Any artist worth his salt would happily give up a lung to have the words “lost classic” appear next to one of his works. Practical people naturally hope for some degree of recognition while they’re still around to enjoy the accolades, but really: could anything be more satisfying than to hear your critics publicly declaring that their peers had erred in neglecting your work when it was new? I’d wager that any artist who hasn’t indulged in at least a moment’s reverie dreaming of just such an opportunity is lying either to himself or to us. So a month or so ago I got a rather large mailing from a promotions company. All kinds of metal, some of it great, some of it poor, much of it stuff I’d never heard of before. Now there are, as you may have heard, two kinds of people in this world. One type looks at a stack full of discs that are being given away for free and says: “How could these be any good?” Then there’s me and the Mongol hordes behind me, who, looking at a record by a band they’ve never heard before, immediately think to ourselves: “Whoa! What if this is, like, the greatest album ever made, and nobody even knows about it, and the band’s gone down to oblivion and nobody has any idea where their guitarist lives any more or even if he’s still alive, and the last names of the musicians are lost forever to history and so all that remains is this album, which is unquestionably the most important link between the days of underground speed/thrash metal and the latter days of black and ‘extreme’ metal? What if this record whose pentagram-bearing sleeve I’m holding in my right hand as I drop the disc into the changer with my left is that most slippery of fish, the record that you had no idea was gonna kick your ass and then did it anyway?” |