Biohazard’s Billy Graziadei on Music Industry Changes Over Past Two Decades

Biohazard have influenced heavy music for decades, so when we caught up with guitarist and vocalist Billy Graziadei in his hometown of New York City, he talked all about the differences he noticed from Biohazard’s debut release in 1990 to their latest record ‘Reborn in Defiance.’

“There’s a lot of differences besides the fact that everything went from CDs to MP3s. The Internet wasn’t around when we started our debut album, so that’s changed. On our debut record, I remember physically mailing s–t to people around the world and meeting people that way so that’s a big change, we get tons of kids from Indonesia, from China reachin’ out to us that couldn’t happen back in the day” says Graziadei.

“The Internet made us all neighbors, especially in our sub-culture, in the music scene here, we’re all people that like similar music, that have similar ways of looking at life. We have similar cries for individuality, similar angst and dissatisfaction with the status quo outside .”

He goes on to say, “We have a sub-culture. I mean within sub-cultures you have different genres and s–t but pretty much we’re all like. We don’t want to be three piece suit wearin’ f—in chumps or chumpettes so we do what we do. Maybe you got a job where you got to wear a tie but on weekends you’re at a hardcore show or a metal show because you like the music, that’s us, this is ours. That binds people around the world and all of the communities and different chats, whether its MySpace or Facebook, that’s all because of the Internet.”

Graziadei concludes by saying, “There’s more differences than similarities between when our debut album came out and our new record ‘Reborn in Defiance,’ which is our ninth studio record, so I’m lookin’ forward to the 10th record and we’ve already been in the studio writing, we have a couple of new songs, we’re probably going to release them sooner than later.”

Check out our concert review and photo gallery of Biohazard’s headlining show in New York City. Stay tuned for our full interview with Billy Graziadei.