Kerrang! magazine was thirty years old last month.
I used to love it in my teens and had it delivered for years. Unfortunately its little more than a comic nowadays and i haven't bought one for a looong time.
Metal Hammer writer Dom Lawson wrote this piece in the Guardian and to me it perfectly sums up the mag.
[Kerrang!'s 30th birthday is worth making some noise about Kerrang! may have lost focus in recent years, but the fact that it continues to thrive after three decades is cause for celebration
To its admirers it represents an oasis of ear-shattering good taste amid a celebrity-obsessed media. To its detractors it is a shadow of its former self or, perhaps more routinely, an irrelevant but dogged curio beloved of emos, moshers and moody youths in leather trenchcoats. One thing is undeniable: Kerrang! magazine will celebrate its 30th anniversary this week in comparatively rude health, seemingly impervious to the fashion and fortune of music it has covered for three decades.
First published on 6 June 1981, Kerrang! began life as a supplement issued with the well-established but lovably cantankerous Sounds music paper. It was initially conceived to celebrate the then flourishing new wave of British heavy metal, and the handful of commercially successful bands that predated and pre-empted it (including AC/DC, whose guitarist Angus Young graced it's first cover). Kerrang! catered to an audience who embraced hard rock and heavy metal culture, from the music to the cliched denim'n'leather uniform. The magazine made no bones about its self-imposed estrangement from mainstream music journalism.
That was its strength for a long time and despite an ever-changing music scene that has seen "old school" metal usurped by new genres, the fact that it still exists in 2011 says a lot about the strength of the culture it originally elected to support and the resilience of the writers and publishers who have kept it going.
Admittedly, in recent years Kerrang! has appeared to alter its focus, pursuing a younger and more fickle audience. It has embraced bands who subscribe more to the soft-focus, pop-friendly aesthetics of boybands than to anything discernibly rock'n'roll, while seeming to cast a disdainful eye on the diehard metal culture that Kerrang!'s rival, Metal Hammer, has snatched from its grasp.
I am hopelessly biased, however. I worked for Kerrang! for seven years and though I applaud what the magazine once represented, one of the main reasons I jumped ship to Metal Hammer a few years ago was because the winds of change were clearly blowing the senior publication into territory to which I, as a self-confessed and cheerfully stubborn metalhead, could no longer relate. Kerrang! has become the rock equivalent of once-great pop bible Smash Hits – albeit nourished with Green Day and 30 Seconds to Mars rather than Culture Club and Wham! – and while I recognise the value in such an endeavour, its evolution betrays a lack of understanding of metal culture and what it means to its adherents.
Magazines have to change to survive, particularly in an age when fewer people buy them, but metal's atavistic nature is not open to negotiation. Once you "leave the hall", to quote more-metal-than-thou titans Manowar, there is no re-entry.
What Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and a handful of like-minded magazines continue to prove is that the mainstream media's coverage of real rock (as opposed to U2 and Coldplay, in case you harbour the delusion that such neutered twaddle qualifies on any level) and metal is of no great consequence to a vast audience that is going nowhere any time soon. You only have to look at the popularity of bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica and Bon Jovi to see how the media consistently miss a trick, generally preferring to hype up the latest gaggle of indie, dance or pop no-marks, few of whom will ever boast the following or the record and ticket sales that many rock and metal bands generate year after year. Most UK magazines refuse to take hard rock and metal seriously, preferring to wheel out the same old Spinal Tap references and jokes about Ozzy Osbourne's bat-munching exploits rather than acknowledge the sheer diversity of heavy music and the remorseless passion of those who choose it as the soundtrack to their lives. Kerrang! and the magazines that follow in its footsteps exist to redress the balance and to give credit where it's due. For that alone, this anniversary is one worth celebrating.]