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The internet is a haven
for weirdos, inconoclasts and nutjobs all ready to spew their
worthless opinion all over a Geocities page for everyone to read.
Punk zines used to be a labor: badgering your friends till you
had enough content to put out a twice-yearly issue, then trekking
to the copy-shop and using a xerox machine to run off 300 copies
then selling them outside of shows for $1.50 and listening to
all the crust-punks talk about how the smell from their armpits
once made a better zine. Now all you have to do is type some HTML
tags and you've got yourself a zine. Because of this ease of creation
and distribution, zines have proliferated faster than nuclear
arms. Because of the vast amount of garbage out there today, finding
a good one is really difficult. We're not going to help you with
that, all we're going to do is talk about the absolute worst
ones. Enjoy!
Emotionalpunk.com
Quite possibly one of the absolute worst indie zines on the internet.
Emotional Punk is what you get when a gaggle of Asian teenagers,
raised on the absolute dregs of what is considered punk rock today,
decide that their abysmal taste is good enough that they just have
to share it with everyone. They give out free handjobs to every
band on Vagrant or Drive-Thru Records: Dashboard Confessional gets
an 8.5 for originality, Finch gets a 9 and Thursday’s Full Collapse
is proclaimed to be “the revolutionary emocore record that shocked
a generation.” Meanwhile they deride Good Charlotte but praise bands
that sound exactly like them. Their reviews are full of awkward
sentence structures, piss-poor word choices and innovative new terminology
like ‘innovational.’ The reviewers themselves claim to be ‘growing
out’ of the pop-punk scene, but still offer praise to a bunch of
shitty nu-emo bands that nobody’s ever heard of before, with really
horrible names like Number One Fan and A Thorn for Every Heart.
Emotional Punk’s site is convoluted, ugly and extremely difficult
to navigate with a thousand little snippets about a thousand awful
bands all crammed together. Their ‘news’ is little more than the
excited scribbling of an overeager fanboy. That is, when it’s not
copied directly from a press release.
Oh, not to mention that
they call their site fucking “Emotional Punk” and their founder
has the AIM name “Weezer006.” Pure crap!
Absolutepunk.net
The word ‘poser’ was invented specifically for the people who
run Absolute Punk. Besides the audacity of calling yourself ‘Absolute
Punk’ in the first place, the zine bows down to pressure
from bands and record labels. (For instance they posted an interview
in which Midtown talked shit about their label, Drive Thru Records.
One of their writers let me know that Drive-Thru's parent company MCA made certain threats and you better believe that
interview disappeared very quickly.) Rather than having a real
website, their clueless reviews and features are just posted on
a really obvious and ugly message board, which not only makes it
totally unprofessional but also extremely difficult to navigate.
Their archive is completely empty, and it’s impossible to tell content
from advertisements. Here’s an example of the kind of genius statements
their writers regularly drop, grammar mistakes included: [In regards
to Cursive] “The sound is hard to describe, but it makes me say,
‘the strokes suck.’” That’s the kind of brilliant analysis and in-depth
description of music that I only expect from Spin magazine. Somebody
tell me what the fuck that even means, seriously? About Blink-182
they write, "Their music is the reason I am still breathing,"
as if a song about ben-wa balls has emotional resonance. Even better,
for their ‘Worst of 2002’ list, the writers of Absolute Punk actually
picked The Strokes and White Stripes records that were released
in 2001! We salute Absolute Punk for their complete lack of integrity.
Congratulations!
Buddyhead.com
Buddyhead likes to think that they’re funny, but in their
own words, “nah brah.” They’re kind of like that friend you’ve
got who gets a lucky joke every once in a while, and when he sees
everybody laughing he proceeds to repeat three times a day for
the next year and a fucking half. He laughs himself to tears every
single time but everybody else just learns to ignore him. Buddyhead
is home to a million dick jokes about Fred Durst. That’s all they’ve
got, really. For some reason their influence spread across the internet faster than
a celebrity nudie pic, pissing off ugly indie
rock kids and frustrating label executives across the country.
Here in 2003 it’s difficult
to understand why: their reviews are either trash talking, name
dropping or the kind of doodie jokes that would make an autistic
three year-old squeal with glee; they often have advertisements
for bands they utterly despise (a Promise Ring pop-up on a page
where you talk about how the Promise Ring sucks off guys isn’t
cool); their interviews and news are fake or just transparent
attempts to promote the ‘totally awesome’ bands on their ‘totally
awesomer’ record label. All that and the fact that Buddyhead hasn’t
had a new feature or joke for the last two years. Ironically enough
though, one of the last things the douchebags posted was about
how they’ll ‘always be a thorn in the side of the industry. Instead
they're just busy pimping terrible bands like the Icarus Line
and Radio Vago. Who, you ask? Exactly.
