this is why I love the Internet

Because it’s so much more interesting than mainstream music media.  AP Magazine asked Defiance, Ohio for an interview for an issue focusing on folk punk and we declined to do it.  Personally, I think that there’s too much focus on promotion and attaching music to genres and really narrow and rigid identities and values and by extension encouraging people reading media to attach to really narrow and rigid identities and values.  Also, it tends to focus on what’s cool in music instead of people’s relationships and experiences with music and music’s relationships and experiences within itself.  Today, I found that the Internet, in particular, Wikipedia offered the kind of more complex and connected information about music that feels more satisfying to read…

I’ve been listening to Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor and was interested in the track The Instrumental because it had this kind of icky sounding Linkin Park-style rock hook in it.  I was interested in who contributed to it, and it turns out it was Jonah Matranga who performed as OneLineDrawing who I used to listen to when I was in college.  The track is interesting because lyrically, it is a critical look at the influence of television yet according to Wikipedia was included in the soundtrack to the Madden 07 video game.

Jonah Matranga has a wikipedia user and I thought this was  interesting  from his user page:

I’m okay with (and happy about) being considered influential in the context of post-hardcore, anti-macho rock, but I take no responsibility for McEmo as it generally manifests today. I deplore the commodification of sincerity, and big budgets to make people look/sound ‘authentic’.

I am an utter rock geek, an art idealist, and I absolutely believe in the transformative, transcendent power of rocking the fuck out. Rocking the fuck out is in no way tied to volume or mood, it’s just letting go.

Although  I would also argue that macho rock is also in no way tied to volume or mood and one of the biggest problems with post-hardcore or “McEmo” is that it often reflects the same masculinites (and often mysogyny) as genres of music that are more frequently criticized for those things (metal, hip-hop).  I think that Weezer’s Pinkerton which is infectious and also chock-full of mysogyny and a sense of sexual entitlement is my textbook example of this.