Oof

I stumbled across an excellent metal catalog site the other day. The site is called “Encyclopaedia Metallum”, and the database is impressive. So impressive, in fact, that it blew my initial list (from Wikipedia) out of the water. I was working with a list of about 2,000 bands. Well, this website has a database of close to 50,000 metal bands. So that changes things a little bit. I’m going to have to structure my drawing so that it is a “fan” shape, that will allow for a greater expansion of space as the timeline progresses from the past into the future. As opposed to a more linear, horizontal timeline. The downside to that is the drawing will be more difficult to read, and it will require a larger venue when it is on display. Oh well, them’s the breaks.

In other news, a Russian researcher is claiming that “Having researched 700 most popular heavy metal songs revealed that half of them is about murder, 7 percent is positive about suicide, and 35 percent preaches a variety of Satanist ideologies”. Wow, really? Apparently this guy’s been listening to a lot of Cannibal Corpse.

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan claims that he’s going to save us from ourselves with his new side project “Puscifer”. “Heavy rock is sinking, the industry is dying.” He says in this article in Rolling Stone. Look, I love Tool, but Keenan has got it backwards. There is more new and interesting metal coming out now than ever before. It’s a renaissance. The industry is growing, if anything. Metal festivals in the U.S. and abroad are growing every year, according to this article in Grammy.com

“I think that people are really into metal and rock again, almost like it used to be in the ’80s…The festivals are sometimes sold out in a couple of days. The time is good for our kind of music again. It’s really, really great.”

~ by mikehill25 on July 19, 2007.