SOUNDTRACK: Big 4 Thrash Tour (2010).
During my recent trip down metal memory lane, I learned that the Big 4 Thrash bands may be touring together. The Big 4 would be: Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer.
When I was a young metal dude, these were definitely my big 4. I own the first 5 or so albums by all of these bands. Megadeth was the first to fall out of favor (around 1990), then Anthrax (around 1993), then Slayer (around 1994) (although they came back nicely in the last few years) and the Metallica (around 1997 although really they’ve drifted the furthest from the thrash world, and probably I should’ve stopped sooner).
I haven’t really listened to any of these guys’ newer releases (although I did get Slayer’s 2001 release, God Hates Us All–and I wanted to add this wonderful quote from Araya, who sings of ever so much death and destruction: “when you see someone and if you’re a human being you respect them and treat them as human beings”), so I can’t say that I’m the target audience for this tour. However, I am delighted that these 4 bands, whose music I loved while growing up, are still together and still touring.
I wonder what the audience make up for this show is? Is it old fogeys like me (who are still younger than the band members, at least) who would have wet themselves for this tour back in 1989, or is it a new generation of thrash kids who would mosh the crap out of me?
Either way, I won’t be going to this concert (in Poland or in Greece for that matter) but nor will I be going should it come to a theater near me. But I’ll be delighted to hear how it goes.
[READ: March 29, 2010] “Bystanders”
I was prepared not to like this story (actually an excerpt from a novel). It is set on a mountainside on the border of China and Tibet. And it was about mountain climbing, a subject about which I care very little. And as it started feared it was going to be another story about battling with the elements on top of a mountain, blah blah.
But rather, the story went in a different direction entirely. While the young protagonist is watching the sun set on the mountains she hears gun shots. Ad i the distance, she sees a man fall. The guides come over to offer her a hand but she refuses. They force her down behind the rocks as they call for her father. Then she flashes back to another time when her father selflessly came to someone’s rescue.
There were many cool ideas in this story. I loved the idea that she was sitting in two countries at the same time. I loved even more the later idea that the glacier has moved the border between the to countries and that soldiers had to remeasure and replace the flag. But really, it was the final line, “that by making his care, his very life and limb, equally available to all, he deprived [his family] of an exclusivity they had a right to expect” that was incredibly moving.
I don’t know that I’ll track down the novel Every Lost Country, but I did enjoy this excerpt quite a lot.
SOUNDTRACK: FANTÔMAS-Suspended Animation (2005).
If you know Fantômas, then you know what you’re in for. If you don’t, well, it’s a surprise!
I Just Read About That... 