Memories of Kerrang/Scuzz/MTV2 etc

Ah man, Kerrang TV. I didn't have "the channels" myself, so I used to get a friend to tape the videos. Those were the days.

Remember getting the magazine which sometimes came with a video of the best videos.... Think mine had left behind and... Creed? And that song nothing by... A?

would watch kerrang on repeat and then watch epidoes of jack ass on repeat....

Ah good times

I listen to Kerrang radio a couple of hours a day. Great variety and I've found a lot of new music through it!

Yeah, all that time, around the year 1999-2000, was when I was first getting into music in a big way and I was the in the exact age group to eat up all of that stuff. Young, filled with energy and stupidly angry at stupid things. GIVE ME SOMETHING TO BREAK.

Limp Bizkit were the big one at the very beginning. I have an awful hard time listening to them these days. But I did love them for a while. I remember hearing Take A Look Around on the radio real late at night and buying the single the next day. Truth be told, I still kinda like the song. The intro is cool, with the band all coming in instrument by instrument, but then Fred Durst arrives at about forty seconds and utterly ruins it with his presence. The breakdown at 3:30 in the song is still pretty epic. Limp Bizkit have qualities musically, but Durst is the worst frontman in the history of music and makes them unlistenable to my ears these days



I bought Kerrang pretty much every week and then Metal Hammer once a month. I'd read them from cover to cover. It's so quaint now when you think about it, I used to read about bands for ages before I'd hear them. 90% of the time, unless you heard them thanks to a free CD, the only way to hear them was by buying an album or swapping an album with someone else.

I've a lot to thank Kerrang and Metal Hammer for. I read about countless bands and they made me curious to know more, but, when you look back, Jesus, they fairly chased the trends at the time. Even though it was aimed at a bit of a younger audience Kerrang was arguably better at showing a bit more diversity in rock and metal overall. It was usually some nu-metal or pop-punk flavour of the month shyte on the front page, but I remember them giving a cover story to Emperor when they had their last album out. At the time I'd only heard about one black metal song and I couldn't understand how anyone could listen to it. If I was to go back now and hunt down that old copy of Kerrang, I'm sure out of all the other bands written about in the that issue I'd respect Emperor the most.

Metal Hammer though hyped up some awful bands - and it was supposed to be the more "metal" of the two. I read it regularly for about two years and death and black or any vaguely underground forms of metal were badly sidelined in that time in favour of endless coverage of crap, crap bands or former bands who were now chasing the trend. The amount of rubbish bands that got mileage out of that period is amazing. I have some seriously dodge musical purchases from that period: Adema, Slaves on Dope, Boy Hits Car, Pitchshifter, One Minute Silence, Mudvayne... the list goes on. I guess there was money to be made. A bit like how there's an endless stream of mumblin' crap trap and emo rappers out there now.

From that era the only ones I still have fondness for are Deftones, System and Tool. I used to hate Slipknot in particular at the time, with their masks and 25 members, but I have a soft spot for them these days. Some of the stuff off Iowa is properly brootal, they did well to sneak that stuff into the mainstream. What a time to be alive it was when this was the type of craic that'd end up on chat shows in the states:



And yeah Kerrang TV. I remember bands getting big on the strength of one good video and Rammstein going from German weirdos to being massive. I didn't watch it after about 2003 and when I checked back in a few years later, all that ironed hair made me immediately realise that time had moved on.