Metal was what Whitesnake did before you heard them, or Def Leppard used to propel themselves onto the charts before releasing “Pyromania”. Figure it was the very late eighties, very early nineties, and I like most of my generation had grown up believing that Metal was something that happened in the way to a band’s true goal of being famous. I had my mind blown and my paradigm shifted at least once a week from that show. It was mainly a punk show, but there were segments dedicated to the burgeoning political rap scene, garage, pregrunge, berkeley, reggae and metal.Īnd it was all pretty far underground, although what I heard then would now read like a who’s who of nineties rock culture. It was a local community radio program hosted by “Brad”, and it contained the underground. The show was on very late and I would actually set my alarm clock to start recording it and then to turn over and change tapes. I remember it as a moment from a radio show I used to tape and listen to at work. “Streetcleaner” is very arguably the best Godflesh album because it was the first exposure most of us around at the time had to this duo. And although there IS a context to “Streetcleaner” that makes it incredible, it doesn’t need that context. On the other hand, sometimes you are staring at Godflesh. It’s just hard for us to imagine a time when the line between pop and rock didn’t really exist, when DIY meant show up and be handed a musical number written by someone else that you got to play…sometimes…yourself. It’s hard to listen to a Beatles record now and appreciate what actually had to happen for it to turn out the way it did, because now any fuckhead with a computer and microphone can make something interesting, and prefab pop has been the wayandmean of the last several decades. Things that seem commonplace in music at the point we inhabit may not have been so when a particular record was released. Context is very important when discussing an older record.
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