I recently attended the Vans Warped Tour thanks to recieving free tickets. I haven't been in a few years due to being busy with my previous summers, so I was actually pretty stoked to re-live some enjoyment from my near past!
After looking at the band line up, I realized that I've never heard of half of these new bands that were going to be playing the festival. I decided to check them out on Myspace and first thing i noticed was the amount of gimmicks plus bright neon colors that are being used. Hopefully their music would be a lot better than their image, which didn't happen to be the case. Where did all of this horrible "scrunk" scene come from and is this what kids like these days? I'm glad the tour wasn't just those types of bands, so my day for sure wouldn't be entirely bad.
My Warped day started off with seeing the brightest rainbow of a line up ever of kids waiting to get inside. It was a sea of neon colors and in your face shirt designs. I guess no one wears basic band shirts anymore. Also the hairstyles have gotten more ridiculous now. The last time I went to Warped Tour like 3 years ago, it was mainly mohawks and reverse mullet (or "emo" as the common term thrown around) hairstyles. Now you have huge hair in random colours that stick out in every direction looking like a huge atrocity that's striving for attention. On top of that, the amount of boys using makeup (an excessive amount of makeup i might add) seems to outshine the girls attending the show. I guess they never got the memo that wearing loads of makeup all day to a sweaty outdoor music festival in the blistering heat isn't the smartest idea.
I finally get in and made a list of bands to watch. I had plans on checking out Bad Religion, Hit The Lights, Bayside, Gallows, A Day To Remember, Alexisonfire, NOFX, InnerPartySystem and Less Than Jake. I was also planning on walking around and randomly checking out all these newer bands out of curiousity.
After checking out random acts like Breathe Carolina and Attack Attack, I can't believe the amount of bands that use live-autotune on this tour! They don't even hide it too by even leaving it on inbetween songs when chatting with the crowd. The crazy thing is that the audience eat it up and don't seem to give a shit. Just when i thought things couldn't get any worse, I stumbled upon Brokencyde and the Millionaires. These people don't even play any instruments other than their iPods spitting out generated beats. Even the lyrics are terrible and shouldn't be heard by all the little 14 year old girls due to the misogynistic content, as well as encouragement of drug abuse and sexual content. It pains me to see that these "bands" on the smaller stages have a much bigger crowd than bands like Bad Religion and Bayside. Other than all the lame bands i ran into on this tour, it was great to see the majority of the bands on my list who can actually play real music. I hope Warped Tour isn't going into this whole "crunk-neon" phase for next year as well because I definitely wouldn't pay money to attend this year. This festival isn't nearly the same as it was before. One more thing, I picked up a pretty sweet shirt that says "Fuck You And Your Neon Shirt" in the most basic way without any sort of fancy design. It's good to know that other people associated on the tour feel the same way as me.
After my Warped 2009 experience, it makes me worried about the state of the music industry we’re in now. Like all fads, they always fade away in the near future but this time it’s a little different. The amount of popularity of the whole excessive use of autotune and fake playing instruments has skyrocketed in such little time. It seems like everyone is using it now and those bands are the ones dominating in popularity which is putting on a hurt on real bands that want to write/play real music. Do people not care about integrity anymore? It seems like any kid with Garageband on their computer can start a band now with no musical talent at all. Do yourselves a favour and boycott these newer fake bands.
-LouderLoudest
