Rex Brown of Pantera Insists “We’re Not Doing This For Ourselves”
Pantera’s Rex Brown just won’t shut up about his defense of the new Pantera lineup, but as he’s the one legacy member of the band left who hasn’t shouted “White power” at a concert, maybe it’s good that he’s the one who keeps talking. Recently he’s insisted that the new lineup of Pantera isn’t a tribute band despite having no original members left and only half of the band’s current lineup being from the band’s most popular era. Now he’s insisting that the reformation of Pantera happened because their music “needs to be heard again.” Apparently records don’t exist anymore and live shows are the only way to listen to music.
In a new interview with American Musical Supply that was reported on by Metal Injection, Brown talked about all the work that the new lineup put into the live show and admitted that the new lineup “is a completely different thing” and that “this is another band.” Sounds like a tribute band to me, but what do I know? He then continued on to insist that the new version of Pantera is not a vanity project, and that it’s all about Pantera’s legacy.
“There’s many ways that we wanna keep this legacy alive, ’cause the music is still played all over. We have a whole new generation of fans that, they probably wouldn’t have heard this stuff if we weren’t playing out here playing these shows. And so, that generation of fans — let’s say the 15-to-18-year-old kids that come out — they’ll shortly have children, and that keeps that new generation alive. And Phillip even says it in the set, the parents of the ’90s, which I’m a parent of the ’90s, it’s a very important statement in the set because it’s about the gratitude.”
He then continues:
“We’re not doing this for ourselves; we’re doing it for the name and the brand Pantera. And by God, this music needs to be heard again. It does. It needed to for a long fucking time. And that’s what we’re here doing tonight… It’s just wonderful to be able to do this and pay homage to my music, the riffs that I wrote, or the riffs that Dime wrote, or the patterns that Vinnie played, and for what Phil came up with — tremendous impact on this music.”
If this is all about the legacy of the band and the memory of the Abbott brothers, then it would make sense for the new lineup to just play shows and not put out new music, right? But Rex and other band members have been teasing the possibility of new Pantera music in other interviews, so who knows at this point?
