BrokeInCider.

It was my friend Luke who one fateful winters night cajoled me over facebook chat to simply type in Brokencyde into youtube and tell him my thoughts. If you haven't heard of Brokencyde you are too old to care about any of this so just go on living this doesn't concern you. As for the rest of us between the ages of about 17 and 27 this is very much our problem, how did we let this happen!? This is our watch, were meant to be stopping this kind of thing! Never mind fucking global warming or over fishing or the gazillion other really really important things we should be filling our time with this should for the moment be our number one priority. I know we can't just blame ourselves but did we stop believing in everything so much that we thought it would go without consequence. Did we become so overly introverted and nihilistic that we didn't notice what was happening beneath our very noses? Firstly lets look at how it happened and then we shall figure out why and then what we can do about it.


What seems to have happened here is someone found a dusty old Motley Crew record languishing in their parents attic and borrowed their older brothers vinyl player to play it. Now Motley Crew were a great old laugh in the 80's, snorting columbia dry, banging girls and generally being irreverent rock n roll bad boys. It was the 80's that's cool and all, greed is good, mass consumption, MTV, blah blah blah. Great. If the popular line of thought is to be believed then at around 11:59pm December 31st 1989 Nirvana came along and took a giant flannel coloured dump all over that. Then I don't know Eddie Vedder kicked Nikki Sixx cock off with his Doc Martins or something. I'm not a music historian, whatever the 90's happened, it was great, Hanson showed us all the true meaning of rock n roll, Dawsons Creek showed us it was ok to cry and in the most punk move of the decade Prince became a symbol that looked like alien cooking utensil. Blinding.


The of course we had the whole 'emo' thing come around Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, Saves The Day, etc etc leading millions to complain more about emo than emo complained about itself. Even so at last count there were over 649 million solo white boys with acoustic guitars kicking out the G, C, D on myspace. Looking back there really wasn't that much wrong with this, I mean it wasn't exactly awesome but it wasn't exactly questioning my belief in humanity and although it has taken me many years to be able to admit it Brand New were a really good band who I secretly listened to at the time.


Of course while the whole mass market emo thing was exploding and even throughout the 90's the face of hip--hop was changing. Now I don't know much about hip-hop but I know N.W.A and Public Enemy were really awesome, had a social conscious and made a real impact. Somewhere a long the way this took a back seat to a rather skewed view of both poverty and wealth somehow co-habiting one person. I've never been able to quite get my head around why some rappers seem so proud to wear audaciously grotesque jewelery, make such obvious and cheap caricatures of women and generally act like neolithic barbarians while still claiming some kind of artistic entitlement because they are 'from the streets.' Maybe that's why I don't listen to mainstream hip-hop too much. Of course really it's all synthetic aspirationalism that sells the fantasy of having lots of power and money, hip hop at it's worst is the most soulless capitalist circle jerk there ever was. The irony of it is that the poverty they are supposedly making reference to is a direct result of a capitalist society. But the feverish individualism adhered to by the mainstream rap artists plays into this system and seems self defeating. just a thought.


Anyway emo came to an gradual end by really being a victim of it's own success, on one side of the coin you have My Chemical Romance who are like Motley Crew playing Hanson songs and Bring Me The Horizon who are like an overweight cat being anally raped by a hippo. So finally we come to Brokencyde, what I presume was some guy in a record label did was say 'hey, you know kids are big into this nonsensical bling, bitches, hoes thing and they also like the whole flippy haired tattoo'd guy screaming, lets but them together and make some money.' Which in fairness is there job and so the spunked about Brokencyde.


Lets pretend for a minute that Brokencyde have some actual qualities as far musicians and artists. For a start I like how you can't really figure out if they are taking themselves seriously or if they even have souls. I mean that's a fun thing to do, I find that interesting, figuring out if people are indeed demons sent directly from hell to taunt humanity. Dane Cook for example. Hey you never know, the guitarist could be a reincarnation of Hitler! Secondly they have a great sense of irony, calling their record 'I'm not a fan, but the kids like it' some label intern is patting their back real hard over that one. All their songs revolve around the premis of getting drunk and sleeping with lots of girls, basically a 14 year olds wet dream but at it's heart it's just weird. It's a very very odd thing to have been invented. They have these lyrics that don't make any sense, a obvious marketing stratergy directed a younger teens and rip off the old thrash hardcore type graphics if they were drawn by teletubbies. It all kid of leads to them looking like a Scandinavian euro-pop band. They sound a bit like a euro-pop band to, like Aqua meets slayer. You see how much fun it is to poke fun at this, this is what they want you to do. I could go on all day but I want to try and be serious about this. ahem.


This really is what my major point is, I mean it's great to be sarcastic and try to offend as many people as possible while your young but so long as when you do it you're doing it for the right reasons. There's nothing right about Brokencydes music, their attitudes or their aesthetic style, there is nothing new or fresh, we aren't going to look back in twenty years time and think Brokencyde were a ground breaking moment for music. I'd like to use the example of The Clash here, I'm sure back in the late seventies people were saying exactly of I was saying about them but at least The Clash had something to say, which is what made them so important to music as a whole. Of course that isn't what Brokencyde want, they just want all the money, yo. The thing is it's moronic lowest common denominator drivel about nothingness, it's a vapid cassum which reflects perhaps the aspirations of people today. I'm waxing lyrical here but if Brokencyde have 39 million plays on myspace there clearly are people relating to this music and the fact is while grunge, nu-metal, emo or whatever other flash in the pan musical fad is popular for the next couple of years, could stand up and at least have a microcosm of talent and integrity not matter how far Brokencyde (and the million other bands who will no doubt follow them) stick their tongues into their cheeks it's all really there just to hide the fact that they don't have anything to say or offer anyone other than they are making someone somewhere a lot of money. If the people who listen to Brokencyde choose not to see this or simply don't care then thats their problem and even as I write this I sound old and moaning about the kids and their music, like I'm not in on the joke. I get the joke and I'm bent out of shape about it because it's just lame. It's kind of how I feel about skins and most youth based things these days, it seems that they are just forced a unsubtle image of sex and drugs and beer and sex and a life which was once unattainable fantasy (like Motley Crew) is now shown on their suburban doorsteps. Where's the fucking chance to grow up questioning these things and being nervous and scared and unsure about everything, god knows my teenage years were fucking hard enough without some twat in a neon tshirt telling me he's having sex every minute of every day and I should be to and if I was cool I would be. Fuck that. So what can we do about it?


Well not a lot really, I feel like we as a generation of people fucked up left right and centre, we were too interested in myspace and making stupid acroynms, lol, and being brootal or listening to crappy hip-hop, I think this is the result of our vanity, our self obsession, our increased isolation from the real world. Either that or sex sells, things that piss off your parents are awesome and boyz in neon shirtz r lyk sooo cute!!! When really this is all nothing new deep down and that is probably the most depressing thing about it.