There's A Problem

It’s always hard to see something that you care about a lot become a shadow of what it once was. This is definitely happening to a certain subgenre of punk music right now.

Right now my favourite genre is pop-punk/melodic hardcore stuff. You know like Lifetime, Bigwig, ALL, Strike Anywhere, etc., etc. This definitely wasn’t always the case. I went through my adolescence as a ska kid (not saying I hate ska, still listen to it all the time, and Less Than Jake is still my favourite band), and would even go to lengths to say how hardcore sucked. Granted a lot of bands considered to be “big hardcore” bands at the time really sucked, and focused on throwing in breakdowns and sour notes than any type of message. So when did this metamorphosis of ska to hardcore happen? Around the end of high-school and it was pretty much all because of one band.

I saw Set Your Goals open for Less Than Jake in the fall of 2006. I thought it was pretty cool that they had like pop-punk parts and the hardcore parts, but honestly just didn’t think that much of it. I showed them to a friend because I thought he would like them, and ended up downloading a few songs off their purevolume for free, because whatever they were free. I gradually started to listen to them more. After seeing them headline a show I became a full-fledged fan. Another thing really got me at the show. That was the crowd interaction and the energy of a “hardcore” show. There was basically no divide between the crowd and band. The two singers spent all of their time at the front, giving the crowd the microphone as much as they used it. The crowd was extremely into the music. I was used to kids dancing at shows, and a bit of a pit. Here the focus was on singing along and screaming every word of the lyrics as loud as you could. This was really got to me. Lyrics have always been my favourite part of music. I don’t really care if a band isn’t breaking new ground musically if their song-writers really know what they are doing. Case in point, this band. They wear their influences on their sleeve. It’s not hard to draw comparisons to Gorilla Biscuits, Lifetime, or for sure New Found Glory. But the band’s lyrics and message make it sound fresh.

Naturally after this I did everything I could to find other bands that were like this. The first one was actually a really small band from Florida called From Me To You who are broken up now, I’m pretty sure, but you should still check them out. Naturally I found bands like Four Year Strong, rekindled my love for New Found Glory, and came around to Lifetime after being told to get into them for a while. From it was a spider web effect, every new band I found led to other new bands and I was getting entrenched in a new scene. Suddenly the breakdowns, break-neck tempos, punishing riffs, and lack of any vocal finesse whatsoever of “true” hardcore started to appeal to me a lot more.

Set Your Goals and Four Year Strong began to gradually blow up, which I could have seen coming. Of course when bands get bigger they influence new bands to form and this is where I get to the main point of this ramble, the degradation of the whole pop-punk/hardcore genre.

The hardcore scene has always had a sixth sense of smelling bullshit on kids from a mile away, and some of these bands just reek of it. Five jocks from San Diego singing “welcome to the west coast, where we’re holding it down” just doesn’t have the same effect as, say Ari singing “I’m desperate tonight and I just wanna fight” in Turnpike Gates. There’s getting to be too many bands like City Lights, who more concerned with wearing sweet v-necks and having some lame ass un-needed breakdown than actual substance.

Granted, there are many new bands that also rule and stay true to principles. The Wonder Years are unashamedly poppy, have a synth player but still stay true to hardcore principles and play faster than any band I’ve heard recently. They got invited to play the Bamboozle but dropped off, saying that playing a large corporate festival would be against the reasons the originally started the band. I’m sure any one of the cookie-cutter poppy but still with some double kicks lead singer wearing a new era hat backwards neon album covered bands would have sold their souls to play that festival. But that is what separates the people who want to play music form the people who want to be in bands, if you get what I’m saying. It’s not about getting recognized or looking cool on stage; it’s about expressing yourself in a positive way.

Put down that Every Avenue album, and pick up a Living With Lions one.