The Never-Ending List Of Bands That Suck, Pt. 3

First Published 9-2-09

12. Emmure
Four words: Generic breakdown deathcore garbage. Every song this entire band ever wrote is just one long breakdown. You listen to their album, and it’s just one long breakdown. I have something to say which I’m sure is about to offend every deathcore fan ever: Breakdowns are fucking stupid. It seems like every time some cut-and-paste deathcore band gets a decent riff going, they let it play for maybe ten seconds, and then “OMG BREAKDOWN TIME GET LOW!”, totally ruining the only part of their music that’s worth listening to. Its intentional self sabotage. I get it once in a while, to mix things up if done right. But repeatedly hearing the same note being played once every few seconds with the singer screaming something generic like “NO MORE LIES!” or “I NEVER LOVED YOU!” isn’t music, it’s emo bullshit. It doesn’t sound good, but that doesn’t stop this talentless fuck band from doing it constantly. Breakdowns take no skill to perform, which probably speaks volumes about this band, and the genre in general.

Another thing that pisses me off about breakdowns is that they have effectively replaced and shit all over the greatest, most metal tradition in history: the fucking solo. The guitar solo embodies everything that is shred, thrash, glam, classic, black, death, and just plain awesome about metal. Without the solo, metal would not have come as far as it did. Given the fact that the solo embodies metal, deathcore is phasing out the solo for the godawful breakdown. The only viable conclusion is that deathcore is going to be the downfall of metal. Do your part to keep the scene alive, lynch a deathcore fan today!

13. Killswitch Engage
So, I am not a fan of Killswitch Engage, but nor am I a hater, per se. I have little opinion of them; however I won’t listen to them on my own accord. The primary reason they are on this list is due to an unspeakable crime they committed against the world of rock: They butchered a Ronnie Dio song. Their cover of Holy Diver is worse than the stench at a Nicki Minaj concert, and the accompanying video is even worse. If you have never before seen the video, imagine a Lawrence Fishbourne body double starring in a middle ages-themed gay porn.

It breaks my heart to see Dio himself endorsing this kind of audio harassment to the senses. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

14. Jeffree Star

As referred in an earlier article, being gay doesn’t give you special privilege. Taking this into account, we are left with a cross-dressing drag freak designer queen who also thinks it can write music. A viable comparison would be that Star is nothing more than a pink Marylin Manson. They are both blatantly terrible, dance around in makeup and gender-defying outfits and stunts to the horrible Hot Topic fan service music they write. Who the hell writes a song about Louis Vitton? What kind of bullshit is that? The only people I know who like this trash are entitled gays and the preteens who love them.

The syringe-in-a-cupcake logo simultaneously says a lot and nothing at all. What it does convey is some sketchy message about drugs and pastries that I feel perfectly comfortable never fully understanding. Of course, Jeffree pulls off its clown makeup better than John Wayne Gacy ever did and walks around in nine-inch heels disturbingly better than most women. It is a marketing wet dream for the ultra-lib Hollywood group, the bright pinks, excess, and buttsex is EXACTLY the message we wish to convey to the young, impressionable kids who one day want to be famous, or losers. I mean, if a child willingly comes to that conclusion, then it’s their vice. But that doesn’t mean you should jam it down their throats all the time and practically brainwash them into thinking that way. I feel like the amount of fame Jeffree Star is getting just for being a gender-bending shock-model, and the fact that growing up in the Hollywood modeling scene created him is doing just that. But in Hollowwood, you need to be exactly that: hollow. You need no talent to be famous, it’s obvious these days. Just look at all these people who are famous for being nothing useful: Megan Fox, Perez Hilton, Barack Obama, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, Corey Taylor, Halle Berry, Lady Gaga, Shia LaBeouf, and…

15. Greenday
I was a freshman in High School when Greenday rose to prominence with their “politically charged” album “American Idiot.” I remember those days well, as the most infuriating days of my life. Seemingly overnight, every dim-witted mouth-breathing stoner in my school was suddenly a maverick political activist. Being gifted with a higher worldly intellect then my peers, I didn’t buy into the “big mean evil government” schtick that managed to sell over 14 million records to unsuspecting teenage saps and aged hippie socialists who have loathingly seeped back into society. I remember sitting in class, having debates about politics with Greenday fans and kids who wore Leftover Crack shirts, and while I admittedly didn’t know squat about politics back then, I didn’t pretend to like they did, which was my entire point. Badassery was tantamount to having a radical opinion, which everyone already had because it was rebellious to do so. That made not a single person growing up unique, outspoken, an activist, or even situationally aware. All it served to make them were vacant-minded zombies who got their political viewpoint from the liner notes of an Anti-Flag album. Did they know what any of it meant? No, but they knew they were sticking it to the man! Did the entirely know who “The Man” was? No, but that didn’t stop them from sticking it to them.

