IN WHICH WE APPARENTLY HAD TO TEACH YOU THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD “MODERN”
Of course when you set out to make a list like, say, the one we’re doing right now, of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, you are bound to piss a lot of people off — that just comes with the job.
But I always find it hilarious HOW those people get pissed off. For example, this week I saw a lot of complaints that the guitar players we’ve been selecting aren’t “modern.” And I can’t believe we have to fucking define the word “modern” for some of you idiots, but apparently we do. So:
mod·ern
–adjective
1. of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote: modern city life.2. characteristic of present and recent time; contemporary; notantiquated or obsolete: modern viewpoints.
So… which one of you jackasses would like to call up Alex Skolnick or Vernon Reid or Adam Jones and let them know they’re antiquated and obsolete? ‘Cause I saw Testament and Living Colour and Tool live just last year, and I would not want to make that call. Just because those dudes have been playing this game for awhile doesn’t mean their best days are behind them.
My point simply being: I don’t care if you hate our choices. That’s fine. But at least try to hate our choices based on an argument that makes sense, y’know?
And on that note, here are other ways we entertained ourselves this week:
- We debuted new music from A Pale Horse Named Death and Oakhelm.
- We checked out the latest releases from From Exile, Godstopper, and Cruachan.
- We wondered which is better, old music or new music?
- We philosophized about Google’s new cloud service.
- We fretted that metal may soon be blamed for terrorism.
- We got excited about The Faceless’ new demo.
- We bemoaned the current state of In Flames.
- We wept because Dave Grohl is not going to be on the new Mastodon album after all.
- We enjoyed a vegetarian cooking lesson from a dude in corpse paint.
- We questioned the logic of the new Avenged Sevenfold video.
Next week we unveil numbers fifteen through eleven on our guitar player list; the average age of those five musicians is thirty-one, whereas the average age of this week’s selections was forty-two. So maybe you can go back to being upset because you think they suck, not because you think they’re too old to be “modern.”
-AR
