How Corporations Trapped the MySpace Scene in a Literal Bubble

Consequence Staff
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The post How Corporations Trapped the MySpace Scene in a Literal Bubble appeared first on Consequence.

Journalist Michael Tedder’s new book Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music tracks the evolution of several bands that broke big from the once-dominant social media platform, particularly in the “Scene” — which refers to MySpace groups in the emo, pop-punk, and metalcore realm. In this exclusive excerpt from chapter nine of Top Eight, Tedder takes a comprehensive look into the intersection between “Scene” notoriety and the ensuing corporatization and commodification of that space. He specifically highlights the 2007 MTV series Band in a Bubble, which saw pop-punk quartet Cartel in a Dr. Pepper-sponsored “bubble” in New York as they worked on their self-titled sophomore album.

Top Eight is Tedder’s first book, and is available now. In celebration of the book’s release, Tedder will be speaking with Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly at The Strand in New York City on August 17th; check out details here.

Read below for the excerpt of chapter nine of Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music.

Some people called it pop-punk. Some called it emo. Some deemed it Warped Tour music, or MySpace rock, or scene music. Plenty of people called it whiny. The passionate may not have called it an energy source, but they certainly treated it that way. But by 2007, you could have simply and accurately called it The Sound of Young America.

Or, if you were of a certain age and a certain inclination, you could just call it The Scene. By 2007, The Scene was growing in a way that was just straight-up weird, becoming a catchall term for anything that appealed to the Alternative Press and Warped Tour crowd as well as to a large chunk of MySpace users. The Scene included emo and its brattier cousin pop punk, two genres that were increasingly blurring together.

But The Scene also included bands in the metalcore and screamo genres, two offshoots of hardcore punk that have lineages almost as deep as emo. Screamo, a variation on emo that features serrated riffs, throat bursting cries, and an underlying introspection, could be traced back to 1990s pioneers Heroin and Orchid. Metalcore was a mutation of the 1980s hardcore scene that found some punks adopting elements of Metallica-style thrash metal; common tropes included mid-song drum breakdowns and an on-again/off-again variation between screaming and clean singing, as typified by ’90s groups such as Integrity and Earth Crisis.

But the kids in The Scene cared about those early pioneers about as much as they cared about any emo group that existed prior to Dashboard Confessional (or maybe before Fall Out Boy). By 2007, the MySpace Scene’s version of metalcore and screamo referred to groups such as Bullet for My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold, and the absurdly named The Devil Wears Prada. (The band members insisted they named themselves after the book, not the movie, mind you.)

At some point, The Scene became basically anything that MySpace teenagers liked, and this dynamic did not go unnoticed. Former Midtown frontman Gabe Saporta turned Cobra Starship into a real band, including a keytar player named Victoria Asher he found by searching through MySpace. The band’s look was as proudly gaudy as their music, very heavy on pastels and bold colors. “I’m just a contrarian person. No matter what, if you say one thing, I’m just gonna say the opposite,” says Saporta. “When what everyone was wearing was very street punk and Hot Topic-looking, Midtown dressed in turtlenecks and scarves. And then when everyone became really dark and eyeliner and all black, we wore the brightest things possible. We were doing things that were ’80s throwbacks. I didn’t want to be lumped into what everyone else is doing, even if that means doing something that people think is ridiculous.”

Before long, the all-important Pete Wentz cosign also brought the hip-hop group Gym Class Heroes into the fold. Led by the heavily tattooed punk rapper Travie McCoy, who guested on “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It),” the group became Warped Tour and Scene mainstays after the Patrick Stump–featuring 2005 single “Cupid’s Chokehold” became a viral MySpace favorite. Gym Class Heroes were a band that knew who their fans were and had no compunctions about catering to them, as the single “Taxi Driver” name-dropped emo acts such as Dashboard Confessional, My Chemical Romance, and anyone else McCoy could fit in with breathtaking try-hard energy. (“On a Thursday/taking back Sunday for a refund.”) They later dropped the would-be Scene anthem “New Friend Request,” an ode to crushing on a girl’s MySpace page, with McCoy rapping “My man Tom introduced us.” The group were popular among Scene kids until their breakup in 2012, but they were always kept at arm’s length by the traditional hip-hop consumer base.

