Since 1977, punks have decried the new generation’s bands as slick, radio-friendly sellouts. At its core though, punk is music for outcasts and as time shifts the factors leading to social ostracization, so too will a band’s lyrical and musical tropes. Yes that excitable emo whine is annoying as hell, but it’s a reaction to a decade of tortured-growl Eddie Vedder rips, that were in turn a reaction to the pretty-boy wails of '80s hair-metal.
But sometime around 2006, punk-identified bands, or more specifically the punk-identified bands blaring out of your neighbourhood West 49, started experimenting with sounds and themes of hip-hop. Disco breaks, and songs about girls and dance floors (and, in a clever twist, girls on dance floors) is the new MO. Gone is a desire to tear down the system, now they just want to get down.
Cobra Starship have certainly hitched their apple wagon to this sound and it has helped to set the band apart from their pop-punk peers. But live, the studio sheen is stripped away, leaving the five-piece sounding like every other mall-punk band on the sold-out all-ages quadruple bill at the Opera House last night.
Hit the Lights played the night’s most aggressive set, harkening back to the days when bands looked to New Found Glory for inspiration instead of Fall Out Boy. In the final moments of their short set they even ripped into the chorus of Pantera’s “Walk,” a fitting end for a band named after a Metallica track, but probably lost on the mostly teenage-girl audience.
Dallas sextet Forever the Sickest Kids make the case that punk has entered its own hair-metal phase. These guys, with their angular haircuts and in unison head banging look like six skater-fucks who couldn’t give a shit as long as they’re getting laid after the show. Their plea to donate money at their merch table so they can “help feed an entire African tribe” seemed particularly disingenuous since it came from a guy wearing a crooked ball cap and pink Hollister t-shirt. They did inspire me to go home and listen to Will Smith after playing a faux-Limp Bizkit style cover of “Men in Black.” Thanks guys.
By the time Cobra Starship hit the stage, the audience was in rapturous anticipation. Their arrival was greeted with a round of shrieks and camera flashes. Like the rest of the evening’s bands, they jumped around a lot and played catchy tunes. Differentiating one from another though was getting pretty hard. I think they played the one with the ripped-off J-Lo lyrics (“Hey Mr. DJ/ You’ve gotta put a record on yeah”) and they definitely played the song they wrote for the movie Snakes on a Plane. Various ass-hats from the other bands joined Cobra Starship on stage near the end of their set, but like the music, you’d be hard pressed to tell one from another.
To be fair, none of the groups had trouble revving up the audience. When For the Sickest Kids sing “whoa-oh-ah-oh” the kids sing right back. And the same kids knew every song in the Cobra Starship oeuvre, and it’s easy to see why. After two days of listening to their records even I knew a good chunk of their sing-along songs and if I were 15, I’d eat that shit up. But I’m not 15. I’m 27. Does anybody else miss the days when punk bands just boiled complex social issues down to naïve sing-along choruses? Yeah, me too.