Okay, I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. If you please, follow the link and read the article. It’s interesting as hell and I can wait, I’ve got laundry in.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080910-large-hadron-collider-comes-online-world-fails-to-end.html
So, the world hasn’t ended then, right? However…
A couple of nights ago my wife arrived home from work, rushing in and interrupting whatever I was listening to on the CD player to try and bring up the infamous KROQ on the house tuner.
“Ah, what’cha doin?” I asked holding a Sierra Nevada and long wiry cat toy in the other, a large and enthusiastic feline mesmerized at my feet.
“You have to hear this…” she said enigmatically; excitedly. There was an hint of disblief in her voice. However, without an antenna we apprently have no trouble getting KCRW (thank god, Saturday nights with Dan Wilcox are, at this point, a must) but not the mega-wattage silo of what passes for ‘indie’ music these days.
“They were playing the entire new Metallica album and… well… it sounded like old Metallica.”
“Yeah right. They probably ran ‘Justice’ through a pitch shifter or something.”
My wife is no fool, and she knows music as well as me, so even though I played this off I was intrigued/concerned/worried and dare I say maybe even… excited? Good god, you’ve all seen in print how I feel about these clowns. I wrote about it somewhere on here I think but now cannot find the link.
Anyway, to sum up, I hate them. I know, I know, most of us who were in Junior High School back in the late 80’s do hate them now, so Boo Hoo. This has been a non-issue for some time, and really a wound that healed before I hit 20. But now there is talk of a return? On one hand I wanted to know what some of you no doubt want to know right now – WHO FUCKING CARES AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? I worried that I was slightly akin to another musical douche, Billy ‘God is empty’ Corigan, who has been unable to let anything from his teenage life go for the last two decades (but he made money at it). Yet at the same time there was curiosity, and it was revving flames deep down in the part of me that used to hang out under underpasses, smoking cigarettes, spray painting Metallica and Slayer on the stone support pillars and waiting to meet a real live Satan worshipper… or at least a Kelly Bundy look alike who might let me feel her up (neither ever materialized, much to the chagrin of my young, rebellious self).
The curiosity now comes from the fact that deep down, all of us who were in the same shitty boat when our captains of young adult rebellion, the amazing Metallica turned around and showed us their arses even while cashing all the checks and trading in their thrash digs for slick dress, short hair and bland, alterna-nu-mtal crap music, we all wanted, deep down, to have a return to the way things were. Now, even though I’ve grown and found oout why those first four albums, as good as they are, are now mostly irrelevant to anyone who started their journeys in music there and have gone on to ravenously explore in every direction (as good as ‘Master’ or ‘Justice’ are they simply lose all shock and violence when you hear bands like The Jesus Lizard, Einstruzende Neubauten or even, perhaps more on the same page, the majesty of the mighty Opeth)