“They just happened to sound like someone else, but that’s not their fault. So, stop it”: Tobias Forge defends Greta Van Fleet – and says the future of rock is bright
Is rock ‘n’ roll dead? Well, despite some – including Kiss‘s Gene Simmons, thinking it is – Ghost frontman Tobias Forge believes the future of rock music is bright.
In a new interview with Consequence, Forge insists that the next big rock ‘n’ roll act is just waiting in the wings.
“I think it was Gene Simmons that said it most times, but a lot of people have said that rock ‘n’ roll is dead and there will be no new headliners,” he says. “I understand that it’s been sparse, but I think that with the unfortunate disappearance of a lot of [legacy] bands… I do believe that with time I think that there will be more [headlining rock] bands.”
READ MORE: Why does Greta Van Fleet’s music sound so much like Led Zeppelin?
With genre veterans like Kiss breaking up after 50 years, it’s certainly time for new blood to enter into the rock world. Forge points to the likes of Sleep Token, Måneskin and Greta Van Fleet as those bearing this flag.
“They are all new bands. I think they prove that you can absolutely go places. You can form a band tomorrow and theoretically become a big band within a few years. I think you do so by trying to want to create something.”
In Forge’s eyes, there’s somewhat of a prejudice towards new bands. “I think that there’s this strange time phenomenon that happened somewhere in the 2000s where everything that was sort of old was ‘old’, and everything that came after was ‘new’,” Forge explains.
It’s something Forge chalks up to age. Older music fans often abide by the rock and metal “hierarchy”, Forge notes. “There’s this idea in large swaths of metal community that the hierarchy is based on age,” he says. “[Post-2000s bands] just keep on being labelled as new, especially by people who at the time were in their 20s or 30s or 40s and now are in their 40s, 50s, 60s.”
He goes on to defend Greta Van Fleet, who Rolling Stone labelled ‘expert forgers’ in 2018 for sounding like Led Zeppelin. The band have been labelled as ‘derivative’ since they first hit the rock scene. “I don’t wanna hear anything about Greta Van Fleet now, because I think that their intentions are true,” he insists. “They just happened to sound like someone else, but that’s not their fault! So, stop it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Forge harks back to Avenged Sevenfold’s Download Festival headline debut in 2014. Much like with Greta Van Fleet, it felt like another form of older fans rejecting anything they consider to be ‘new’, regardless of a band’s quality.
Forge has found that younger rockers feel less prejudice towards ‘new’ bands, as they grow up with them. “If you ask a lot of our fans who are 15 years old now, just the fact that our band has been around for 15 years, do you think that they think that we are a new band?” he says. “No! And that’s how it should be.”
Of course, Forge is aware that certain acts – including Ghost – receive flack for being inspired by the ‘old’ bands. But, in his eyes, plenty of up-and-coming acts take their inspiration as a springboard, forging something entirely new.
“I understand that we’re just a Mercyful Fate/Blue Öyster Cult/Alice Cooper wannabe band,” he jokes. “But you need to do something new. Don’t look at your one idol and say, ‘I wanna be like him. I want to be like her. I want my band to sound exactly like that band.’ That’s most likely not gonna get you anywhere.”
The post “They just happened to sound like someone else, but that’s not their fault. So, stop it”: Tobias Forge defends Greta Van Fleet – and says the future of rock is bright appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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