[Daycare Nation]

I like Clap Your Hands, The Shins and Arcade Fire, and Jesus.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I noticed the word post-hardcore is starting to get mainstream too. But instead of referring to post 80's hardcore, it refers to post-now hardcore, which is just shitty emo kids screaming. WTF is this Norma Jean shit?

Sometimes I think that maybe I'm just not hip to the times. That if I don't like all this Interpol, Modest Mouse, Arctic Monkeys, Strokes, bullshit, maybe there is something wrong with me.

Reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, there was a lot of hate for New Wave and later on College Rock. But to me now, I see a lot of it has really delightful, consumable, pop music. Echo and the Bunnymen, Adam and the Ants, Elvis Costello, and in the realm of college rock the Pixies and They Might Be Giants. If I was in my teens or 20s when those bands came out, would I have dismissed them as pseudo-underground with a corporate sheen?

But then I think, do any of these indie bands have nearly as much texture about their music as the Pixies? Or can any of them scream like Adam Ant? Or write hooks like Gary Numan?

I'm trying to find the best way to say it, but I might as well be blunt: indie rock is boring. When indie rock singers scream or holler, it just sounds so unrocking. It is like they are fake screaming, and without any spirit, because these are completely brainless entities drugged out on some sort of SOMA like drug that doesn't affect your ability to play tightly in the key of boring slick digital corporate indie rock.

To me right now there are only a few bands making new music that really matter to me: Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, Shellac, TV on the Radio, (somehow in the indie genre but incredibly awesome) and Beck. That's it. If Gang of Four or the Pixies write new material, I'd add them to the list. I do like Lightning Bolt and Hella, but their music isn't very important to me.

To me, it seems with barely anything that matters, the thing to do is really define your own scene. "My Little Undeground" so to speak. With the internet and the advent of cheap recording, the air is polluted with so much schlock. With all this crap everywhere, I think we've really regressed to a sort of proto-punk sort of era. The support network flooded. A new one needs to be built.

[HaydenAsche]

Norma Jean's first album is great. FACT.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I've only heard a little bit by them.

I just got tired of my little pothead brother saying "punk and post-punk blows, you should listen to some hardcore like Norma Jean and Leftover Crack man." Then he'd go hang out with a bunch of kids who I to this day cannot tell apart because everyone dresses and does their hair the same.

I bought him Black Dots last Christmas so he'd know what real hardcore was. He stopped listening to it fairly quickly, and now it is a member of my collection. His loss.

[HaydenAsche]

Leftover Crack and Norma Jean aren't comparable. The new cd and old one sound completely different. There are good bands in every genre. Converge and early-Norma Jean are examples of good hardcore bands.

[Norma J]

Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child is a really good album. They then got a new singer as the one on said album formed another band: The Chariot. Oh God the Aftermath is a good album, but I prefer the debut alot more.

You Fail Me by Converge is a really good album.

[Everyneurotic]

luti kriss (pre-norma jean) and the chariot sound like the mouth of hell oscillating, meaning it sounds awesome.

[HaydenAsche]

Originally Posted by Norma J

Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child is a really good album. They then got a new singer as the one on said album formed another band: The Chariot. Oh God the Aftermath is a good album, but I prefer the debut alot more.

You Fail Me by Converge is a really good album.

The Chariot put on one of the most fantastic live albums I've ever seen. Josh is a super nice guy. My friend has the old guitar player's broken guitar from when the played in town here a year or so ago.

I love how a Christian band sounds like the mouth of hell. They are fantastic.

[strictlycommercial]

Maybe things work out easier if you consider a genre not as something a band/song belongs to, but something it interacts with?

I think Arcade Fire have a great album in them somewhere, but Funeral isn't it.

[HaydenAsche]

The EP could have been a wonderful album.

[fishmonkey]

i love Arcade Fire, Bloc Party on the other hand can suck my balls.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by fishmonkey

i love Arcade Fire, Bloc Party on the other hand can suck my balls.

You know they'd love that as well.

I don't get the hate for Arcade Fire. They're one of the few indie bands with a decent approach to drums that are about today. More love for decent drumming please.

[gmku]

I'm hanging on to my Arcade Fire, Shins, BSS, and New Pornographers, in spite of everything. I heard a Shins song from the last LP on the radio over lunch and decided it was pretty good. Maybe you just have to be in the mood. I seem to be in a much harder "rock" place these days. I pretty much don't trade anything anymore, even the cheesiest stuff, becuz I've learned in my 30 odd years or so of collecting that you never know what you might get a hankering to listen to.

[DJ Rick]

Originally Posted by SpectralJulianIsNotDead

I noticed the word post-hardcore is starting to get mainstream too. But instead of referring to post 80's hardcore, it refers to post-now hardcore, which is just shitty emo kids screaming. WTF is this Norma Jean shit?

What's happened to the word "hardcore" is a perfect example of the streamlining or narrowing of a genre which changes a word's definition. I never thought I'd see a day when I'd have an argument with someone half my age about what is "hardcore," but now it has happened, as certain myopic kids who misguidedly subscribe to rigidly segregated genre ghettos wanna re-characterize the original "hardcore" of the years 1980-1985 as "hardcore punk."

The whole emocore/screamo, metalcore, and melodic hardcore thing were the ingredients that combined to form this stuff. It's gotten kids away from the DIY punk ethos and rawness of the original HC...all the way to the point where that is actually something to be vilified. And yet, some of the first bands to begin leading toward this trend are totally redeemable. Converge, for one.

As far as it "starting to get commercial," it's waaayyyy beyond that point when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a Fred Meyer store in rural southeast Oregon, and the young men's clothing section is full of distress-dyed hoodies with asymmetrical screenprints of feathered skulls on them. In fact, I was just at the Fred Meyer in Klamath Falls, OR, on my recent roadtrip, and I saw this helplessly nerdy kid out back-to-school shopping with his farmer dad and ultra-frump mom. He was trying so hard to get some of those shirts and hoodies with those prints.

