I Know I'd Rather See A New Glassjaw Record

Last night I attended the annual Thursday holiday show at the Starland Ballroom in Sayerville, New Jersey. It was hands down the best line-up for a concert I have ever been to (Well, best line-up for a small venue show. Rock The Bells headlined by Rage and Wu-Tang was pretty fucking amazing).

Last night I had the immense privilege to witness United Nations, Dillinger Escape Plan, Glassjaw, and of course Thursday epically tear through hours of the best of the best New Jersey post-hardcore has to offer. However, the point of this post isn’t to bore you people with how perfect the night was for myself as a music lover. Most of you don’t listen to the same music I do, and there are only so many times I can talk about how great these bands are to see perform live. No, I want to talk about how a money-grubbing big business company almost ruined the entire evening for myself a number of other people attending the show last night.

First a little history about my favorite concert venue in the country. The Starland Ballroom opened December 6, 2003 with a performance by David Lee Roth. Before it was known as Starland, the venue was called the Hunka Bunka Ballroom, which operated as a dance music club in the 80s and 90s.

In its inaugural year as Starland, over one hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold to events hosted at the Starland, enough to make the venue one of the ten largest concert nightclubs in the world. By year two, Starland sold over two hundred and five thousand tickets, making the jump to the fourth-best ticket-selling concert nightclub in the world. Not bad for a small warehouse on a back road in Jersey. Also, you should keep in mind this venue only holds about two thousand people to put in perspective how many events needs to held to accumulate those kinds of numbers.

Over seventy-five different acts have sold multiple sold-out concerts at the Starland, including a two-night event benefitting the December 2005 tsunami headlined by My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, and Senses Fail and raised over $150,000 for UNICEF and the International Red Cross. Again, charity came calling in September 2005 where Dashboard Confessional and Coheed & Cambria co-headlined an event and raised $80,000 for Direct Relief International's to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Sadly, On April 13, 2007, the building was purchased by AEG Live, one of the largest producers of live concert and sporting events in the world.

And last night, “one of the largest producers of live concert and sporting events in the world” apparently failed to understand and plan appropriately for the event, which was the Thursday Holiday show. Thinking more like a money making machine than a small punk rock venue, Starland oversold the show by almost ­one thousand tickets. I spoke to people working there (security, etc.) and no one was prepared for what was coming. What do you expect when you put Thursday and Glassjaw together in the same room with one of the best math-metal bands (DEP) in the world, and top it off with United Nations’ only show in America this year? They apparently expected only half of the people who originally bought tickets to the two-month-early sold-out show to attend, so AEG opened another thousand tickets to make sure the place was full. Then when EVERY TICKET HOLDER rolled in, the venue was short on bartenders, security, and most definitely space. It was like a frat party in the basement at Phi Kap: you could barely move. I watched as people poured over the barrier to the bar area just try to grab a drink before they hit the pit. I almost felt bad as three burly security guards fought tirelessly to try to hold back the throngs of people flooding into the venue. This is the fourth holiday show I’ve attended, and I don’t ever remember the Starland having trouble selling out a Thursday show.

Still despite the packed-ness of the venue, I managed to find a couple of a cool people, one of a which was a lovely young lady who had never seen Thursday perform live. We watched all of the acts, had a few drinks, and was “forced” by said young lady to drag her down to the pit so she could get a better view of the band.

I have to first thank the members of Thursday (Geoff, Tim, Tom, Tucker, Andrew, and Steve) for throwing another amazing party. And second, extra special thanks to Tucker Rule for hanging with (and remembering) me in Pomona and persuading me to change my flight and stay for this show (although, I am now stuck east coast until March). So glad I decided to attend.

And you were there… And I was every question that never had an answer... I see right through you…

Guest Blog: Power Violence Band United Nations Frontman Geoff Rickly Urges Followers to Drop Cameras, Pick Up Rocks, Get Active

Geoff Rickly, for the Headbanger’s Blog on MTV.com, wrote the following article in September 2008. Geoff is the lead singer for United Nations, as well as my favorite band, Thursday. He is known for his powerful lyrics, which are a powerful extension of his personal beliefs. His ideas on the state of music today mirror those of my own. Read on, reeducate, and enjoy.

