The New Re-Punk-lic

The newest issue of The New Republic contains an article by David Hadju on the massive popularity of the music-based social networking site, MySpace. Not only is Hadju late to the game—The New York Times came to similar conclusions about the site’s unsupervised, virtual teen nightclub aura in a similar, much better story more than two months ago—and not only does he recycle the same fears of seedy internet-inspired meetups between naïve youngsters and 40 year old ex-con creeps posing as 16 year old boys that have popped up in net scare stories for years, he also makes a strange, barely anecdotally supported case that MySpace somehow breeds musicians with pitiful live skills. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

Through MySpace, some bands have built ardent followings so quickly that audiences know the words to their songs before the musicians know how to play them. Fall Out Boy headlined the Warped Tour of punk acts last summer, and I caught one of the shows in Milwaukee, during a vacation with my son, who is a senior at the University of Wisconsin. Fairly impressed by the group’s second CD, From Under the Cork Tree (an album with some good juvenile thrashing), I was looking forward to seeing the band and was surprised to find it utterly inept on stage—and I mean really inept, not inept in accordance with the anarchic conventions of punk. The singers (guitarist Joseph Trohman and bassist Peter Wentz) never used the microphone, and the band stopped and started in the middle of tunes, struggling nervously to find its place. (Not caring would have been punk. Struggling nervously was incompetent.) I heard most of the words, though, because the audience chanted the lyrics.

What Hadju, TNR’s music reporter, seems to be utterly unaware of is that Fall Out Boy is, plain and simple, a wretched, utterly talentless band of nth-wave, Green Day-imitating corporate-rock degenerates. The fact that they can’t play has little to do with their popularity on MySpace and everything to do with their total musical inability.

Hadju’s claim is based almost exclusively (the next paragraph offers an equally flaky description of a band who becomes popular without playing a show, but never discerns whether or not they’d actually be any good if they did) off his one experience with this one band, and yet he treats it as a serious conclusion. Maybe if he’d found some widespread pattern suggesting that bands who owe their popularity to MySpace are weak on stage, he’d have something. But all he offers is that Fall Out Boy sucks. That’s not a conclusion; it’s an obvious to any music-fan fact that has no real correlation to the web phenomenon he’s ostensibly writing about.

It’s interesting that Hadju takes pains to qualify his remarks by noting that their lackluster performance was not merely some punk affectation. In this, he is right, for Fall Out Boy, no matter how much faux-punk Hot Topic posing in which they engage, is about as punk as Creed is classic rock. For Hadju to compliment the band’s digitally polished excrement of an album as “good juvenile thrashing” shows he has absolutely no business commenting on anything in the vicinity of, or even pretending to approximate, the punk and indie rock genres. Fall Out Boy is suburban-safe, prepackaged mall punk, which is to the blistering, frenzied, DIY real thing—both its old school and new school variants—what tricycles are to Lamborghinis. Punk’s not dead, but The New Republic's clueless commentary isn't helping anything.