"Mom, what about this?" the kid asked, eyebrows raised in hopeful excitement.

"No way!" mom snapped. "Too goth!"

Reaching for a compromise, kid held up a Nike shirt with a small swoosh overshadowed by a strong "NIKE" inscripted in large orange-glowing outlines and the look of a wrought-iron "NIKE" brand.

"How about this?" he pleaded.

Mom: "That's still too goth!"

Kid: "Do you know what it says?"

Mom: "Nike...I can read."

Kid: "Well, it can't be too goth if you can read it."

Seriously, though...the uniform of Avenged Sevenfold is available in every big box store. By and large--so I'm not talking about anyone here specifically--youth don't know how to rebel anymore. It actually started with my generation, the first to be marketed corporate-controlled rebellion since the "psychedelic era" of 1967-1968 that permeated pop culture. We had "grunge." And since then, with "nü-metal" and "rage rock" and now this "post-hardcore" crap, corporate-controlled rebellion continues, and it only truly counts as rebellion in places like Klamath Falls, OR, where parents never caught up to understanding "grunge"...and other places where the local Bible store is the only bookstore around.

[HaydenAsche]

Shut up, gothy.

[DJ Rick]

Too much lecturing and "I was there!" posturing can't get in the way of mutual appreciation of KK Rampage.

[HaydenAsche]

That's becaue KK Rampage is phenomenal.

[porkmarras]

Originally Posted by DJ Rick

Music that is diversely influenced may become diversely influential, and on the other hand, music that is narrowly influenced most likely will become an evolutionary dead-end.

You couldn't be anymore right about this.The real problem with the so-called crap indie bands that prolificate 'on the scene' is that ultimately they are very much their own worst enemy for the limitations that having limited influences implies.The reason why they don't bother me at all is because there is an invisible 'sell by date' attached to their records,existence etc etc.

[Norma J]

Originally Posted by DJ Rick

What's happened to the word "hardcore" is a perfect example of the streamlining or narrowing of a genre which changes a word's definition. I never thought I'd see a day when I'd have an argument with someone half my age about what is "hardcore," but now it has happened, as certain myopic kids who misguidedly subscribe to rigidly segregated genre ghettos wanna re-characterize the original "hardcore" of the years 1980-1985 as "hardcore punk."

The whole emocore/screamo, metalcore, and melodic hardcore thing were the ingredients that combined to form this stuff. It's gotten kids away from the DIY punk ethos and rawness of the original HC...all the way to the point where that is actually something to be vilified. And yet, some of the first bands to begin leading toward this trend are totally redeemable. Converge, for one.

As far as it "starting to get commercial," it's waaayyyy beyond that point when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a Fred Meyer store in rural southeast Oregon, and the young men's clothing section is full of distress-dyed hoodies with asymmetrical screenprints of feathered skulls on them. In fact, I was just at the Fred Meyer in Klamath Falls, OR, on my recent roadtrip, and I saw this helplessly nerdy kid out back-to-school shopping with his farmer dad and ultra-frump mom. He was trying so hard to get some of those shirts and hoodies with those prints.

"Mom, what about this?" the kid asked, eyebrows raised in hopeful excitement.

"No way!" mom snapped. "Too goth!"

Reaching for a compromise, kid held up a Nike shirt with a small swoosh overshadowed by a strong "NIKE" inscripted in large orange-glowing outlines and the look of a wrought-iron "NIKE" brand.

"How about this?" he pleaded.

Mom: "That's still too goth!"

Kid: "Do you know what it says?"

Mom: "Nike...I can read."

Kid: "Well, it can't be too goth if you can read it."

Seriously, though...the uniform of Avenged Sevenfold is available in every big box store. By and large--so I'm not talking about anyone here specifically--youth don't know how to rebel anymore. It actually started with my generation, the first to be marketed corporate-controlled rebellion since the "psychedelic era" of 1967-1968 that permeated pop culture. We had "grunge." And since then, with "nü-metal" and "rage rock" and now this "post-hardcore" crap, corporate-controlled rebellion continues, and it only truly counts as rebellion in places like Klamath Falls, OR, where parents never caught up to understanding "grunge"...and other places where the local Bible store is the only bookstore around.

I somewhat agree. Although you're clumping a whole heap of bands and 'genres' together when alot of the bands and genres are different. The kids are the ones who make the labels, not the bands. Some bands just like the image like Avenge Sevenfold etc. But there is a huge difference between Converge, Poison the Well, and Norma Jean compared to Avenge Sevenfold and the likes, yet they get clumped together because the kids have to have a scene. It like the Blood Brothers said: "The Kids are spoiled rich and don't know shit from shit". It's sad that alot of these awesome bands are now popular within the 'emo' scene, because that scene is totally superficial.

I say listen to what you like. Music is like politics these days. People only sticking to their clique and image.

[Glice]

Kids don't know how to rebel any more? I think that's cack. Not because it's untrue of this generation, but because it implies there was a generation that did rebel. Kids still don't get on with their parents. Kids still resist their parents. In terms of a 'culture' of 'rebellion', kids will always believe that their generation is resisting the older generation, which they always do. The problem is that 'rebellion' is always part of being a stupid teenager, rather than a genuine thing. For all the first generation British punks I know, not a single one held true to its 'revolutionary' ethos. All the ex-hippies I know have short hair and 4x4's. The idea that any generation ever had anything other than a fake revolution is ridiculous to me.

No offence and all that, but I think it's such a risible sentiment, 'kids don't know how to rebel any more'.