Ha! I read the following in GQ last week and thought of you (it's long, sorry). The writer worked in an honest-to-god record store (you know, like vinyl) for a week and learned a few things...
"As I organize the stacks, I start to realize that I have no clue how to tell punk from metal. I’m familiar with the staples, like, say, Black Flag (punk) and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (both metal), but a lot has changed on the landscape since my record-store days. Lauren is patient with all my questions, but only to a degree. Right, so a guy in a cowboy hat looking pensive and standing in an amber field of grain will henceforth signal me to “file under country.” Got it. To spare her further grief, I concoct a rule of thumb: If the word hate is in the band name, it’s metal, not punk.
Take your Hate Eternal, Hate Plow, Hatebreed, and Hatesphere and set them aside. All hate, all metal, period. I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking: Yes, but how can you tell punk from metal when it comes to the Atomic Bitchwax, Dead Child, Cock and Ball Torture, Blood Tsunami-—how can you be sure of where to file these nuanced trios and quartets? Excellent question. That’s where the second part of my simple system comes in: If they don’t have hate in the band name, the art will show you the way. So when any of the following elements are on the cover, it’s metal:
• Well-muscled corpse men with insect-like mandibles, often wearing a gas mask or a scuba breathing apparatus. • Red swamps, especially red swamps filled with armored skeletons. • Hot zombie women performing fellatio on corpses that are half man and half goat or ox. • Muscular Grim Reaper/hooded executioner appearing to hump a big pile of skulls under a sky that’s on fire. • Huge robotic/skeletal spider with bloody fangs standing next to a pretty woman in a dress whose abdomen has a large wound exposing intestines and other vital organs.
There is one tricky exception, and that’s the band Naked Raygun. On the Naked Raygun cover, you’ve got your basic apocalyptic swamp diver wearing a futuristic mask/breathing apparatus in a lagoon of sewage, and they are filed under punk.
Thank God that there is also filing to be done in rock and pop. The metal section is kind of making me a little bit hopeless or lonely or something, as if everybody is a mall shooter waiting to happen. But maybe that’s the point?
[My word verification word this time is "flarred" -- which I think means "the way you feel after filing the entire metal section."]
ege: Hilarious. There's a record shop here in Stockholm which has a symbolically empty hiphop section at the back. Needless to say, their window is filled with pictures of insect-mandibled men wearing gas masks.
JH: Ernie and Bert doing blastbeats? Blasphemy! But funny.
4 comments:
Humor! :D
Ha! I read the following in GQ last week and thought of you (it's long, sorry). The writer worked in an honest-to-god record store (you know, like vinyl) for a week
and learned a few things...
"As I organize the stacks, I start to realize that I have no clue how to tell punk from metal. I’m familiar with the staples, like, say, Black Flag (punk) and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (both metal), but a lot has changed on the landscape since my record-store days. Lauren is patient with all my questions, but only to a degree. Right, so a guy in a cowboy hat looking pensive and standing in an amber field of grain will henceforth signal me to “file under country.” Got it. To spare her further grief, I concoct a rule of thumb: If the word hate is in the band name, it’s metal, not punk.
Take your Hate Eternal, Hate Plow, Hatebreed, and Hatesphere and set them aside. All hate, all metal, period. I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking: Yes, but how can you tell punk from metal when it comes to the Atomic Bitchwax, Dead Child, Cock and Ball Torture, Blood Tsunami-—how can you be sure of where to file these nuanced trios and quartets? Excellent question. That’s where the second part of my simple system comes in: If they don’t have hate in the band name, the art will show you the way. So when any of the following elements are on the cover, it’s metal:
• Well-muscled corpse men with insect-like mandibles, often wearing a gas mask or a scuba breathing apparatus.
• Red swamps, especially red swamps filled with armored skeletons.
• Hot zombie women performing fellatio on corpses that are half man and half goat or ox.
• Muscular Grim Reaper/hooded executioner appearing to hump a big pile of skulls under a sky that’s on fire.
• Huge robotic/skeletal spider with bloody fangs standing next to a pretty woman in a dress whose abdomen has a large wound exposing intestines and other vital organs.
There is one tricky exception, and that’s the band Naked Raygun. On the Naked Raygun cover, you’ve got your basic apocalyptic swamp diver wearing a futuristic mask/breathing apparatus in a lagoon of sewage, and they are filed under punk.
Thank God that there is also filing to be done in rock and pop. The metal section is kind of making me a little bit hopeless or lonely or something, as if everybody is a mall shooter waiting to happen. But maybe that’s the point?
[My word verification word this time is "flarred" -- which I think means "the way you feel after filing the entire metal section."]
Tips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZNBcJTmWs
ege: Hilarious. There's a record shop here in Stockholm which has a symbolically empty hiphop section at the back. Needless to say, their window is filled with pictures of insect-mandibled men wearing gas masks.
JH: Ernie and Bert doing blastbeats? Blasphemy! But funny.
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