When do music journalists grow a brain?

When Hell freezes over. Most of these culture critics and " music journalists" rarely show any quality. Mostly they just defile paper editions and net 'zines with pseudo intellectual ideas, wishful-thinkings and pure garbage of opinions. They have no insight in music (or they choose not to reveal it, which is unreasonable) and they don't contribute to anything in the discursive agenda of musical development, except drawing gullible people into self-exploiting bands with shitty images, which is stupefying the individual.

If you come from Stockholm and play death metal, does that automatically make you sound like Entombed? No. If you come from Norrköping and play black metal, does that automatically make you sound like Marduk? No. If you come from Gothenburg and play melodic death metal, does that automatically make you sound like At The Gates? No. When do journalists grow a brain and realize that many times there is nothing in common between two bands, except their localisation. I wonder how many times hardcore bands from Umeå were compared with Refused, how punk bands from Piteå were compared with Randy, and how many times an experimental rock band from LA were compared with Tool or System Of A Down. It seems very likely that as soon as there's a new scene growing and there's some artists gaining reputation in that scene, the "music journalists" stick to these names and use them as reference out of sheer laziness, stupidity, or both.

The only music mag' worthy of reading in Scandinavia was Slayer Mag, which contributed to a small scene, and fanzines during the 1990s. Nowadays you only have Sweden Rock Magazine, who still have these fat douche bags who interviews and listens to Dokken, Def Leppard and Stratovarious (for fucks sake, can't they just die of bad pyrotech'), and Close-Up, which, to a smaller degree, exhibits the same kind of people (the idiots who listens to prog metal but tries to review something entirely different, or the shallow listeners who always sings the high-praise of their favourites, without a glimpse of self-awareness or broader perspective of the work). These have something tangible to interesting reading, but it's mostly the same questions, the unmoving goals of interviews and the superficial idea behind the business as a whole.

When has crust gigs ever been good?

I've probably heard over thirty crust albums now and about fifteen crust bands live, and none of them resembled anything like a real band.

On stage, everything seemed like a fucking joke. No serious performance, no band coordination, no craftsmanship whatsoever. In short: nothing even remotely close to professionalism in music. They all suck big hairy balls, music wise, mentally and aesthetically. They're attitude is brain-dead, they're instrumental handling is even worse than a twelve year old (some couldn't even tune their guitars properly). I smelled clams all over the fucking place, not to mention the stench of rotten people. It is a rare thing to meet so many zombies and clueless morons at the same time and at the same place. Imagining diving into a big cesspool of vermin, and there you have a crust festival.

On albums, most of them resembles older hardcorepunk bands from the 1980s and 1990s, but with less craftsmanship than the originals (the old hacks-and-copycats story). Not all of them are utterly pointless though - some even have the personal conviction and seriousness in the music that makes you regard them as a decent or really good band (for example Driller Killer, Doom and Wolfbrigade).

But without those few shining representatives, this scene is useless. The motives of the bands are scattered by their confused, childish and hack performance. Why on earth do you want to play and act like a fucking idiot piece of shit, when you can invest time and effort in creating a musical imprint that is truly personal and demands brains and patience? This looser attitude, this I-want-to-look-and-behave-like-a-fucking-hobo act, is really beyond my comprehension.