If you're a musician, you're probably familiar with these. They basically give an intro to the elements of rock music in a theoretical sense and then push off and go into detail about different styles of rock.
Whenever you turn to the metal section, these books are stupidly inaccurate; KISS? AC/DC? Jethro Tull?
But, hey, it's mostly forgivable. At least most of the bands satisfy the genre of hard rock and don't neatly fall into sub-genres that remove them far from traditional metal. Except Jethro Tull. Goddamn, what was everyone smoking?
A few days ago, however, I witnessed a true abomination.
In the metal section, it had these bands featured:
- Iron Maiden
- Motley Crue
- Metallica
- Bon Jovi
- Nirvana
- Guns 'n' Roses
If that wasn't bad enough, apparently Iron Maiden is "incredibly simple music that relies on its stage performance to generate attention", and I learned that "Nirvana was a revolution in simple heavy metal". Plus, this guy's wisdom is a bottomless well, because he managed to convince me that "Bon Jovi is considered one of the best heavy metal groups ever".
I mean, what the hell. Which person did they employ to write about movements of music that knew so little of so many genres of music? Let's count: NWOBHM, thrash metal, glam metal, glam rock, grunge, hard rock.
Even ignoring that the list and descriptions are a disgrace to metal, it's just a disgrace to anyone who likes any of those bands, full stop. Goddamn.
Second bitchfest: speed metal. All these books seem to refer to it. Thrash metal does not exist, apparently. Only speed metal. Are the publishers not allowed to say the word "thrash"? Do they think that somehow, the term "thrash" is going to lose sales?
Or do they just not know what the fuck they are talking about?
I have not yet seen a single book that actually refers to thrash metal while explaining the concepts behind it. Which are usually very shallow and pretty wrong explanations.
So, who the hell is it that's employing music authors, who all seem to be high graduates from various prestigious schools, that not only don't know anything about musical movements the mainstream doesn't fellate, but know nothing of musical analysis?
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