The Mediocre, The Bad, and The Ugly

Ah yes, the sub-genre (sub-sub-genre?) of crunkcore. Where shall I even begin? For those unfamiliar with the "explosion" (*see later note) of this underground sub-genre of sorts, let me briefly acquaint you. The most recognizable band to come out of "crunkcore", and they're not even REALLY crunkcore, would be 3OH!3, hailing from Boulder, Colorado. Shush girl, shut your lips, do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips? Ring a bell? I thought so.

Besides 3OH!3, the two most definitive bands of the genre I would say are brokeNCYDE and Millionaires. Go ahead, click on those links, check out their Myspaces, listen to a song or two, it'll be better for all of us if I don't attempt to describe their "music" (valleygirlvoiceovergaragebandtrack).

But look, I'm not looking to bash this "crunkcore" movement - trust me, there's enough of that floating around the internet for all of us. What I would like to do here, briefly, is to explore what I believe to be the silver lining of this 15 minutes of fame fleeting genre.

The explosion (*see?) of crunkcore has gotten a lot of people's panties in a twist. The contempt and general disdain for everything this genre represents, from shitty music to shitty style to shitty lyrics is abundant (see links in last paragraph), some even going as far as to say that a band like Millionaires is ruining music. Given, they're not being totally serious (I hope), but nonetheless, it's a little over-dramatic. True, this crunkcore movement has grown, quickly and greatly at that, in the past two years, BUT... this is still just a little blip on the little underground radar that is the indie/punk/pop/whateveryouwishtocallit scene. It's not even remotely CLOSE to being mainstream. So chill, haters, is what I say first.

Secondly, I am a firm believer that there cannot be good without the bad (evil?) I feel that in the past couple of years the underground punk scene has slipped into a trend of mediocrity of sorts. Sure, there were a handful of good bands that came out, but also an atrocious number of sub-par, listenable but without much musical merit bands that also made it big on the scene. The growing popularity of crunkcore in the past few years has spawned a lot of discussion, whether it be positive or negative, about the industry and the direction of music in general. Is the neon fashion/music scene going to take over? Of course not.

Why, you may ask. 1) Shitty music has no longevity. period. 2) Discussion is the key and gateway to the revival of good music. In the process of bashing all of these bands, it is inevitable that people have to begin to think about their own musical tastes and choices. If you think brokeNCYDE is so bad, is what you listen to that much better? Additionally, the contrast between a band like brokeNCYDE and say, Good Old War, is like night and day. Given when listening to the two bands one would think that they wouldn't exist in the same scene, but they do. It's all a part of that underground general emo/indie/punk scene. Just hear me out on this one.

Both brokeNCYDE and Millionaires were on Warped Tour this summer, which stirred up quite a bit of controversy. But think about it this way: a young, fresh-faced 13-year-old who discovered the Millionaires on Myspace and decided that they were totally awesome and thus will of course go see them at Warped Tour and hopefully meet them at a signing - well. the bands only play for half an hour, the show is at least eight hours long - it's INEVITABLE that our girl here will end up seeing other bands. True, it could be that she'll run from the Millionaires set to the brokeNCYDE set to the Attack!Attack! set, but perhaps she'll also be walking around and see Dear and the Headlights playing or punk veterans NOFX being ridiculous and as offensive as possible (Fat Mike, I'm looking at you).

The point that I'm trying to make is that, yes, crunkcore is not necessarily the best thing that has happened to music since the invention of GarageBand, but perhaps this is the jolt we needed in order to realize just how much good music there is out there, and what good music really IS.