Thursday, April 14, 2011

Metal Idol, continued



This wasn't as cool as Durbin singing Judas Priest's "You Got Another Thing Coming" a few weeks ago, but gotta give the man props - he is unapologetic in his metal-ness, even if he does choose a pretty suck-ass song (Sammy Hagar's title track from the film Heavy Metal) to prove it. If nothing else, this was easily the most time given to a guitar solo in the history of American Idol and for that alone it was sorta neat.

2 comments:

  1. I gotta disagree. Just like the Priest performance, this was just godawful. It's like a bad version of Steel Panther. gah. Good point about the solo though (part of my problem with the Priest was the continual soloing underneath the vocal -- as if to say, 'it's metal, it must have a guitar solo in it, even if no one ever sings over guitar solos in metal')

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  2. For me, good is relative when it comes to things like what appears on American Idol. Will I ever buy a James Durbin album if/when such a thing is released? Hell to the n-o. But do I enjoy seeing this kind of stuff on a show that began its life trying to manufacture the next Spears/Timberlake/Whitney thing? Indeed I do. Now, whether the change is a sign that metal occupies the same cultural terrain once occupied by boy bands and teen pop is different question altogether...(although on that score, metal already covered that ground; see Def Leppard's Hysteria).

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