The twenty-four-hour restaurant chain Denny’s had a decades-long reputation as the place teenagers, as well as inebriated people, would hang out after a show, as you could order a single cup of coffee and stay all night if you pleased. Just don’t forget to tip. But in 2008, the owners of the Denny’s chain noticed they’d had a drop-off in late customers coming in to order a Moons Over My Hammy and not leaving for hours, owing to rival fast-food chains staying open later.

In response, Denny’s started the All Nighter campaign to bring the kids back in, playing various flavors of alt-rock music in the restaurant, hiring younger servers for the 10 pm to 5 am shift, and allowing them to shun the chain dress code in lieu of jeans and T-shirts, ever the standard rock kid uniform. But the pièce de résistance was the introduction of the Rockstar Menu, in which artists, mostly from The Scene, were invited to create their own dishes. None of the artists were paid, instead receiving free advertising via exposure on Denny’s menus and website, as well as free Denny’s for a month, as long as they mentioned the visits and posted about Denny’s on their personal accounts at least three times a month. Did Denny’s create influencer culture? Kind of.

Plain White T’s contributed the Plain White Shake, consisting of a vanilla milkshake with cheesecake, whipped cream, and white chocolate chips, a concoction as treacly sweet as their music, and the first band to participate in the program was Taking Back Sunday, auteurs of the Taking Back Bacon Burger Fries (was a Taking Back Sundae too obvious?), which consisted of French fries with cheese, hamburger, tomatoes, pickles, bacon, onions, ketchup, and mustard. Reyes gamely played along with the free food requirements, posting a video about how after meeting his future wife after a show, he’d taken her to Denny’s for his first date. (He ordered chicken fingers, undeniably the best thing on the Denny’s menu.)

In case that wasn’t an obvious enough sign of how commercialized The Scene, as well as emo as a whole, had become, a year earlier MTV debuted Band in a Bubble, which combined two of the channel’s main late-aughts focus points: Scene music and reality TV.

The conceit was that Cartel would spend three weeks writing and recording their second album in a 55,000-pound, 2,000-square-foot fiberglass and steel bubble located at New York’s Hudson River Park’s Pier 54. (It was based on an Australian show by the same name, featuring the Australian rock band Regurgitator, and the whole thing was inspired by a stunt by the magician David Blaine.) Fans could drop by and watch the band in person whenever they wanted, or they could buy a bottle of sponsor Dr Pepper and get access to a 24/7 viewing of the band by one of the twenty-three webcams scattered around the enclosure.

Cartel were planning to continue to promote Chroma, which had begun to break into the mainstream by the end of 2006, but a planned radio campaign for the fan-favorite single “Say Anything (Else)” was put forcibly on hold, and the band bubbled up. “Hindsight being what it is, there’s always that reputation that the bands have to really watch their back. The label’s trying to screw them, whatever. That’s a common thing that people have about the music industry, and they’re not necessarily wrong,” says Cartel frontman Will Pugh. “But, we felt like we’re riding this wave. The radio stuff is going nuts. The album sales are going nuts. This is Epic Records. They know how to do this.”

Pugh now admits they would have been better served working on a promotions campaign for “Say Anything (Else),” an abject example of the sort of song that would play at the end credits of a teen rom-com. But it’s rather hard to say no to a major label like Epic when you’re still a baby band.

“We one hundred percent should have done that. We didn’t have that choice. That was the thing, the label did bring that up. They were like, ‘Yeah, like if we’re going to do this, we’re not going to be able to work on anything else,'” he says. “Doesn’t that seem kind of stupid, considering we have a Top 20 single? And we got a bunch of radio people who are actually paying attention to us? Shouldn’t we actually try to work that song?”

‘Well,'” he remembered being told, “‘we just think it’s going to be a bigger deal with the MTV show.’ They couldn’t really promote the old album while trying to promote the new album is what I was told.”

The show would, shockingly, not be a nuanced look at a young band dealing with industry expectations that they were about to become the next Fall Out Boy while working on their make-or-break second album. MTV goosed the drama by having random street musicians (including an accordion player) and the Knicks City Dancers crash sessions. One night, producers plied the members with copious amounts of alcohol only to later unleash a fitness instructor to force the severely hungover group to engage in 7:00 am jumping jacks, which is just rude.

Episodes were edited to make it misleadingly look like the members were fighting with each other, and ten days into filming, the front window of the supposedly indomitable structure shattered during a storm. “So essentially what happened is they had a negative air pressure thing come through when they were having wind from a tropical storm that was going out in the Atlantic. Luckily it’s like windshield glass, where it doesn’t splinter and go all over the place. It sort of clumped up,” he adds. “Nobody got hit. We were standing far enough away, because three of our moms were there. They had brought us dinner that night. I think they were a little spooked.”

