Product placement and the Warped Tour stage at Nassau Coliseum. Photo by Anna Feitzinger.
By Bob Freville
Like $8 bottles of spring water? Enjoy heat exhaustion and snotty food vendors? How about shoving your way through a congested cadre of sweat-drenched, dehydrating teenagers dressed in belly shirts and short shorts that would give Richard Simmons pause? If that sounds like a gas, then Warped Tour is your ticket to ride.
Here you can see 133 indistinguishable bands whose only variation from one another is the classical instrument they throw into the mix to try and camouflage the fact that they are all yelling in the exact same way.
This is a rude generalization, from someone who is bitter from suffering sun stroke and having to slamdance his way through a feverish flotilla of angry teenagers who all wanted what I wanted—free water, from the spout of a water tank filled with God knows how much fluoride. The truth about the 2009 Vans Warped Tour line-up is that, like most festivals, there is at least one or two interesting bands for virtually any person’s taste, and this year was definitely owned by artists of the female gender. Groups like Meg & Dia and solo songstresses like Canadian transplant Lights brought a range of melody and emotion that was either absent or hidden beneath growls in the rest of the concert’s offerings.
The yodeling Romanian mellifluousness of Me Talk Pretty was the second best thing I experienced all day, after first witnessing a rabid group of teenage girls fighting over a band poster, tearing it into small shreds until the image of sullen boys with feathered hair was an amorphous coil of tattered tree pulp. Me Talk Pretty vocalist Julia Preotu riled up even the leathery olden-punks, scattered here and there like Waldos, with her clapping, sequined booty shakes and Euro-English.
Nearly every band in attendance lip-synced at least part of the time, loaning a tasteless Six Flags entertainment quality to what was supposed to be a raucous rock block of pure fury. They managed to get away with this vocal affront by drowning it out with thunderous guitar amplification. The general audience didn’t seem to notice, probably because this crowd has long since lost function or focus. These are the noise addicts whose cilia have been singed off and whose Eustachian tubes are thick with inflamed scar tissue from too many shows.
The first Warped Tour, in 1995, boasted a king’s ransom of brilliant alternative artists as talented and diverse as Sublime, Deftones, L7, No Doubt, Sick of it All, Swinging Utters and Orange 9mm, to name a few. By 2007 most of the great names had fallen off. NOFX stuck around for reasons I have to challenge the usually subversive Fat Mike on if I ever interview him again.
Last year saw sets from Angels & Airwaves, Gym Class Heroes, Bouncing Souls, All-American Rejects and The Vandals. The line-ups for this thing have gotten progressively worse and more obscure with each passing year. Which might seem more “punk rock,” or simply esoteric, if it wasn’t for the fundamental notion that these younger bands might have been duped into performing, where most of their forebears might not, because they are the benighted bastard youth who are unaware of the evils of Live Nation.
And even those who are aware of the media conglomerate that presents these turbid displays of consumerism gone grotesque are accepting rather than vengeful. “There’s always gonna be the big company running shit,” said Kelsey, lead singer of Kelsey & The Chaos, a recently signed band that is enjoying its second year playing one of the secondary stages at Warped Tour. “You gotta take it.”
Taking it means watching hardcore sociopolitical legends like Bad Religion and Anti-Flag delivering their lamest performances in years while merch booths blast mainstream R&B and security guards walk around with spare bottles of water in their back pockets, ready to dole out knuckle sandwiches if anyone deviates from the set pattern of jumping up and down and acting all giddy for a roster of second-rate screamers who claim to be “experimental” while throwing their voices out like Raybeez of Warzone (R.I.P.).
In 1981 trailblazing punkcore group Fear was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live by their acquaintance John Belushi. Their segment resulted in glorious mayhem when they invited skinheads to tear up the dance floor and left pumpkin remains all over stage equipment. It was the only time SNL faded out their telecast, to prevent the band from performing “Let’s Have a War” in its entirety. The segment was an epic and notorious middle finger salute to the television industry. It displayed a wonderful disregard for mainstream exposure.
Lee Ving and the new members of the enduring Fear have been part of this year’s Warped Tour, but they were mysteriously absent from the Coliseum stop. Meditating on the SNL appearance that was a defining moment of their rock ‘n’ roll career, it is hard to surmise one of the soggy pseudo-punk outfits of today getting away with something like this…or even attempting it.
Ivy League was one of the few bands that didn’t suck, but whose music was blatantly plundered from the vaults of some anonymous Jamaican act and given the Ajax treatment for a bunch of Caucasian cretins who would never know the difference. Still, they made you groove, whether you liked it or not, even going so far as to play percussion on aluminum garbage cans, for those of us who had a longing to be in the tunnels of Penn Station. And then they started flinging Discmans at the children like we were all at some knock-off of an Elks Club raffle.
Music wasn’t the point of this fine Live Nation presentation. The real aim of this year’s tour was to SELL. AT&T, Kia Motors and other corporate enterprises were all represented throughout the Nassau Coliseum grounds, pimping everything from temporary tattoos emblazoned with automobile decals to free karaoke opportunities at the AT &T booth.
The corporatization of punk is obvious, but not to the masses that show up. Which is why caravans of vendors get away with charging upwards of $25 for T-shirts and, also, why the blasting of Eminem and Rhianna from merch booth ghetto blasters goes unacknowledged and undisputed by the gullible children who think they’re enjoying a countercultural experience.
It’s a bad day for the scene when vainglorious, designer-clothes-obsessed transvestite Jeffree Star is the most punk rock thing out of more than one hundred acts to perform at your neighborhood rockaterium.
Bob Freville is the Associate Editor of kotorimagazine.com. To blacklist him from future shows e-mail him at: bob@kotorimag.com.
