THE MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS OF BUTT ROCK

turn on rock radio and you will literally hear the same stuff that i heard when i was in high school in 1996 like green day offspring metallica guns and roses it's like frozen in time what's up everybody i'm finn mckenty this is the punk rock nba and today we are talking about butt rock there's this set of stuff and pop culture that gets no respect from critics in the media and yet is simultaneously incredibly popular for example how the fast nefarious sold billions of billions of dollars of tickets so obviously somebody thinks those are great movies and yet they will never even sniff an oscar and i kind of think of butt rock as the musical equivalent of that bands like breaking benjamin shine down and seether are massively popular and yet when was the last time that you heard any kind of critic or influencer in the rock media space even acknowledge that they exist let alone say anything good about them so what's the deal does the public simply have terrible taste and make awful music popular or could it be that maybe it's the media who don't get it that is the question that i will answer in this video but first i wanted to mention the punk rock nba podcast this show is really all about doing what you love for a living and so every week i sit down with people who have done exactly that for example musicians like matt from periphery tommy from between the buried me low lotus shinigami i also talked to photographers designers youtubers like glenn fricker and sarah dietschy and what i try to do is unpack exactly how they got to where they are with the goal of helping you do the same you can check that out at the link in the description and with that out of the way let's get into it first of all what exactly is butt rock because every time i bring this up people always ask so let me just explain that really quickly the name butt rock comes from those radio stations that say like you're listening to kisw 99.9 will replay nothing but rock get it nothing but rock butt rock and those stations tend to play stuff that sounds like this [Music] [Applause] or this [Music] and so we call it butt rock and so when i say butt rock that's what i'm talking about the kind of bands who tend to play the red state rock festivals that like the county fairgrounds with a funnel cake stand over here in a marine corps recruiting booth over there that's running a pull-up contest stuff like cedar three days grace shine down breaking benjamin firefighter death punch disturbed all that kind of stuff and just in case you weren't aware of exactly how popular these bands are they're pretty [ __ ] popular which kind of highlights one of the most interesting things about the music industry or at least like the music media this massive disconnect between what's actually popular and what the people in the media obviously wish was popular these two things are very rarely the same for example disturbed and shine down both sold over a hundred thousand tickets each in 2019 which for reference is more than mariah carey or 21 pilots and the same is true on the streaming side of things for example like cedar and hubba stank two bands whose names you probably haven't heard since like 2006 both have over five million monthly listeners on spotify three days grace have six million listeners disturbed have eight million which is way way bigger than any of these like critically acclaimed artists that you might hear about all the time in the media like for example at the drive-in who have 345 000 or death grips at 774 000 and i get that people in the media typically have different tastes than your average guy or girl on the street but in this case there's such a massive difference between the two that i kind of had to ask myself like what happened what's going on here why is butt rock like pretty much completely ignored by the media despite the fact that there's obviously millions of people who love it well to answer that question i think what we need to do is dissect exactly what makes it popular which basically comes down to the fact that it's everything that cool alternative music isn't the obvious first place to start is the music itself which like i said it's kind of the musical equivalent of the fast and the furious there's no pretension here they're not trying to make some sort of profound deep hard to understand piece of art that if it was a painting would be hanging on the wall next to a rothko or a mondrian no they just want to write catchy accessible songs that people like and you know what they're really [ __ ] good at it [Applause] which i think is way way harder than writing some needlessly complex rift salad song with no hook and hiding behind the excuse of progressive as the reason why nobody other than other guitar nerds likes it writing simple catchy songs is really [ __ ] hard and for everyone who says whatever sorry i just don't want to like barf out these crappy radio rock songs why don't you show us how easy it is why don't you prove me wrong by writing a radio hit and making me eat my words you might find out that it's actually a little bit harder than you think and i think a big part of their appeal is that they're all about singles which almost seems like a dirty word in rocking metal now there's this like strange emotional attachment to albums and this kind of unstated belief that there's something like cheap or corny about trying to write songs with big hooks because that's what pop artists do because pop is bad but you know what writing singles works almost every one of these artists got big off of some huge radio hit that's pretty much responsible for the