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The passing of Apple visionary Steve Jobs is not nearly as maddening as the Casey Anthony verdict (let’s get cereal for a moment: it’s actually incredibly sad), but the responses of the metal community via Twitter are just as lulzy! So, in the spirit of our own Anso DF’s Casey Anthony verdict vs. the metal people Twitter roast I present to you…
… THE METAL PEOPLE REMEMBER STEVE JOBS:
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:
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
MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Living Colour’s Vernon Reid…
If ever I was told that a certain guitar icon has been living a secret life as a crazed face-eating killer, my first guess at that guitarist’s identity: Vernon Reid. Don’t take that wrong. I know that, in reality, he’s wonderful, an ambassador, an explorer, and a cross-genre samplee (on Public Enemy’s “Sophisticated Bitch”). He’s a higher-consciousness dude, a high-concept artiste (what’s a Marcel Duchamp?), and a high-impact collaborator with outer-ring weirdos John Zorn, Bernie Worrell, DJ Spooky, and Mariah Carey. And he’s handsome, in good shape, nice hats, all that.
So, no, Vernon Reid is not a bad person. That’s not what I mean by these 100% hypothetical accusations of purely imagined murderous nose-chewings. All I’m saying is that if we consider his quiet exterior vs. the “Cult of Personality” solo — a three-act brow-singer that announced Reid as a major talent back in 1988 — we’d all be like, “Ah, that makes sense,” once confronted with evidence of his human face collection.
I got home at about 1 a.m. on Sunday morning and my stomach started to hurt. I thought it was just indigestion, so I took a pill and went to sleep.
Then at 3 a.m., I woke up suddenly with that awful feeling. You know the one – GET TO A MOTHERFUCKING SINK OR TOILET RIGHT NOW.
I ran to my bathroom and I puked.
And then I didn’t stop puking until sometime around noon.
This morning I was reading an interview with Binary Code guitarist Jesse Zuretti, in which the artful shredder mentioned jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth as a major influence on his playing. Curious, I hit YouTube up for an Allan Holdsworth history lesson.
Check out this video of Holdsworth playing live; he doesn’t really get going until around the 2 minute mark, at which points he lets loose with a flurry of seemingly atonal out-of-key shred passages that just somehow work. Then around the 5 minute mark he goes bonkers, and here’s where I see the Zuretti influence; the quick, almost-sweep-like jazzy shred passages recall the solos in The Binary Code songs “Ghost Planet” and “The Story” (the latter of which is streaming on The Binary Code’s MySpace) in their almost Vernon Reid-esque insanity. Like Reid’s solos, it’s constantly as if the train’s about to run right off the rails but you know there’s a method to the madness underneath it all.
-VN
Photo by Greg Aiello
On Friday night, Vince and I saw Living Colour live for what I think must have been the seventh or maybe eighth time. And it’s a testament to the abilities of this band that, in a day and age when so many groups are seemingly just going through the motions, we’ve really never seen the same Living Colour show twice. These dudes just seem to come from another time and place – an era when a live performance wasn’t about doing a note-for-note recreation of your albums so much as it was about creating a unique experience for the audience. In that regard, Living Colour still delivers in spades.
Mr. O’Grady answered the question “WHICH LIVING COLOUR SONG HAS YOUR FAVORITE VERNON REID GUITAR SOLO?” with a very long, detailed, and well thought-out missive on “Cult of Personality;” for his troubles, he wins a free pair of tickets to tonight’s Living Colour show at the Highline Ballroom here in NYC.
Toxteth tells me he’s never seen LC live before; man, is he in for a treat! Toxteth, if you see us at the show tonight, feel free to buy us a beer. Thanks.
Read Toxteth’s essay-sized answer after the jump.
Living Colour, one of the best live bands on the planet right now in pretty much any genre, are playing the Highline Ballroom here in NYC tomorrow night, and we just came upon a pair of tickets to give away! We’re gonna make this real simple because we have less than 24 hours to unload these babies, so all you hafta to do to win is:
TELL US WHICH LIVING COLOUR SONG HAS YOUR FAVORITE VERNON REID GUITAR SOLO, AND WHY
We’ll read through all the answers and choose a winner in the morning. The tickets will be at will-call under your name. The only requirement to enter is – duh – that you have to live in NYC, or near NYC, or be willing to get your ass to NYC by 8 pm tomorrow night, when the show starts.
This contest ends on Friday, October 30 at 6 am EST.
The show is nearly sold-out (actually, by the time you read this it might be totally sold-out) and is sure to be killer, so definitely go ahead and give it your best shot! And don’t forget that Living Colour’s awesome new album, The Chair in the Doorway, is out now on Megaforce.
