Oh dear, it's all got a bit handbags in the world of metal. It seems success with a top selling album brings out the worst in the serious world of heaviness.
It begins with Avenged Sevenfold making a No1 album, then Machine Head’s front man Robb Flynn makes some jokes at their expense, actually they're fairly lame and a bit daft about how they are copying other bands, but as a result the fans then pile in with the usual incoherence.
Just an aside here, but possibly the worst culprit in spreading the teenage like venom is the new comments board created by Google+ who in their infinite wisdom have decided to link it to the YouTube comments. Most viewers will have noticed the changes. The end result has been to take trolling to a new lowlife with the self righteous music fan being some of the worst offenders.
Anyway the bickering continues but Andy Biersack of Black Veil Brides poured some cold water on all the heat and spoke out in Artisan News.
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“There is nothing more, I guess, cannibalistic than the metal or the hard rock scene, it seems, and people wonder why we aren’t selling millions of records and why we’re not at the top of pop and everything. It’s because, in my estimation, we have eaten ourselves alive for the last twenty years. The genre itself, the feeling of, ‘If something gets successful, let’s bash it.’ Or in the case of Avenged Sevenfold, how ridiculous is it that one of our own got a Number One record and is doing all this wonderful stuff and everyone feels the need to say something negative to them. It’s a real testament to where the dark side, in my estimation, of the metal community, or the hard rock community, where people don’t want success for the things that they don’t necessarily love.
And also, it’s really commonplace for metal fans to not give new bands a chance. Just it is. The Black Album (Metallica) still sells more copies. I’m not saying it’s not an amazing album, but The Black Album still sells more copies than any record that is put out every single week than any new band. And it’s not to say that any new bands put out a record that’s as good as that, but I don’t think people are even really ready to give it a chance.”
So this is what all the fuss is about, well one of the tracks from the Avenged Sevenfold album. It's now done over 9 million hits. It's also got a YouTube ad. Of course it has.