The result was the worst of both worlds. Band in a Bubble felt forced and contrived even by the standards of reality television, without providing the juicy drama that makes viewers turn in anyway, while the association didn’t do much for the band’s sales or street cred. Released in August just a few weeks after Band in a Bubble aired, Cartel debuted at number twenty on the US Billboard 200 but ultimately sold 100,000 copies, far fewer copies than the 250,000 for Chroma. Reviews were tepid, and it certainly sounded like an album that was recorded in a rush by a distracted band that had the talent to do better. They were later dropped by Epic. They released Cycles via the hard-rock label Wind-Up Records in 2009, a bad year for rock bands and everyone else. After their self-released 2013 album Collider, they went on hiatus.

“We made a pretty ambitious album. We were trying to be a little more exploratory. I think if we made the exact same record and just put it out normally, we would have probably gotten a lot better reception. But I don’t think that doing the bubble necessarily had anything to do with anyone’s negative opinions. I think mostly it was just them advertising it in a certain way,” Pugh says.

“We’d also never been on MTV before. So if we can get five people that had never heard of our band to like our band, because they don’t subscribe to Alt Press, then that’s worth the one fan that might be bent out of shape because ‘Oh, they went with Dr Pepper and MTV and blah, blah, blah.'”

With the exception of Thursday and Dashboard Confessional, who were vocally against the war in Iraq, emo became more apolitical as it got more popular in the ’00s, and as time went on, some of the most basic underlying tenets of punk—a wariness of capitalism, macho culture, and conservatism, and an intrinsic empathy for those exploited and maligned by the world—began to get watered down by the newcomers, who either skipped some crucial lessons in their attempt to skate to the top or never had much interest in anything besides popularity to begin with.

As CD sales began to further erode, licensing your song for an advertisement was beginning to lose its stigma, as it became one of the few ways for bands in any genre to get paid. (In 2010, indie darlings Vampire Weekend and the Black Keys participated in a “sellout-off” on The Colbert Report, goofing on themselves for the amount of ad licensing deals that they profited from.) It was perhaps unavoidable, and ultimately fans would get used to hearing their favorite indie bands in soda commercials. Even then, it seemed that every day a younger band that didn’t have any hang-ups about the whole art-versus-commerce bugaboo (and often didn’t have any compelling ideas worth watering down) were only too happy to give the kids what they wanted as slickly as possible. The unofficial genre of MySpace was becoming just as corporate as, well, MySpace.

WILL PUGH (CARTEL): We weren’t like bumpkins or anything. But it’s like, “All right, this is Epic Records, this is Pearl Jam. This is Oasis. This is Michael Jackson.” They want us to do this thing where we’re going to have a TV show on MTV. They’re going to promote it. Dr Pepper is sponsoring it. And you’re going to do this live webcam documentary thing about your next album. I mean, there isn’t anyone in their right mind who would say no to that. You literally cannot buy that sort of exposure and press. We all grew up watching MTV, and now we’re going to have a show on MTV? What the hell is happening?

JOSHUA CAIN (MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK): MTV approached us for it. The biggest thing is that we didn’t wanna say “F you” to MTV, which maybe we did in the end. Maybe that’s hurt our career with MTV in the long run.

JUSTIN COURTNEY PIERRE (MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK): We were getting to a point where we were like, “Oh shit, we gotta sign this thing and if we don’t, we’re probably gonna ruin our career.” But Walmart got involved, and they said that we couldn’t release a record with any swearing on it for like a year.

CAIN: So basically, Walmart was censoring us at this point, so we were like, “You know what, that’s a big F-you, we’re out.” Our booking agent was the same agent as Cartel’s. It got kind of thrown in their way and I feel so bad. I talked to them afterwards, like, “You guys literally stepped in front of a bullet for us. Thank you so much.”

NORMAN BRANNON (TEXAS IS THE REASON): I think the Band in a Bubble thing was very unique, especially because it was so branded. I may have watched that show a little differently if it was coming from a place where Cartel got dropped and they needed money to make a new record and they didn’t have it, and Dr Pepper came in. That would have been interesting. But the fact that they were still on a major label, and this was just, strictly, a marketing gimmick, on some level it just made me sad, because I actually like that record. I think there are good songs on it. But, at the time, it was just going to be tarnished as the Dr Pepper Band in a Bubble record.

