LOS ANGELES – Slash is known for his hats, and recently he’s been wearing a good many of them — specifically as a producer on new horror film “Nothing Left to Fear,” the composer for that same soundtrack, the head of his own Slasher Films and a touring and recording musician. He, in fact, was touring to support his most recent solo outing as “Nothing Left…” was being shot.
The legendary guitarist spoke to HitFix this week about the film, but also took the time to take rock ‘n’ roll of recent days to task for its problem with mediocrity. Slash gave a hand to Black Sabbath, Alice in Chains and Queens of the Stone Age (plus a little backhand to Avenged Sevenfold) for their latest albums, but said, overall, “rock is in a really bad way.”
“Everybody’s conforming to the industry standards,” he said in talking about the current state of his longstanding genre. He said the industry gives no room to development, and has an overemphasis on the creation of a hit off the bat. “Younger bands can’t even get a record made… in order to make a hit record out of the box, you gotta copy everybody else that’s making hit records.”
He called pop artists like Katy Perry “genuinely good” but the domination of pop has given rock a formula problem.
Watch the excerpt from our interview above, and stay tuned later this week for the complete interview on “Nothing Left to Fear,” horror films, Slash’s next solo album with Myles Kennedy and more.