I remember a kid once who was vocal about his protest to the Afghani war. I had nothing better to do, so I walked up to the kid and challenged him. He believed that Bush was a warmonger (remember when that was a fresh buzzword?), and that we invaded Afghanistan for oil. First off, that’s generally what they say about Iraq, but I’m pretty sure this kid was too stupid to realize the difference. Second, he was an emo kid. Third, and most importantly, why the fuck shouldn’t we have gone to beat some Afghani ass? They started it. I reminded the kid about a little event that sparked the war, that little fall morning when a couple of airplanes full of people crashed into a couple of buildings full of people, no big deal. His reasoning is that we didn’t even try to use diplomacy, and instead went right to war with the Taliban. I explained to him that if someone punches you in the face, and you try to talk him out of doing it again, you have already lost the fight. I then took great pleasure in demonstrating to him by punching him square in the face. Instead of fighting back, he just stood there, shocked. I told him that he has just lost the fight and walked away with a massive erection. Now if that kid would have known anything about anything and not been force-fed his politics by a middle-aged stoner punk band, this whole situation could have been avoided.

In 2005, Greenday released a live album/DVD called “Bullet in a Bible,” which was essentially the DVD of their American Idiot Tour. In the live footage included on the DVD, there is a scene where the singer, Billie Joe Armstrong gets the crowd to shout and chant anti-Bush, anti-war slogans. Normally, this would be a strong display of the civil unrest growing in America today, if it wasn’t for that fact that the entire fucking DVD was shot in England, which makes about as much sense as sugar-free candy. You dumb fucks. As if the concept of British teenagers denouncing a President and a war that isn’t even theirs doesn’t disqualify their opinion as sheer ignorant and mindless stupidity, the fact that they paid to see Greenday in concert definitely shatters their credibility. I mean what the fuck’s the matter with you? Showing overwhelming American dissent in god-damned Great Britain? That sure sends a strong message to the powers that be, too bad it’s probably not the one you intended. See, you wanted them to see the throngs of people that don’t support them, who think their “warmongering” policies are wrong, but instead you managed to broadcast the fact that you’re an idealistic douche bag with no real following other than a bunch of dip-shit kids who have their mouths wrapped so tight around your lyrical dick that they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about and just regurgitate the mindless shit you constantly ejaculate into their faces.

But wait. It gets better.

Not content with the damage they’ve done to our youth, Greenday went ahead and released ANOTHER political album. The motif of this one? You guessed it: “big mean evil government 2: Republicans lol,” even though Bush is no longer relevant because he’s no longer president. But if would be WAY to hard for the band to start up ANOTHER cultural revolution by thinking of something new to whine about. What am I saying; they never started a cultural revolution.

21st Century Breakdown is just another political album that does nothing but bitch vaguely about “the Man,” is so self-important that that it sinks itself under the illusion that it’s full of glory, and contains a “Rock Opera” story about something or other and politics. Seriously, anyone who can clarify the story the album is trying to convey must be clairvoyant. I can’t understand a single story point, let alone the entire arc of whatever the fuck this stupid album is trying to tell. All it clearly conveys is the protagonist is a little bitch and obviously a character based on Billie Joe himself. Even the album title proves that they didn’t even try to make it at least look/sound presentable, but that didn’t stop it from outperforming American Idiot on the charts. It’s just a blatant sucker-punch to “authority” in implying that the world is in a “Breakdown” because of our former President who was apparently gay and/or Hitler, depending on which Huffington Post blog you read. It would have at least somewhat creative to name the album “Post Apocalypse” or something equally as stupid or suggestive of the fact that the world we live in sucks. Too bad it sucks because of people like you, not the people you denounce. It just goes to show how fucking stupid people can be. How they mindlessly devour any propaganda that denounces “The Man” regardless of how poorly it was concocted, blind to the fact that people only write this garbage because they know they will get rich off of your stupidity, not because they actually believe in any cause but their own bank accounts. You know, like how Michael Moore makes all these movies about how evil capitalism is, but he lives in a multimillion dollar mansion that he bought with all the money he made off of his movies. No band has spawned such a generation-spanning epidemic of full blown brainwashing since The Grateful Dead, though I don’t ever remember hearing about Jerry Garcia throwing a crybaby bitch fit when his band got axed at iHeartRadio.

And Billie Joe you queer, stop wearing eyeliner. What are you, an Aiden cover band?

16. Aiden:
See above. Plus, they opened for HIM. Double whammy. I’ve heard dying babies that sounded better than this garbage.

17. BrokeNCYDE
The banner example of the god-awful “Crunkcore” movement, this band sucks beyond anything I have EVER encountered. You could host the National Juggalo Convention in a five-story department store that only sells vacuum cleaners and you still wouldn’t scrape the level of suck this horrible group emanates. “Crunkcore” is an abomination so abominable that there was simply no way this genre evolved on its own. Somewhere, a T-Pain spokesman and a Stephanie Meyer representative met up at a Cobra Starship concert and put forth into motion the biggest cop out in history. “Crunkcore” had to be intentionally manufactured to capitalize on both the ailing genres of emo and hip hop. In that regard, “Crunkcore” is a supergroup of shit. This new and unlikely alliance of Sucks and Suckers went out to find a unsuspecting group of Suckers who wanted to Suck professionally without become prostitutes. They found their victims in New Mexico in four blatantly gay and troubled teens. BrokeNCYDE was born.

Mere months later, they drew the ire of every musician and music reviewer in the world. The only reason people even like BrokenCYDE is due to a sheer juvenile sense of idiocy to the magnitude of which make words such as “poop” or “wee-wee” funny in the first place. In other words, in order to like the intentionally worst, most useless “band” in history, you need to be a roundly immature moron, a virgin, and/or have Down syndrome. If you aren’t old enough to have facial hair to shave and still think that smoking cigarettes at the mall after school will make you cool, then I guess BrokenCYDE is just the band you need to complete your resume of childish uselessness. Because some people have already beat me to the punch, here are, courtesy of Wikipedia, actual reviews of the band:

Metal Edge Magazine has called Brokencyde “fucking horrendous”. Thrash Magazine has called them “a mockery to the world of music”. Another metal magazine, Decibel, has repeatedly made fun of the band, mentioning them in a interview with the group Big Business, and once ironically referring to then as their “favorite screamo-crunk band”. British commentator Warren Ellis calls Brokencyde’s “Freaxxx” music video “a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture”. Says August Brown of the Los Angeles Times, “The ‘Albucrazy’-based band has done for MySpace emo what some think Soulja Boy did for hip-hop: turn their career into a kind of macro-performance art that exists so far beyond the tropes of irony and sincerity that to ask ‘are they kidding?’ is like trying to peel an onion to get to a perceived central core that, in the end, does not exist and renders all attempts to reassemble the pieces futile.” (I wish I could write shit like this)

“If this is the future of rock music, we’re fucking outta here”, – wrote Kerrang! in its January 2009 What the F* is up with Screamo Crunk feature. Placing the ‘irritation factor’ mark at level “very high”, the magazine concluded – “Thanks to their tacky, lightweight and frankly rubbish sound, they’ve probably only got a shelf life of about six months”.

And their album:

The album overall received a very negative reception. NME gave the album a negative review, stating “even if I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother’s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment”.. Kerrang! also gave the album a negative review, stating that “‘I’m Not A Fan… [But The Kids Like It!]’ boasts a self-aware title, but that’s where all trace of intelligence ends.” Aidan Williamson of Strange Glue provided a video in place of a formal written review. The video compiled clips of Eric Cartman from South Park laughing hysterically at clips of Brokencyde’s music video for “Booty Call,” followed by a rating of 0/10 stars. Unfortunately, despite what the album’s title implies, even the kids don’t like “It!”

A press release issued by Brokencyde’s record label about “I’m Not A Fan… [But The Kids Like It!]”’s first week of sales contained quotes from bands and music critics that have publicly expressed their dislike for the album and Brokencyde.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Lots.

In an interview with the band, the lead singer/rapper/thing kid cited the band Creed as his inspiration for singing.

My friend followed Warped Tour this year (I’m pretty sure he’s straight), and claimed that they had shit thrown at them at EVERY. SINGLE. SHOW. Not one to break tradition, I took a handful of condoms that were being handed out for free at the Trojan booth, filled them with water, and flung them at the band. It was the best five minutes of my life.

Shutter shades. I hate fucking stupid shutter shades. Crunkcore posers can always be spotted wearing those useless, ugly, bright colored shutter shades. They aren’t fashionable, they aren’t practical. The only thing they successfully do is advertise your virginity. So advertise away, it’ll make it much easier to pick out targets when the lynchings begin.

UPDATE: Kerrang! was right. This parody of sound faded faster than a rapist’s motivation at a Celldweller concert.