THE METAL CRYPT INTERVIEW
Tell me a little about yourself. How did you first get into Metal, and how much would you say it has impacted your life?
My name is Jim and I run the YouTube Channel Ruthless Metal. Which is a heavy metal channel with around 50.000 subscribers. I've been promoting metal in various forms for almost 25 years now. I got into metal and hardrock as a kid. I remember seeing Metallica's One being played on MTV when I was about 10 years old and after that I became a Metallica fan and after buying all of their albums I got into Megadeth because of the Metallica ties and then I discovered that the sound that I liked so much was called 'thrash metal'.
So I started buying albums from bands that were labelled as thrash, Exodus, Testament, Kreator, Slayer and so on. This was in the mid to late 90's so there wasn't really any information to be found on this genre that besides perhaps in old magazines. There was no the metal archives, facebook or even youtube. Just a few sites that talked about metal in general. While my focus was more on thrash metal than anything else.
I loved the genre and I wanted to spread the word because I found the music so amazing, yet almost nobody knew about the genre besides perhaps the big four. So I started the first ever thrash metal site in 1998. Over the years I have interviewed 100+ thrash metal bands and written about 500 album reviews and I've written countless articles on the subject. So I've dedicated a lot of my life to the thrash genre.
In 2021 I started making metal content on YouTube but for some twenty plus years I have been promoting it in text.
I understand you initially started a website called Ruuth’s Inn back in 1998 that focused predominantly on Thrash Metal until it turned into a Facebook group. What’s the exact timeline for its run?
Yes, I uploaded the site to the internet in 1998 and I started writing album reviews and I did my very first interview in 2001 with the Swedish band The Haunted. Over the years I have interviewed bands such as Megadeth, Testament, Overkill, Sodom and a lot of other known bands. I also started a site in 2005 calles Swedish Metal From The Past, which focused on early 80's metal from Sweden and bands like Heavy Load, Gotham City, 220 Volt and such.
Around 2010 I kinda grew tired of the site and I had to pay to keep 'em online so all my sites were down for a few years.
In 2014 I put my sites online again. Fast forward to 2021. As a hobby project I started creating a documentary on Swedish Heavy Metal from the eighties. This era is one of my favourites, not only because I'm a Swede but I really think Sweden had one of the best metal scenes in the eighties but only a handful of bands were known outside the Swedish borders. I first thought of using Ruuth's Inn since it was a somewhat established name but I decided to go with Ruthless Metal because it made it easier to understand what the channel was about.
In March of 2021 I uploaded the Swedish Metal documentary to YouTube and since then the channel has grown far beyond my expectations and now some 14 months later the channel has over 50.000 subscribers. I just planned to do a video as a hobby project but it became viral so I decided to continue making videos since I saw that people had a hunger for some old school metal on YouTube.
Back when the site was still active, were there other contributors involved, or just you? If there were, do they still contribute to your YouTube videos?
It was like 98 percent just me. I had a few guys that wrote a review or two but I built it myself more or less. Per-Ola who made the top 25 doom metal list actually wrote a handful of reviews for my old site some 20 years ago. He is a former Sweden Rock Magazine journalist and he wrote the official Candlemass biography 'Behind the wall of doom' so he knows the doom metal genre better than anyone I've ever met.
So he contributed with that list, but so far I haven't done much collaborations, besides a few interviews in my 'New Wave of Metal' documentary about the NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal) movement.
What would you say is your most fond memory of the old website?
Mostly I'm proud over the work that I did. Back then in the 90's nobody cared for thrash and people were unaware about just about every thrash band outsite the big four. My site didn't change that but perhaps we had a small, small part in making people aware of the thrash genre.
In 1998 it was like winning the jackpot to find another human being that even knew what thrash metal was. I was in contact with about 10 people worldwide that were fans of thrash and heavy metal so fans like that was real hard to come by.
I doubt that there even was more than 10 thrash metal fans in Sweden in the late 90's. Now there are probably thousands of thrash metal maniacs out there. Which is a cool development.
What first inspired you to start the Ruthless Metal channel?
I ran a gaming channel 'JimRuthless' for about 2 years but I didn't get any views so I was growing tired of it and I decided to try to do a documentary on Swedish metal as I said earlier. That video took off so I decided to continue down that path instead. Plus I thought I had enough knowledge about metal to do a good job at it and when people are interested in the content that you make it was a no brainer to continue on.
It appears your first big hit was with the first part of the History of Swedish Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. Did you ever expect it to perform as well as it did?
No, my gaming videos rarely got over 10.000 views and gaming is probably more popular than 80's metal from Sweden so you just can't expect that. I had been doing YouTube for two years and I had more or less no success so when a video then goes viral with all the sudden then it's more or a surprise than anything else.
Several of my first videos got 100.000 views so my channel got monetized within a week. A task that some channels struggle with after doing YouTube for years. So I just went all in on making videos after that.
Currently, your best performing video is “Masters of Plagiarism” at nearly 700k views. What do you think has made this your most popular work so far?