There is a vacuum in the center of our music culture. Whatever the genre -- metal, punk hardcore, dance, pop or rock -- the trend remains the same: leave your beliefs at the door. Our 21st Century promise seems to be that of a society in the advanced stages of decadence and social apathy. Not only has our music been stripped of any message that it might have had, but it's now packaged as being "beyond message" -- irreproachable in its indifference.

In the recent past, bands as diverse as Fugazi, Megadeath, Pearl Jam and Ministry all had songs that raised questions about political corruption, social inequity, personal responsibility and artistic freedom. Today, we see artists more concerned with friend requests on MySpace or wanting to "shake it" than with the problems of our lives. This isn't to say that there's not a place for celebration, joy, silliness and fun in pop music. That would be a frightening vision in its own right. We just have to ask ourselves, if we're not facing the big issues then who are we leaving them to? Politicians? Lobbyists? Maybe it's time to quit f---ing around and wake up.

Where did it all go so wrong? Although there seems be be a cavernous gulf between the glory days of Dischord Records to the vapid careerism of today's mall-centric punk and nu-hair-metal, the transformation took place in less than 25 five years. Were we all tired of being earnest? Was sincerity unflattering? Was a compassionate world merely a naive dream or is it something that we killed with in-fighting and ego-stroking?

It's quite possible that the dialectic of our progressive music movement was responsible for its own demise. The conversations in 'zines and at shows resembled the discourse of a University debate rather than the concerned talks at a town meeting. People were discussing the politics of language instead of volunteering at soup kitchens. Arguments over patriarchy and masculinity took precedence over starting women's outreach centers. The intellectual one-upsmanship became a rhetorical nightmare; many young kids came to shows energized and ready to start making a change and left feeling drained and humiliated. In short, we liked to talk about the revolution more than we worked for it.

Our own philosophies have been used against us. Canadian '70s media theorist Marshall McLuhan once famously contended: "At the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message." As a counterculture, the underground punk movement simplified this message to "the medium is the message" or "the music is the message" and adopted it to mean that the message and music were one and the same and wholly indivisible. It seems obvious now that the shortened version isn't the same. It's missing an essential word: content.

Various groups, including The Nation of Ulysses and Refused made a study of the aesthetic of revolution, and so did many underground artists such as Sheperd Fairey and Banksy. These artists explored the links between advertising, propagandizing, evangelism and philosophy. As a subtle and complex exploration of art, commerce and humanity these artists were very successful. Unfortunately, this may have been an important turning point in our culture -- the point at which the image replaced the message.

In the years since, we've been given bands that retain the sound and image of our counterculture but forget the politics and leave out the distasteful bits of reality. If Milemarker and Q and Not U put some dance into modern punk, it wasn't so that they would be replicated sans-politics by third rate impostors being blasted in every Urban Outfitters or American Apparel. There has been a domino effect: Political punk gets more accessible, accessible punk gets less political, punk becomes completely apolitical and irrelevant. The tiger has been declawed and we're all wasting time in our twenties pretending not to care about anything but ourselves.

Recently, the magazine Adbusters, published an article railing against "hipster culture," saying, "We've reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it's been stripped of its subversion and originality." While this may be true, we need to investigate how we got to this point. We have to face facts. We have let the "hipsters" down. By not presenting a counterculture movement worth caring about, we've railroaded them into a subculture of not caring. We need to reach out to our DJ friends and organize events that are socially conscious. We need to inject a sense of urgency into all our mediums of expression. It's not like all hope is lost. Le Tigre has made feminism danceable. Verse put out, in the form of a record called Aggression, a political protest you can feel, not just think about. Darkest Hour and Lamb of God are continually blasting a message into the headphones of metal lovers around the world. And everywhere in the world, kids are starting bands in their basements and they are pissed off.

We have been attacked repeatedly as a generation and as a demographic. We have been derided because of our looks and attitude. At the end of the Adbusters article, the writer, Douglas Haddow, tellingly concludes, "I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, 'If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we'd look like revolutionaries.' But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet --oblivious to our own impending demise."

Pretty glum. He writes something so insidious here, it's easy to miss: "...if only we'd carry rocks... we'd look like revolutionaries..." Maybe looking like revolutionaries isn't enough anymore. We have to start thinking like revolutionaries. The only sane response to criticism is activism. Let's get active

Contact me: www.myspace.com/unitednations and I'll write you back.

All your life you've been a sinking ship… It's time to make you rise… To make your mind up…