I think I would be hard pushed to describe myself as a thrash metal fan. On the latest count I have 6 thrash tunes out of 16,186 songs in my iTunes library - thats not much commitment to the genre by any objective standard. But if there is one thing I like and that's a music doc, so it stands to reason I was going to be interested in checking this one out regardless. While it is about thrash metal generally, its more specifically about the San Francisco Bay Area scene which kicked the genre off. Influenced by European metal, the thrash scene rejected the very popular hair bands of the day, who constituted what most people thought metal to be back in those MTV influenced years. Needless to say, it seemed to be of especial importance to the thrash people to exhibit no image at all - I recall back in the day Anthrax receiving a lot of stick for having an image, which when you consider that all that amounted to was the wearing of Bermuda shorts and the holding of a placard with 'NOT' written on it, it makes you realise how ridiculous this was. If you believed the furore you would be forgiven for thinking Anthrax must be trying to attract Liberace fans. It seemed that in order to appear a legitimate thrasher you had to look like someone you would hire to lay tiles in your bathroom. There is quite a bit of focus in this doc on how this kind of thing was pretty important.
The doc takes a talking heads format, with contributions from many bands, including the likes of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Exodus and Death Angel. We learn about their influences, outlook and the places they hung out. It's a look at a type of music which began as pretty underground and remained decidedly non-mainstream even when some of the groups were selling lots of records. There didn't seem to be a lot of women involved - especially in the bands themselves - so inevitably the scene was a bit of a sausage fest. With this in mind, there are a disproportionate number of tales of quite tedious macho behaviour from some of the more bone-headed fans. This didn't overly surprise me as it reminded me of attending the Monsters of Rock festival back in 1988, where the entertainment between bands seemed to be members of the crowd launching projectiles in the air - this, I recall, resulted in my mate Andy being hit on the back of the head with a plastic cannister full of urine. I'd be willing to bet that you wouldn't get this kind of carry on at a Richard Marx concert.
All-in-all, this is a good music doc - its entertaining and informative, with a lot of bands covered. So, whether or not you are a fan of the genre, you should still get something out of this on purely a music history standpoint.
