.Scrunk Happens

brokeNCYDE's mixture of screamo with gangsterisms and emo fashion has drawn ire from the punk world.

You’re traveling to another dimension, a dimension where the most
detested trends in pop music combine to make a sound that teenagers
cannot resist. Sure, the Warped Tour (which comes to Shoreline
Amphitheatre on Thursday, Aug. 20) isn’t The Twilight Zone, but
Rod Serling’s taste for the absurd certainly fits well with this year’s
lineup. The tour’s fifteenth year sees a large number of acts that have
embraced a combination of minimalist Southern hip-hop, Auto-Tune
croons, techno breakdowns, barked vocals, and party-til-you-puke
poetics.

It’s called scrunk, a bastardized combination of crunk and screamo,
and it’s the hottest thing since sliced bread joined Twitter. Chief
among all the scrunk acts performing as part of the punk carnival is
Albuquerque, New Mexico’s brokeNCYDE, who have drawn considerable ire
from the punk community and have ridden their infamy to #87 on the
Billboard 200 with their debut album, I’m Not a Fan, But the Kids
Like It!
(Breaksilence). To the punk community, a genre like
screamo had already hit rock bottom a few years ago, so the idea that a
handful of kids would remix lowest-common-denominator screamo with
crunk beats, misappropriated gangsterisms, and the extreme garishness
of emo fashion was sure to incite hate-filled diatribes.

Musicians from Steve Albini to Thursday’s Geoff Rickly trash them
(there’s even an awareness group named Mothers Against Brokencyde
drumming up outrage), but the members of brokeNCYDE couldn’t care less.
“We don’t care what people say,” says vocalist Mikl on the phone from
Utah. “All these critics are trying to bring us down, and yet we’re
selling a lot of copies of our music and that’s because of our
dedicated fans.”

Carefree as Mikl may try to sound, he takes a defensive turn when it
comes to how the band members are perceived as people. “We get this in
interviews and other places all the time; that we’re suburban kids,
we’re rich, we had it easy, our parents pay for everything, and it’s
the total opposite. We were raised the best that our parents could
raise us, but there was times that we didn’t have food, water,
lights.”

Yet, despite the various hardships the members of brokeNCYDE claim
to have endured, it is by no leap of the imagination that people assume
they’re rich suburban kids with hot software. We need look no farther
than their lyrics, which revel in the accoutrements of suburban
comfort. Mikl states that the band writes about “everyday life.”
However, many of their rhymes come across as almost painfully juvenile
attempts at plasticine gangsta rap, completely detached from the real:
Put your hands down in my pocket/And make my pee-pee hard (“Sex
Toyz”). Now drop it girl go shake that ass/I wanna see you make it
clap/Like clap clap clap/clap clap clap
(“Booty Call”). Kickin’
it baby/Get crunk, get crazy/All fucked up/Make me wanna punch
babies
(“40 oz.”).

BrokeNCYDE’s messy setting of blandly misogynistic lyrics against a
backdrop of catlike wailing, formulaic hip-hop tropes, and, yes, plenty
of Auto-Tune has become poisonous to many punk ears. “There hasn’t been
a level of backlash like this toward one act in the 10 years I’ve been
doing this,” says AbsolutePunk founder and CEO Jason Tate via e-mail.
Tate is a regular contributor to the website’s forums and has been
absolutely stunned by the mere existence of brokeNCYDE. “They’re just
that bad, and they epitomize everything that music (and human beings)
should not be.”

Jessica Hopper, author of TheGirls’ Guide to Rocking, agrees
with Tate’s sentiment, and says brokeNCYDE are “everything awful about
pop music rolled together.” Yet Hopper can sense the potential appeal
to teenagers scrunk acts have. “If you are sixteen or seventeen right
now, brokeNCYDE just completely references anything that might be a
contemporary pop culture reference, or anything that a teenage person
is into. … You kind of get everything at once.”

Hopper traces the sound’s influence back to 2005, when Panic! At the
Disco first mixed up emo and electronics, much to the delight of
mainstream music listeners. Warped Tour co-creator and CEO Kevin Lyman
points towards Boulder, Colorado’s 3OH!3 as the real tipping point for
scrunk. “They were right at the cusp of this at the beginning,” says
Lyman over the phone from Phoenix. “Though 3OH!3 doesn’t incorporate
the blood-curdling screams of many scrunk acts, they were the first
emo-influenced act to depart from traditional instruments in favor of
pre-programmed beats, all while retaining many of the same stylistic
elements that define emo today. A couple of years ago, this stuff
started coming around, and I let them [3OH!3] play one show in Denver.
It went exactly like the showcase I’d like to see.”

This year, Warped is packed with bands that have taken to a mixture
of electronics and screamo, be it the aggressive Christian
technoscreametalcore of Attack Attack or Breathe Carolina’s sugary
electropop punctuated with growl-filled choruses. Of all these bands,
the bulk of the attention continues to be split between brokeNCYDE and
another band, Millionaires. This all-female Huntington Beach,
California, trio have been relegated to scrunk largely by association.
Although Millionaires refrain from any actual screaming over their
crunkish beats, their immature and sexually provocative lyrics, weak
style, fashion extremes, and secure place in Pete Wentz’s Decaydance
label have solidified this status — as well as an aura of
perma-spite surrounding the group. To many, Millionaires are the
quintessential example of the inertia and uncontrollable popularity of
scrunk acts: what began with a couple of sisters shouting in-jokes in
rhyme over GarageBand beats has snowballed into massive MySpace
popularity.

Millionaires’ newfound infamy is something singer Melissa Green
finds hard to grasp. While interviewed during a break from a recording
session, Green reached to offer an example of the band’s positive
impact: “As a role model, I don’t think what we say is what the younger
girls should really look up to saying or doing. The three of us are
role models in that we never had the musical abilities to actually play
instruments and play guitars.” Unfortunately, when it comes to artistic
expression, you don’t get to choose what other people should and
shouldn’t focus on. Though some have criticized groups such as
Millionaires for their inability to play instruments, a lot of the
anger towards scrunk acts has been focused on these bands’
oft-misogynistic lyrics. Green’s inability to understand that her
words, as well as her music, are at the center of attention (typical
title: “Just Got Paid, Let’s Get Laid”) spell a musical movement that
has been catapulted into the limelight too fast and too soon.

With the current phase of scrunk at maximum capacity, where does the
genre go from here? Just as scrunk already appears to have quickly
reached its tipping point, it’ll be gone before you know it. “The
market’s gonna get saturated, just like the emo market did and the
screamo market did, and then three or five of those bands will
persevere and have a longer career,” says Lyman. Whereas some scrunk
bands have stirred up controversy, it will take a little more to
persevere. As Lyman puts it, “If they don’t get songs, if they don’t
really start to have the talent behind it, I’m not judging them, but
they won’t be around in a few years.”

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