Kids will have fun and offend

or, What Hath Linkin Park Wrought?

Here’s Robert Christgau on the Go! Team:

Thunder, Lightning, Strike [Columbia, 2005]
The gleeful clamor of Today’s Young People listening to what they want when they want to without paying for it and dancing around like kindergarteners at a maypole or gay guys under a mirrored ball and no offense Mr. Businessman but this is their birthright not your copyright so butt out OK? A-

Here’s Warren Ellis on New Mexico band Brokencyde:

[“Freaxxx”] really is one of those “fall of Western culture” moments. It’s a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.

Exaggeration? Watch:

Now, though no fault of my own, I have stumbled across this music video, “The Impaler” by California band Winds of Plague. The first half literally looks like somebody dubbed the song over a completely different video, until you see that yes, the vocals really do sync up.

We want to believe that these are jokes. Because ha ha, how preposterous to combine screamo metalcore with hip-hop (musically, in the case of Brokencyde, or simply visually, in the case of Winds of Plague).

But I think this might be happening.

Whether we like it or not. Call it syncretism, call it musical miscegenation, or just the latest version of idiotic teenage music. When you’ve got a generation that grew up playing Dragonforce on Guitar Hero and listening to Lil Wayne on Myspace, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that this kind of stuff emerges. We keep talking about how the barriers to cultural crossover are lowering. If this isn’t what we had in mind (these guys are not exactly Elvis, or the Clash, or Public Enemy for that matter), maybe that’s our problem?

[also, the Winds of Plague album is some pretty solid metal.]