I hate ALL music journalism - from Rolling Stone to Maximumrocknroll and the Source. Accross the board, music writers suck. It's just like Zappa famously said, "People who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read."
You know what I'm saying!
"Dood what are your influences?"
"How did you hook up with that label?"
"Are you dating Jennifer Aniston?"
"How's the scene in your town?"
"Could you possibly tell us in mind-numbing detail about ten years' worth of line-up changes featuring people no one's ever heard of?"
"Is your new album the best one yet? Because that would be fortunate!"
And so on.
The only good zine EVER was NORDIC VISION, a super-obscure black metal fanzine from the mid-'90s. Not because their interviews were good or even their pictures. What made NORDIC VISION great was the REVIEWS. Why? Simple!
They gave negative reviews of 90% of bands!!!! From Rolling Stone to the smallest punk-zine, most douchebags give everything a good review.Rap magazines are the only ones with a good excuse for not printing bad reviews: they don't want to get shot. Rolling Stone or whatever are just sucking corporate teat, giving a blow-job interview to some flavor-of-the-month tool, RIGHT NEXT TO THE $50,000 FULL-PAGE AD for the tool's band. But punks are the worst, most hypocritical pussies of the bunch !!! They don't have to worry about getting shot, plus they decry the institutionalized ass-kissing of Rolling Stone, - yet they give everything a good review in exchange for free CDs. Worst of both worlds. Whatever happened to the "Fuck you!!!Drop the nuclear bomb!" attitude?? If I ran a punk zine, every single album ever would get one of two reviews: Either "BUY THE BAD BRAINS' FIRST ALBUM INSTEAD." or "Buy this." (and only one album would ever get the second review)
But, alone in all of music journalism, NORDIC VISION was true to the black metal ideology of "NO FRIENDS, NO FUN, NO CORE, NO MOSH." They dis everyone. Ads or no ads. Their reviews are cold and hateful as the music!!!!
Behold the review of ASAGAROTH: "I see and laugh untill midnight approach. This Spanish band is pathetic to the point of being incredibly laughable. . . .I really puke!. . . go to hell you suntanned, emotional retards."
Further down, the review of AZURE: "Not interesting even if I wanted to lie."
Review of BALTAK: "WIth the most annoying and plastic sounding drums, Baltak comes forth playing Black Metal without impressing a cell of my brain."
here is a sample page:
The terrible thing is that, every crappy knockoff, fake-DARKTHRONE band got their shit reissued or put on a p2p site, and is available for free. But NORDIC VISION is not available on p2p, or even on amazon or ebay!!! It's like it got erased from history. My pal John from WEAKLING / ASUNDER had some old issues, and he let me scan them. I didn't scan the whole magazine, just the reviews. I hope that if enough people like the reviews, maybe someone else who has more issues of NORDIC VISION will scan their OWN issues, and we can really get the ball rolling on this.
Anyway, here is a .zip file with:
NORDIC VISION 6, 12, AND 13 (music reviews only)
SLAYTEAM (comic)
GRIMORE OF EXALTED DEEDS #6 (another classic zine, with interview questions like, "Hast thou ever been with a fat girl?")
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