Good luck everyone…
-AR
Living Colour performing their new single,”Behind the Sun,” on WYNC’s Soundcheck this past Friday.
Getting to spend nearly an hour on the phone with Vernon Reid was another huge fanboy moment in my life. The band’s debut album, Vivid, was one the first cassettes (!) I ever purchased on my own, making Living Colour one of the first bands I ever listened to that weren’t introduced to me by my parents. Today, more than twenty years later, the band is releasing their fifth studio album, The Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce). The fact that it’s no less powerful or brilliant than Vivid made talking to Reid even more exciting, because my love of the music he and his band make isn’t at all rooted in nostalgia (read my review of the record here).
As you’ll see from the following transcript of our chat, Reid doesn’t exactly think in linear terms. There were definitely moments when I had thoughts such as “Why is he talking about Pokemon?”, for example. But he always comes back around to his original point, leading to many “Oooooohhhhh! I get it now!” moments in the conversation. And given the dude’s music, that makes perfect sense: while Living Colour is ostensibly a traditionalist hard rock band, they’re still constantly and thinking outside the box and trying to navigate unexplored terrain.
After the jump, check out Reid’s thoughts on the writing and recording of The Chair in the Doorway, the meaning of that album’s title, the joys of interacting with fans through the net, and more.
Are Living Colour feeling doubtful about their own identity? The band’s first studio album in six years, The Chair in the Doorway, deals largely with questions of self. “Gonna strip it all away,” vocalist Cory Glover repeats over and over again during album opener “Burned Bridges.” “I am the role I play,” he declares on “The Chair,” before wondering “Who am I today?” On “Out of My Mind,” he talks about “losing myself” and “shedding my skin.”
If Glover and his band mates – guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – really are feeling doubtful about themselves, they’re being neurotic for no reason. The Chair in the Doorway cements the band’s identity as one of the best American rock bands of the past two decades.
On Thursday night Vince and I got to go see Living Colour perform their soon-to-be-released new album, The Chair in the Doorway, in its entirety, for an audience of maybe fifty people in a small rehearsal space in Brooklyn.
Needless to say, it was friggin’ awesome.
I’m auto-setting this post to go up at 11:30 am, because I will not actually be in front of a computer at 11:30 am – I will be doing a phoner with Vernon Reid. Rarely do I get nervous about conducting interviews, but this is definitely one of those times when I’m right on the verge of just having a total fanboy moment.
A lot of my man-crush on Reid has to do with seeing Living Colour live. When this band wants to decimate a room, they will decimate it. You’re talking about four dudes who, against all odds, are still as energetic on-stage now as they were two decades ago, and who understand the concept that a concert can, and should, be more than just playing note-for-note renditions of their songs. I hesitate to call Living Colour a “jam band” because I don’t want you to get the impression that they’re Phish or whatever, but they do a lot of jamming on-stage, and because they’re all so incredibly, ridiculously, almost unfairly-to-other-bands talented, it’s always just as invigorating as watching them rip in to “Cult of Personality” or “Love Rears its Ugly Head.”
So. There’s a new LC album, The Chair in the Doorway, coming out September 15 on Megaforce. And a new LC album means a new LC tour.
I implore you – if you’ve never seen these cats live before, you must must must go. It really is just a mind-blowing experience. Seriously: they’re doing two shows here in NYC, and Vince and I fully plan to go to both of them. They’re that good.
Dates after the jump.
Living Colour are streaming a new song, “Behind the Sun,” on their MySpace page. It’s our first sample of the new music that will appear on their forthcoming The Chair in the Doorway, which comes out September 15.
Is Twitter the new Facebook (if Facebook was, in fact, the new MySpace)? MetalSucks isn’t gonna wait to find out, and has now officially joined 2008 by signing up for Twitter (follow us!). In case you’re over the age of 20 and not yet hip to Twitter, Twitter is a social networking site that’s basically just the “status update” section of Facebook with everything else stripped away. Users can update their profiles with short messages and links with quick updates about what they’re currently doing (140 characters or less), from a web interface or from their mobile phone. Musicians have begun dabbling in the world of Twitter, and, naturally, this provides loads of entertainment for us.
Aside from the obvious humor inherent in a bunch of br00tal metal dudes doing something that’s called a “Tweet,” some notable metal musicians are already ensconced in the world of Twitter. And what’s cool about it is that you know, at least until marketing department heads become hip to it, that you’re getting a direct link to the actual person. When Vernon Reid Tweets about the guy that designed his custom pedalboard, you know it’s him. When Fred Durst Tweets about a tattoo of Frankenstein he’s getting… uh, you know it’s him, for better or worse. Let’s look at what some notable quotables in the metal world are saying on Twitter:
