Gorilla Biscuits = Emmure: A Stream of Conscious Rant About Metalcore

Since I've spent time ripping on metalcore today, I thought I'd show you people a fair and balanced approach in my music snobbery. Here's something I wrote as a stream of conscious rant one night after I'd seen some hardcore kids shit-talking some Rise Records band on the internet. I used to be one of those douchebags who stuck his nose up at metalcore for being "untr00" or whatever, but then I turned 11 and realized it wasn't such a big deal anymore. Sure, I still think a lot of metalcore is boring and derivative, but so is a lot of hardcore. So yeah. Whatever. Just read it...

Hate all you want; it's still a #jam

So I recently got kicked out of my metalcore band. Well maybe kicked out isn’t the right word, we mutually decided that I wasn’t the best fit, because I’m not big on metalcore. They wanted somebody who could run with the direction they were going, and I wanted to do something that was more emotionally fulfilling to me, so we parted ways. I learned a lot being in that band, and I feel that perhaps the most important lesson was that I should stop looking at metalcore with disdain and start looking at is as a difference in opinion.

I basically look at metalcore the same way I feel my normal friends look at the music I listen to. I can stomach it, I understand some of the references, there are even some parts I enjoy; however the self-referential nature of it makes it impossible to grasp completely because I wasn’t brought into that scene before I became too old to justify spending my time trying to crack some subculture code just so I could fit in (which is essentially how I got into punk and hardcore). I compare the current state of that scene to Hardcore circa 1987 – the market is oversaturated to a point where the voices of the legitimate artists have been drowned out by shitheads simply due the fact that if you throw a lot of people into a room, most of them will be idiots by default.

But here’s the thing – that doesn’t mean the metalcore scene has an absence of legitimate artists. In fact, since that route seems to be the new entry point into the underground, I bet a lot of the next wave of good underground music will come from kids who listened to emmure, much in the same way so many of our favourite bands were introduced to the scene by Thursday or Rancid or The Killers or whatever “untr00 bullshit” it was cool to rip on in 2002. What I can’t wait for is to see 20 years down the road when the same insufferable poser-types who pretend to like Gorilla Biscuits now will be jocking Emmure while ferociously picking apart the “nu-metalcore” of the day, whatever that may be (completely failing to mention the fact that they loved those “shitty” bands a mere six months earlier).

Shit, didn’t emo and screamo take a beating ten years ago from hardcore “purists”? Now all of a sudden we have like a million basement skrammers and kinesella tribute acts because a decade later somebody finally had the balls to admit they enjoyed that shit when it came out. Now, queue the revival scene; queue the entrance of seventeen year olds; queue the tailspin into the self-reference pit; queue the “tr00 kvlt purists” dismissing the entire scene while untagging pictures of themselves wearing a La Dispute shirt from facebook – fuck, do you people not notice a pattern here? Whatever; every time I try and make sense of the hardcore scene I end up pushing myself one step closer to an aneurism, so I’m not gonna do that anymore tonight. I’m just gonna listen to La Dispute on my iPod then go to bed. Fuck you.