CANNIBAL CORPSE’S ALEX WEBSTER ON THE PROS OF METALCORE

Since there tends to be a lot of arguing around here about the open-mindedness (or lack thereof) of metalheads, we found Way Too Loud!‘s recenet interview with Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster more than a little interesting. Webster states:

“Any kind of metal we support, even if we don’t necessarily listen to it a whole lot. A lot of the metalcore bands are pretty good. I think they have enough of an element of death metal to them that they’ve helped attract fans to the death metal scene. Like if you have metalcore bands occasionally doing a tour with a death metal band, it’s kind of a fan exchange, where the fans of one scene can learn about the music of another, and I think it’s positive because those fans wouldn’t have made death metal a first stop. It wouldn’t have been their first choice to check out death metal, but once they’ve had a chance to see a band like us like at Sound Of The Underground or whatever, it got them more interested in death metal.

“If those bands didn’t exist, then Sounds Of The Underground probably wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t have done that tour, so we wouldn’t have had that chance. I definitely think that metalcore bands have probably opened some doors for the death metal scene, and maybe the black metal scene as well.”

Look: what seems like a million years ago now, I discovered GN’R, and the next thing you know, I’m listening to Decapitated. If some trendy metalcore band does the same thing for a kid today, can’t that only be seen as a good thing?

-AR