Cronos from Venom Has His Finger on the Pulse of Modern Music, Feminism
Not to take anything away from his important contributions to the history of metal, but Cronos from Venom said some really dumb shit during a recent interview with The Rockpit, and I am now going to call him out on that dumb shit.
Here is the dumb shit in question (big sic around this whole quote):
“I was telling some press guy recently, where the fucking hell are all the frontmen? Where have they gone? It seems like that’s one of the biggest things that’s missing at the minute, is where’s the new people like…and I’m not saying copy cat…but I’m saying the next charismatic figure. Where’s the next Ozzy Osbourne, where’s the next fucking Alice Cooper. It’s just girls at the fucking minute ’cause when you see the stage show for artists like Pink and even these fucking Aguilera’s and all the rest of these fucking Katy Perry’s, they are putting on incredible shows and they’re fucking kick ass bitches with a fucking attitude! And it’s like wow frontwomen, I’m up for that haha!”
First of all, I’d like to congratulate Cronos for realizing that women can be successful entertainers. It’s kind of amazing that they next part of that statement isn’t “And I hear they can vote now, too!” Schmuck.
Second of all, his reference points for great frontmen aren’t wrong, but they are dated: in their prime, Ozzy and Alice Cooper did both kick serious amounts of ass, but their primes have been over for decades now. Modern metal has absolutely no shortage of great frontmen and women.
Given that the modern corollaries he cites are pop stars, I think what Cronos actually means is that metal currently has a dearth of rock stars. Which is a much easier assertion to argue… but it’s also not really due to a lack of talent or charisma as it to the fact that the music industry has changed. As we’ve said time and again here on MetalSucks, there will never be another metal band as big as Metallica. Even singers who mostly refrain from mainstream-unfriendly screaming and therefore might have been much more famous twenty or thirty years ago (for example, Royal Thunder’s Mlny Parsonz, M. Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold, Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia, or even, Christ help us, Ivan Moody from Five Finger Death Punch) have a ceiling for how big they can get. That’s not the fault of the musicians — that’s just the way things are at this point in history.
The funniest part about all of this is that although Cronos was/is (depending on your point of view) a great frontman, he never achieved a level of success that was anywhere near that of Ozzy and Alice Cooper. Venom never had a mainstream or even semi-mainstream hit — there’s no “Paranoid” or “School’s Out” or “Enter Sandman” or even a “Symphony of Destruction” in their catalog — and to the best of my knowledge, they never had a platinum album. If the bar for great lead singer is “someone who at one point or another might have been on the cover of Rolling Stone,” as Cronos seems to think it is, he wouldn’t make the cut.
My overall point being that maybe Cronos should, y’know, shut his pie hole.
Debate/discuss in the comments section below.
[via Metal Insider]
