In a recent interview with Brocarde, Dragonforce guitarist Herman Li discussed how he handles the occasional negative feedback he and his bandmates receive from fans on social media. It appears that he doesn’t care about the hatred anymore.
“I think we got much more negative comments when we first started to get known, as a new band that came in,” he explained. “When we had our big break, a lot of people confused the music, they couldn’t accept it. But these days it’s been really, really positive generally. I mean, I really don’t get that many nasty messages… For the nasty people that wanna send them, I’m not trying to say, ‘Wake up and do it again.’ But we’ve had a long career now and a lot of those people moved on in their life.”
“Unfortunately, for a lot of artists, it seems like a lot of the fans [don’t] look at them as like normal humans,” the rocker added. “They wouldn’t say these things in your face, because that would just be crazy, it would be like a crazy thing. And most of these people cannot understand that we’re just normal people and things do affect the artist’s life, what they write on the Internet. Luckily, I was told I’ve got some kind of superpower that I can suppress these things when I read them; it doesn’t bother me.”
Although ‘Through The Fire and Flames’ is the band’s most popular song today, it was hated when it first came out.
“We finished that song in November 2005. We treated it just like any other song,” Li explained in another interview. “I guess we found new ways of making weird noises, right? Like, the Pac-Man noise. We really went throughout and explored and used the guitar as much as we can to its full potential. All the whammy bar stuff, all the divebombs, from the weird noises, the elephant sound, you name it. The Pac-Man stuff, the ghost sound. It just became part of the album.”
“And funny enough, I remember when that album came out, on the Dragonforce forum, our own forum, people just hated it. They said, ‘This is terrible. This is the worst DragonForce album ever. The songs are terrible. It’s full of video game noises, blah blah blah.’ So whatever people say now, I have heard it all,” Li added.
The song was originally on the band’s third album, ‘Inhuman Rampage,’ but it wasn’t released as a single until more than six months later. The video features a now-famous guitar duel between Li and Totman with close-up shots of their solos, and it played a big part in the song’s success.
Another reason for its lasting popularity was its inclusion in the video game ‘Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.’ The game helped the song hit #87 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earn silver and platinum certifications in the UK and US. The song’s popularity also drove up sales of ‘Inhuman Rampage,’ and the album is now gold-certified in both the UK and US.