Look alive, alt-metal fans. Time to polish the wallet chain, spray some Febreze on the ol’ cargo shorts, and dye your goatee purple for maximum extremeness: festival season is nearly upon us! This summer offers an embarrassment of riches for the connoisseur of fine live entertainment.Projekt Revolution
Doesn’t that misspelling make it seem all Soviet and dangerous? Golly, it’s almost as if the “revolution” had begun with the name itself! Founded in 2002 by rap-rock hitmakers Linkin Park (ooh, there’s another one!), Projekt Revolution is known for bringing A-list hip-hop acts together with the nation’s most stimulating rock groups for an unprekedented melding of diverse musiks.
The trick, I think, has been this: by featuring pantywaist teenweep twerpgroups like the Used, Taking Back Sunday, and My Chemical Romance, organizers could scare off the “urbans” in the audience and let skittish young suburbanites enjoy a Ghostface Killah show without all the terrifying ethnic menace. This year’s line-up, however, looks to be a tad lacking in the Revolution department. With a roster consisting entirely of rock and post-hardcore groups, the 2008 tour seems to have ditched the multi-ethnic angle in favor of juxtaposing the distinct genres of godawful tween MySpace shit (Armor for Sleep, Hawthorne Heights, Atreyu) and shit that I’m not sure anyone actually listens to (the Bravery, solo Chris Cornell).
Rockstar Mayhem Fest
Warning: any festival that asks us to choose between the “Jägermeister Stage” and the “Hot Topic Stage” is in real danger of sinking under a massive overabundance of quality. Evidence: featured acts include Dragonforce, whose blistering riffs have provided the soundtrack to a million elves leveling up, and Disturbed, who are so insecure in their ability to project their image of dangerous craziness that they had to name their fucking band “Disturbed.” At least they weren’t desperate enough to fall back on the “ooh, scary masks” method, like festival headliners Slipknot.
Vans Warped Tour
If there’s anything that redeems this bullshit traveling merch booth, maybe it’s that it gives kids something easy to grow out of. That might seem like a snide remark, but I’m halfway serious. My generation had to struggle into adulthood nursing a diverse set of freshman shames ranging from Bel Biv Devoe to that Bryan Adams song from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Just think if all the ridiculous shit we listened to before we knew any better could have been tied up in one neat little superdense bundle of ass, ready to be cast aside at the threshold of adulthood?
It’s kind of beautiful, really: the point at which a modern teen stops giving a shit about the Warped Tour represents a glorious coming of age. Maybe I’m giving the kids too much credit, but I’m hoping that by 17 or so, they’ll stop mulling over whether the Warped Tour is too commercial to represent punk and start noticing that it’s probably a little too commercial to represent shoes.
Yeah, so maybe not, but c’mon. I’m a pretty negative guy, and I think I’ve almost found a silver lining here, so just let me have this one.
Crüe Fest
Hype for this thing started more than a month ago, when the Phoenix received a tantalizing note from the Crüe camp: “I’m the publicist for Mötley Crüe, and I wanted to let you know, if you haven’t already heard, that all four original band members of America’s most notorious rock band will make a colossal announcement in Los Angeles on April 15 (location tbd). This will by far be one of the biggest music announcements of the year!!”
(Note the mighty expressive power of the double exclamation point!)
How could a thing like that not pique my curiosity? What could a ridiculous glam-rock blooper reel like Mötley Crüe have up their sleeves that might be anywhere near one of the biggest announcements of the year? Would Nikki Sixx sheepishly admit he’s never taken so much as an aspirin? Has science proved, after all these decades, that Vince Neil is not Bret Michaels? Maybe they’d haul Robert Christgau up to a bank of microphones and get him to admit, on behalf of critics everywhere, that Crüe records have been good all these years.
But no, the big whoop turned out to be Crüe Fest, a traveling showcase of the most execrable rock dregs in America: the Crüe, plus 10-years-late glam-metal clowns Buckcherry, the reliably lame Papa Roach, and forgotten “Headstrong” superstars Trapt. Also appearing, I presume by default, are Nikki Sixx side project Sixx AM. I recommend visiting motley.com and watching the 40-minute videotaped press conference hosted by a wonderful, ultra-lame marketing guy. “We think we’ve created an excellent entertainment-value proposition,” intones the squarest fucking dude of all time.
By the way, just added “Trapt” to my MS Word spellcheck dictionary. Never know when I might need to deploy that shit again.
