Most people don't know the story of thrash, or how in the 1980s, an unlikely group made some of the most vital music in metal.
It was half-metal/half-punk, because skater kids ("thrashers") mostly liked punk but like most punks, also liked metal. They just couldn't get into the Dungeons and Dragons stuff. It wasn't real enough. But Cro-Mags, Black Flag, Discharge, The Exploited... they talked about the real stuff.
They also wanted something that was their thing. Like every group that carves an identity for itself out of our modern tapestry of interlocking cultural groups, skaters knew they had to have something no one else would. And they found it in blur-fast thirty-second songs that exploded and then vanished.
Like a skater "borrowing" some time on the ramps at a public park. Oh, those were for wheelchairs and loading docks? Well, they work for skating, too -- and they were figuring this out at the same time that hackers were "borrowing" computers and networks, anarchists were borrowing squats, and so on.
The 1980s in many ways parallels our current time. A massively-popular solutions president got swept into office after years of frustration, and now comes under fire. The economy is ill because it's over-stretched and over-sold. Socially, people were recovering from a revolutionary time (the 1960s and 1990s) and are becoming kind of timid as a result. It's a good time to tell authority figures to hit the Ho Chi.
When bands like DRI, Cryptic Slaughter and COC hit the scene, they were bursting out into a time when music was slower and cleaner-sounding, in part because it was only thirty years earlier the whole inexpensive-but-good-sounding recording thing had started. People were playing with their new digital gadgets and home studios.
In the current time, that pace has accelerated even further. We all have gadgets not in our homes, but in our computers, that dwarf what people had in 1982. We can make entirely digital recordings and videos that look at sound like the real thing. People want to get back to something organic, gritty, textured like real life or nature itself.
They also want to reject the happy illusion that now that we've had one election, or one economic recovery, that somehow everything will be all right. Like teenagers who skateboard to be out of the house and have an identity outside the ones given them at school, church and work, they know that the problems run deep and are not going to be fixed by some officially-approved one-step method. We've got to fix our souls first.
Our new generation of thrash is a lot like the last, but it's also different. To our list of one-step solutions that don't work, we've added fond thoughts of "just getting along, man" -- after all, the world created today emerged from the 1990s, when those hippies (Baby Boomers) finally grew old enough to take over and change things. They did. Things got worse, not better. if anything, the decay accelerated.
As a result, thrash now is more antisocial. Can you see DRI penning a song like "Parasites Die" by Birth A.D.? Maybe but not quite. They got close on their first LP, but the raw misanthropy wasn't there. There was still hope that make we could be one big human happy. Now people are more cynical. When you say "most people suck," they nod and buy whatever they were intent on buying.
Our new generation of thrash, like the last, comes from Texas. You didn't know DRI was from Alief, TX, a small suburb of Houston? Now you do. We've got two contenders, really:
Both of these are promising additions to the thrash canon because they don't just relive the past -- they extend it into the now, like hermit crabs using the collage of things gone wrong in the present time to make their songs. I'm looking forward to this thrash revival; unlike the last, it isn't beer-drinking music pretending to be the greatest crossover genre in history. It's history being made again.
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