AUDIO FLIES - The Metropolitan

Media manipulation killing pure punk
SARAH CONWAY
sconway6@mscd.edu

    The progression of punk rock went terribly awry at some point. A genre once underground, mysterious and shared among friends through mix tapes, has become more about the eyeliner than the heart, more about trends than progress and more about who you know than what you know. It has become rehash and the media is shedding light on a genre that was once the enigmatic minority.
    Is it safe to say the media is “ruining” the scene? Perhaps. Certainly, what started as a handful of artistic, politically driven bands that could care less if they made it onto TRL, has become a scene saturated with shallow-minded scenesters hypnotized by MTV.
    Fashion trends have made it OK to call a bunch of self-proclaimed “musicians” with some makeup on and a few ties around their necks, “punk rock.” Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was about the music.
    “ I think that we as a society question our existence and purpose, but the current music scene doesn’t reflect that,” said Alison Powell, a sales representative on the Vans Warped Tour. There are a lot of thoughtful, socially conscious musical entities, but that’s just not what’s popular right now. The current trend is an extremely bland, watered down version of bands using fashion as a way to get their music heard, and I think that’s irresponsible.
    Of course, there’s always the technological side of things. Some may say that buying music online is a detriment to the integrity of music, while others view it as the source of their musical identity. Through the Internet, we have the power to lazily type in a search for the latest top 10 lists and have them sent right to our desktops to tell us what to listen to. But, it seems we have lost the tenacity and the perseverance to go out and decide for ourselves what “good” music is. We have lost the drive to do a little digging.
    “ TV and radio have had a huge part in depicting what should be accepted as good music,” said 24-year-old Brad Schmitt, a life-long fan of punk rock. “The music industry looks for a certain sound that happens to be popular, the record labels pick up on this and they go out and sign as many bands that have this sound as possible. Those who listen to music just because it’s there, not because it means something to them, don’t really care how revolutionary a band is.”
    Unfortunately, the convenience of the Internet has inadvertently created laziness. Typing in a few key search criterion has become more appealing than going out to an actual record store, talking to an actual person, feeling the smooth, unopened plastic wrapping stick to your palm and knowing that there’s (at minimum) an hour and a half that needs to be set aside to get to know the actual people behind the project.
    That laziness is subsequently reflected in the bands people choose to listen to. People just aren’t up for a challenge anymore. They would rather listen to what’s familiar and universal, not what’s changing, or at least challenging their beliefs.
    “ Call me an elitist, but I think that music should challenge or at least reflect social change instead of sticking to pop-driven songs about girls and broken hearts,” Powell said.
    If it’s too deep or philosophical, it’s just not worth the effort to take the time to understand it.
“ I think there are bands out there that are just too intelligent and too diverse for people to grasp,” said Ashley Dechter at Complete Control Radio. “Thrice is the prime example. They don’t push the bar, they set the bar. And for kids that just seems too hard to swallow. The time signatures, the lyrics, the instrumentation, its just seems to be too much. It takes a little work to fully understand what their music is about and people just don’t want to put the time or effort in.”
    Whether the effort is there or not, bands that even require effort are few and far between. And while the majority of kids can’t seem to scratch the idea that popular equals good, those who have, have managed to maintain the ideology that was definitive of punk rock from the very beginning, that music doesn’t have to be popular, it just has to stand for something.
    “ Music has lost a lot of its purity, or maybe I’ve just lost my naïveté about it,” Powell said. “The more bands I meet and become friends with, the more I realize that it’s a business and not an innocent approach to pure sound creating feeling and emoting change.”