Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

last night was the chicago episode of Rockstar! Taste of Chaos. that's supposed to be rockstar!, the energy drink. because, like jonah says, emo isn't supposed to have rockstars. yet there they were, band after band of anti-rockstars trying desperately to play an arena with an occupancy of 8,000. (we'll just ignore the fact that there were less than a thousand high schoolers there).
it was a fun evening, but a bad show. i met up with mark at the unofficial UIC architecture school bar, ate 50 cent wings, drank fancy beer and talked about UIC, design, metal, and being old. that part was awesome. and the deftones were pretty good. what sucked was, i decided to go to taste of chaos because dredg was playing, and their last tour skipped chicago. i'm also into pelican, and deftones hold a lot of good memories. so for three bands, $30 seemed fairly reasonable. despite sitting through hours of emo/screamo/metalcore crap.
you know how ticket receipts always tell you that the date, time, performers, and pretty much everything you supposedly paid for are subject to change? apparently sometimes they do actually change things. like not having the two bands i cared most about play in chicago. hence the sitting around a bar for a couple hours beforehand.
we wandered in just in time to catch the end of 'story of the year'
you know, i kinda feel bad for them. they chose a sentence-length band name, they play emo, they shouldn't have ever been asked to be rockstars. but there they are with ramps on top of their amps, playing an arena tour. emo bands are destined to be destroyed by their own success.
now, i was born after kiss had given up the makeup, and david lee roth left van halen when i was 4. but i still saw van halen, 10 years ago, with gary cherone doing a better job of singing for them than either of the previous singers. of course, die hard fans who'd been listening to the band for 16 years already refused to see it that way. but they still played arena rock without having to worry about being called 'sellouts'. they were van fucking halen. who the fuck would they even sell out to?
weezer can at least say they're being ironic. however valid that may be, it gives them license to go for gusto with their live shows. emo bands catch no such breaks. rockstar! thought they'd hit the cash cow, after their success last year with my chemical romance. so they booked big arenas, promoted the tour like crazy, added a second stage* and hired even more emoXcore bands than last year. great formula, right?
except that the last band i saw put on a good show at UIC had 3 story video screens, and a violent stage presence. and they sold out the venue.
in the end, deftones were the only band equal to the promotion rockstar threw at them. they were one of the first bands to commercialize the hardcore aesthetic, without trying so hard not to be rock stars. chino has no qualms about being a rock god. they put on a great show, even though they, too, were dwarfed by the (mostly empty) arena.
*second stage meaning, a tiny corner of the main stage, where small bands play in between larger bands so that there's no waiting for set changes. although if there's a difference between 'story of the year' and 'receiving end of sirens', it's lost on me. one just got a shittier stage with a big myspace banner.