precisely.
There are a good number of people creating black metal and black metal inspired music in the northwest. Much of this music is radically noncommercial and exists only on a very local, private level.
Think, for a moment, about our educational ladder.
We've strengthened the steps lifting students from elementary school to junior high, and those from junior high to high school.
But, that critical step taking students from high school into adulthood is badly broken. And it can no longer support the weight it must bear.