Punknews.org
Punk News is actually a great resource for the latest news
in the punk/indie world. Tons of updates everyday on a broad range
of bands: they have news on everything from the the aging English
punk bands, to the worst of the new wave of pop-punkers. Punk
News covers it all and a lot more, even artists like the Cure
and Johnny Cash see a fair amount of coverage. What makes Punk
News awful though is the community associated with it. Readers
have the ability to post reviews and comment on every piece of
news on the site, which seems like a good, democratic idea in
theory. Unfortunately the people who comment seem to fall into
only two categories: either they’re aging crust punks--with only
about a quarter of a brain not ripped to shreds by coke and amphetamines--who
type idiotic drivel like “U DON’T KNOW 1ST THING ABOYT PUNK OR
MUSIC! UP THE PUNX! ANARCHY 4EVR,” or they’re 14-year-old emo-loving
pop-punkers trying to defend their favorite band by dismissing
great artists like the Clash or Fugazi because they’re old and
don’t sound like New Found Glory. Readers always try to be the
first to comment “FIRST!” under each new review or news item.
Those posts are usually followed by a thousand idiotic, bickering
little one-liners. The wave of insults is truly staggering and
the whining never stops, because every reader of Punknews.org
believes they have the one and only correct opinion, while every
other reader is a completely ignorant dipshit worthy of
scorn. And they have a lot of readers.
Dr.
Balls Underground Music Review
This isn't really a zine, it's just some guy typing random shit
about Drive-Thru Records into his blog and pretending he is 'Dr.
Balls, from the prestigious Sack Institute in Antartica'. As if
that wasn’t a bad idea, his site offers no organization whatsoever.
I guess he just types them out and puts them down as he thinks
of them. Or maybe he intentionally does it in a random order to
confuse the “emo” and “pop-punk” hating critics he so readily
talks about. This moron thinks of those extremely limited styles
of music as some powerful, driving, revolutionary force supported
by a unified and idealistic scene that only a select few have
heard of. In this place we call “reality”, though, everyone from
Dashboard, to AFI, to Thursday, to Conor Oberst (not a very broad
spectrum, mind you) has been on the covers of AP, Rolling Stone
and Spin, in some cases more than once. And let's not forget MTV2.
If you do read this zine, you have to keep in mind that this
kid is probably fresh out of Jr. High and thinks he has some original
ideas. Actually he just spews on and on about the virtues of Taking
Back Sunday, regularly displaying his very limited experience
regarding music and music history. "I've been listening to
New Found Glory since 6th grade!" Real impressive. Dr. Balls
uses even more dick and fart jokes than Buddyhead, but they're
only half as funny because they don't make any fucking sense.
Random words like "ass-rapedly" are injected throughout
his worthless meanderings and considered to be jokes. The words
"BJ" and "Poon" are just the highest form
of humor that the human race will ever achieve.
Here's an example, typos and all, "It all depends on whether
you believe in the end of the world like a big fat salami sticking
out of my fly-oh sorry for the off color remark lady and gentlemen,
but as you remember, I have no backspace key." And that's
not out-of-context, that's just not funny.
Oh yeah. And he hates when people put music styles into quotation
marks. “Emo”, “Sceamo”, “Pop-punk”. All that and he's a die-hard
Republican who loves every lie the Bush administration has managed
to concoct. What more could you want from a zine?
Pastepunk.com
Not only home to possibly the WORST color scheme ever, Pastepunk.com
boasts lackadaisical CD reviews, boring show reviews, and about
the same clientele as punknews.org. These guys even put out their
own T-shirts and a compilation. Who the hell would buy a pastepunk.com
shirt? I swear to god that if I see anybody, regardless of who you
are, wearing a T-shirt from these guys I will kill you without thinking
twice. The comp. is called “Broken Lamps & Hardcore Memories” whatever
the fuck that means. The CD features great “Hardcore” bands such
as Yellowcard and Good Riddance. You don’t get much more hardcore
than that. I guess the rest of the bands just broke lamps. This
piece of shit costs six dollars and isn’t even worth the plastic
it’s printed on. But, some of the proceeds go to benefit research
for diabetes and Parkinson disease. This raises the question, “How
badly do these charities need money that they’d accept it from these
people?” It’s like when the Catholic church took donations from
the Nazi party during WWII.
Bornbackwards.com
What can I say? Bad writing, thinly veiled by snooty elitist posturing
and vague homophobia. Shitty 'artistic' layouts spattered with
words that barely form sentences, and a fan base who’s collective
I.Q. probably would not come close to that of country music singer
Toby Keith. Written by a few college kids who believe themselves
to be “in the know” about music, but are actually about three
years behind on everything. They think they’re some sort of budding
Pitchfork Media, or Buddyhead, but instead they just blatantly
steal from these sites like mad. Always moralizing to their audience
and extremely judgemental, these fuckers are egotistical enough
to try to make a list putting down other zines! Like anybody
would even bother to read their site to see it.
Their reviews are each like 3 pages long and usually don't even
get to the music for a few paragraphs while the writer tries to
be cool and original, but who wants to read such self-indulgent
shit? Either they're confusing psuedo-intellectual crap or
complete blathering nonsense about fetuses and dead animals. They
only update every three fucking months and when they do it's some
bullshit about how they hate this or that sucks. They do interviews
with bands nobody's ever heard of and usually nobody wants to hear.
They post shitty mp3s every week that are supposedly cool because
they're semi-obscure, but usually it's obscure for a reason. They
change their layout every year, not realizing that they get successively
worse. Take a fucking art class for Christ's sake! You can't build
a layout out of other people's layouts!
Plus I heard they were gay.
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