Old is the new...new?

I was about 14 when I first caught the metal bug. Sure, it was the nerve-paralysing 'Nu' strain that infected me first, but hey, that's just an unavoidable side-effect of being a post-millenial teenager. My tastes soon evolved and passed through many stages-metalcore, death, thrash, prog, etc, but there was a pretty consistant thread running through them all-no matter the sub-genre, I was only listening to new bands. Though it's hard to be into extreme metal and be completely unaware of the genre's history, I had no time for classic bands and bought only the hottest new releases, in a pointless game of 'I heard that band before you' one-upmanship. Yes, I was naive, and it was only in my early twenties that I finally bit the bullet and dived into the heady back-catalogue of metal's past, never to return.

I'd say it was Slayer, and more specifically 'Reign In Blood', that showed me that the best bands of yesteryear were by no means hackneyed or irrelevent by today's standards. That album is as vicious and cut-throat as anything you can find lurking about today, and it started a fire in me to seek out as much 'classic' metal as I could find. Within 6 months, new music seemed pointless. Why bother trudging through more turgid deathcore tripe when I could be thrashing out to 'Left Hand Path' or 'Heartwork'? Why waste my time trying to decipher differences between identikit Killswitch-clones when I could slam on 'Master Of Puppets'? Obviously, within time I realised that there was still plenty of great new music around, and that no-one likes a retro-snob. But these discoveries taught me to appreciate that the forefathers of the scenes we inhabit now are not just owed respect for laying foundations, but for being kick-ass bands that wrote neck-snappingly awesome albums.

Since then I've tried to couple the old and new and as a result have discovered some amazing music on both ends of the musical timeline. I also love tracing specific bands' sounds back to their very roots. Love Baroness? Check out some classic Sabbath. Mastodon? Try Thin Lizzy. Like party metal? Stick some Van Halen down your tailpipe. Basically, I think the point I'm trying to get to is that awesome music is awesome music, and it being 'old' or 'new' is largely irrellevent. Sure, the oldies deserve the props for laying the all important groundwork, but what has been built upon them is entirely the newbies' doing. And remember, there is also really shitty music from all eras!

Peace out.