The Tokyo Concert Experience

  One of my favorite movies from Latin America is Rodrigo D - No Futuro . It’s a movie directed by Victor Gaviria and released in 1990. In a documentary style the movie follows the lives of disenfranchised youth in Medellin in the late eighties.The way these kids cope with the violent context they live in is with music, metal and punk music. Places like England, where punk started, cities like New York and to a way lesser degrees other areas associated with extreme metal like Norway and Sweden have some violent elements to them, but nothing can compare to Medellin in the eighties. That scene created a unique lo-fi merge of punk and metal that was a mirror to what those kids in cities like Medellin or Sao Paulo experienced. The tagline of the movie poster says it all: “is it death living this much?” Sepultura and other bands from Belo Horizonte, like Sarcofago perhaps didn’t experience poverty but they definitely witnessed it, it’s unavoidable when living in Latin America. Political...