Recently talking to BraveWords, former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth said he’s “not a big fan of metal”, and moreover, metal “didn’t really bring that much new” stuff to the table.

Here’s what Roth said:

“I put some Hendrix vibrato into Vivaldi, and to some puritan people in the classical world, that’s absolute sacrilege and the height of bad taste. I’m guilty of this, and I’m a little bit proud of it because I think the end result was quite exhilarating. At least for my ears! […]

“There would be no heavy metal without bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin up front. But all of these are completely different from what metal is nowadays. They were a lot more daring, they were a lot more dangerous in the true sense of the word because all that stuff had never been done before. It felt that way.

“I remember what it felt like to listen to Jimi Hendrix back then, it was revolutionary, the sound. Now, the metal of the ’80s and ’90s became a lot more corporate. It became, they used more aggression, louder, faster, whatever – thinking that this would make it more ‘dangerous’. But, to me, it isn’t. […]

“So metal actually didn’t really bring that much new. I felt it was, in a way, a step back. Because all these bands like Cream, Hendrix, these trailblazers, Led Zeppelin... Of course, the Yardbirds very early on. But also then, later, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, they all had one thing in common, they were playing loud, wild, The Who, but extremely dynamical within that.

“Now, this dimension of dynamics, in metal it doesn’t exist. The foot is always, the pedal is, always at 120. Not at 110, at 120. The speed is very often, like, totally over the top, and everything is hyper-distorted and hyper-aggressive, down to the last minute detail. So, it’s almost like a caricature of what it once was, and that is what it sounds like to me. That’s why I’m not a fan of metal, never have been.”