PUGH: You’re going to manufacture some drama. You’re going to have some creative editing, you’re going to do all these things to try to make a TV show entertaining to watch. They did supply us with extra alcohol that evening, but by no means did they have to convince us. Then of course, they do all that and some fitness personality shows up and tries to run us through the ringer. We tried to play ball, but then I think [former bassist Jeff Lett] got sick, and we all were definitely not in the mood after a while. She was having us run around, it was kind of like boot camp. We didn’t necessarily assume that they were going to mess with us like that. But looking back on it, you’re like, “OK, yeah, that makes sense.”

CAIN: I think it was a pretty hellish experience for them, but there was a lot of publicity. They kept sabotaging the shower cameras, it was definitely a debacle in the end.

BRANNON: Now, obviously when somebody goes to Spotify now, they’re gonna click on that record and there’s no backstory. They’re not gonna know about the Band in a Bubble unless they go onto YouTube. Again, I understand that was the period of time where selling out became the nonissue. But even that was pushing boundaries for that. A lot of people at that time were like, “Hmm, that might be too far.” This is the thing of every movement or historical moment in music, where there’s always the one guy who goes too far.

PUGH: There was one [episode] where we were just talking about the sequencing of the record, what order songs are going to come in. We were trying to figure out the first three or four, to really get the people into it, that sort of thing. And [drummer Kevin Sanders] was like, “I don’t really like that song to be the third or fourth song.” And then that turned into an edit that said, “Listen, I don’t like any of these songs.” They put in a shot of me. I was playing acoustic guitar and I remember the moment because one of them made a shitty joke, and I looked over and gave him the “pshhhh” look. They had a shot of that that they put in right after Kevin. So it was from two different days. And when I saw that I was like, “Oh, that’s what they’re doing. OK. Well, you know, like, fair enough.” That was the thing for us. We didn’t care. The album was going to be the album, as long as nobody had any sort of editorial privilege over that, and nobody made us seem like, you know, racist misogynists.

BRANNON: The idea of selling out basically had completely dissipated, into something that was, “Oh, you boomers and your selling out.”

PUGH: That was probably the only thing that really pissed me off about the whole thing. We didn’t record that thing in the bubble. We recorded some vocals and guitar and some piano, so we did plenty of things in there. But when they initially pitched us, they were like, “We only want you to do four or five songs, so we can really feature them.” As far as actually tracking the record in there? Hell, no. They didn’t really let us in on the fact that they were going to start promoting it like that. So that kind of caught us off guard. We’re like, “Wait, you think that somebody can write and record an album in twenty days? You realize there’s fifteen songs on this record, right? In between tracks, we have interludes, orchestras, and a marching band. Did you see a marching band come into the studio? A symphony? Did you actually listen to the album?

HEISEL: Great band, by the way. I do love Cartel. Their manager got written up in the New York Times for some fucking podcast he has now. I’m like, “This fucking guy ruined this band’s career for the fucking Band in a Bubble.”

PUGH: They didn’t promote any single. I think they just sort of saw that some people didn’t really like the bubble myth. They didn’t really have a flat-out single to promote that sounded like “Honestly” or something like that.

EDDIE REYES (TAKING BACK SUNDAY): Our stuff circulated for a couple of years on the menu. We did get made fun of, and people did think it was stupid, cheesy. But then the same people who said that shit were the people at Denny’s ordering what we made.

PUGH: I mean, Wind-Up [Records] was great. I mean, yeah, it was smaller for sure. We didn’t get big quick enough into the “we sell actual records” part of the music industry before streaming took over. We toured, we did the whole thing and kind of just were like, “All right guys, we’re kind of getting up in our twenties here. How are we going to continue on being in a band where it can make sense?” Everybody started to sort of see the writing on the wall, and it’s like, you know, I’ve just got to make money. I was married, I had a family.

REYES: You show up to a Denny’s after you just played a long show to sit down and sign autographs for a million people, and there’s families trying to eat. That’s a little awkward. I think once they asked us to perform or something, we were like, “No, we’re not doing that.” But some other bands did, apparently.

HEISEL: The Plain White T’s and the Gym Class Heroes have to go there after a Warped Tour and eat at Denny’s with like forty sweaty fifteen year-olds who just came from their show. It was weird. Very weird. So they were drunk, is what they were.

How Corporations Trapped the MySpace Scene in a Literal Bubble
Consequence Staff

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