I had to double check, damn we're nearly at 700k on that one, Last time I checked was at half a million so it is still a popular video. There are a few reasions I would say,
1. Metallica is huge and more or less all metal fans are into them or at least know about them.
2. The title 'Masters of Plagiarism' is kinda cheeky so it peaks people's curiosity.
I think those two were the main reasons and of course you need to be able to keep the viewer interested in watching the actual video by doing some smooth editing and delivering on what the thumbnail implies.
I also made a follow up video called Ride the Plagiarism so those videos kinda work in tandem and drives views between them. I did however use copyrighted audio so I personally don't make any cash from these videos but if it makes someone check out more of my work then it's a win for me as well.
Maybe I'll make a third video about it called 'Plagiarize 'Em All' some day, we'll see or even a 'Justice' For Metallica. Time will tell.
What is the typical process of deciding what video to make, and how does the creative process for it usually go?
I wrote down about 100 video ideas back when I started the channel. You have to get organized when you do YouTube and plan ahead and create things that you can use in several videos, streamline things like intros, outros, music, backgrounds and graphics. To shave off a few hours in the creative process. Plus it's just me making this videos and since there are thousands upon thousands metal bands out there it's impossible for me to know everything about every band out there, even though some people think of me as some sort of expert.
I might have heard like one percent of all the metal bands out there, so we're all fumbling a bit in the dark when it comes to a genre that has been going strong for some fifty years with thousands of metal records being released yearly.
So I talk about the bands that I know well and if I haven't listened to some of their more recent albums I take a month or so spinning those albums before I do a Rank 'Em All video. So the ideas are easy to come up with, what's hard is to give it a fair assessment. But on the other hand I don't try to hide the fact that I think that metal had it's peak during the 80's. But I guess most of my viewers have noticed that I rather do videos on Priest and Slayer more so than whatever is popular these days. But I also think that is a bit of my role on YouTube, guiding people away from the Slipknot's and the Marilyn Manson and the metalcore bullshit and into the bands that play metal by the old definition. Wheter it's heavy, speed, power, black, death, thrash or progressive metal.
Which videos are you most and least proud of respectively?
The New Wave of Metal is probably the video I'm most proud over since I worked on that videos for several months. That video is by far the one I've spent the most time on and I think it turned out great. Least proud over is when I make editing mistakes. Since I copy the layover effects between videos I forgot to change some things. Like in that Metallica master of plagiarism video it says that the Rush song Tom Sawyer was released in 76 or something when it came out in 1981. I've probably recieved a hundred messages about that alone. haha
So mistakes will be made and you can't change them after you've uploaded the video. That's what annoys me the most is when a factual error slips through and now it will be there until the end of time.
How would you say the underground as a whole changed over the course of your career/interest in Metal?
It's like day and night. The majority of people thought of bands like Nirvana, Pantera, Machine Head, Linkin Park, Korn and such as the next natural step in the progression of heavy music. All those became absolutely huge but I think something got lost in the 90's. I always thought so even through the NU metal phase when everybody jumped ship and started to get into that.
But towards the early 2000's we saw a lot of classic bands reuniting, Ozzy returning to Sabbath, Halford to Priest and Dickinson to Maiden. Plus a lot of fans had missed the days when metal singers wasn't just screaming into the mic.
I also think the internet saved metal in some sense. Now the information is out there and available for anyone so we're no longer fighting for our existance because these days the scene is almost getting over-saturated again.
How would you describe your relationship with the community you’ve built around the channel? Is it an active relationship, or do you try to keep it at arm’s length?
I answer 99% of all comments I get with the goal to answer every comment. But since I got like 4000 comments on my latest Metallica video. Then it's not possible for me to start discussions with everyone but I'll try to at least say 'Cheers' to those who comment. Sometimes I interact a bit more if the comment intrigues me. I think it's fun interacting with people and I also feel that it's my responsability as a YouTuber.
I try to answer the criticism too but when people starts their message with calling me an idiot or something like that then there isn't a conversation to be had. You wouldn't go up to someone and call them a moron or an idiot to their face and expect a courteous reply.
So when people do that in my comment section I send them back to poserwire, excuse me Loudwire and then I ban them. But most people don't act like morons online which is a bit of a relief. haha
What lies in store for Ruthless Metal in the future?
I don't know. I've decided to continue making videos over this summer. After that we'll see. Having a YouTube channel eats up all my spare time and I don't make enough money to live off my work. So it is a hobby for me and it takes up a little too much time for it to be part of a healthy lifestyle. So I might take a break after that or slow down the production of my videos. Unless people start joining my patreon in droves. haha.
I haven't had enough time for friends and my other interests lately so I need some time catching up on that too. But right now I'll take it day for day and we'll see how motivated I feel about it all in the autumn. No matter what, all the video content
will remain online so all the content ain't going nowhere even if I might start doing something else.
Thanks for taking the time to talk. Do you have any parting thoughts?
Thanks for the interview, check out the Ruthless Metal channel on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/ruthlessmetalYT
and the Ruthless Metal site at:
https://ruthlessmetal.blogspot.com
To quote Grim Reaper, See you in hell my friend! ;)
Cheers!
/Ruthless
Ruthless Metal Interview - The Metal Crypt