whole rest of their career you might remember some of these names for example hubba stank had the reason [Music] three days grace had i hate everything about you [Music] but here's the thing you really can't write these bands off as just one hit wonders some of them were but if you look a lot of these bands have like four five six songs with well over 100 million plays that's no joke and it's actually easy to see why they had so much success because as corny as you might think they are these are just objectively great [ __ ] songs even if you absolutely hate this stuff and a lot of you guys probably do i bet you can sing the chorus to half of the songs that i mentioned in this video and you kind of have to respect that i think that level of songwriting is a serious craft which i respect because like i said it's [ __ ] hard and so that's why i think it's so odd that it almost seems like there's this bias against that in rock and metal so like think of songwriting as a craft to be honest i think it's a little bit of a cop-out or to put it bluntly as my friend trey xavier said butt rock riding the hooks that your shitty metal band can't because guess what nobody cares how hard your song is to play they just want something they can sing along to which kind of highlights what i think the real problem is that alternative music at least a lot of it on the rock side of things kind of lost the plot and started making music for other bands instead of the fans this like kind of self-indulgent naval gazing kind of stuff just like the oscar bait movies that really don't do that well with box office and like zero normies watched or liked or probably even heard of because those movies are made by film people for other film people but not the butt rock bands they're here to give the people a show give him some songs that he can sing along to with a beer in their hand and yeah they don't really get a lot of love from the media but they don't give a [ __ ] what the critics think they don't have to because their fans love them and that's all that matters and speaking of the fans i think that's another big part of the equation here the culture clash between butt rock fans and the media is very real i would say the easiest way to describe those fans is what i always refer to as like the military wife demographic the kind of people who shop at buckle and still wear american fighter shirts boot cut bedazzled jeans chain wallets and leather wrist cuffs lots of soul patches and goatees and faux hawks and girls with that motocross fangirl skunk hair thing which i confess i loved back then kind of girls who look like they might have been on rock of love and i make fun of these people a lot but really it's completely in a good nature like fun kind of way because really they are my people in a lot of ways i grew up in a town about 30 miles outside of seattle with a lot of pickup trucks with a gun rack in the back window a lot of the kids that went to high school would go hunting on the weekends my dad was in the navy and then a corrections officer and so even though i don't necessarily love the music the seether breaking benjamin shine down kind of fans really are my people in a lot of ways and is there any group of people that the media looks down on more than the kind of blue collar middle american kind of people that are likely to be butt rock fans i can't think of one other than maybe tech billionaires and i'll tell you why because 90 of the people writing these like snarky blog posts from brooklyn or portland probably moved there three years ago from davenport iowa or springfield missouri maybe if i just talk [ __ ] on butt rock fans from missouri at every opportunity none of my cool new friends here in portland that wear full of hell shirts will catch on to the fact that i was a butt rock fan from missouri and to be clear i'm not saying they should like this music or the fans nobody is obligated to like anything but the way that they turn their noses up at it in such a condescending classist kind of way i think tells you a lot and to kind of prove the point that their attitude is driven more by the fans than the music itself you'll notice that they kind of switch the narrative about certain artists when they transition between scenes for example at the beginning avenged sevenfold were emo sceni weenies when they wore guyliner and played the metalcore fans when they got more of a hard rock look and shifted their fan base to that military wife demographic the narrative about them changed to now they're like redneck jock rock and speaking of the butt rock fandom that brings me to my next point about the insane longevity of this stuff and the role that the fans play in that this is maybe the most interesting thing about butt rock to me that it's been doing these big big numbers for a solid 20 years despite having basically like zero artistic innovation that whole time i mean if you listen to a skillet song from 2001 compared to one of the songs from now 2020 they don't sound too different and i would say the same is true for almost all the artists in this genre and if you look at the playlist for a lot of rock radio what you'll see is a whole lot of the same names that you would have seen in like 2003 for example looking at octane on sirius which is pretty much like butt rock ground zero you'll see breaking benjamin shine down papa roach cedar evanescence three days grace if you didn't know better you'd think that maybe you tripped and fell on a time machine to 2003 and it's the same deal for all the big rock festivals like welcome to planet rock or whatever as you know if you've watched my other videos generally speaking i'm all about fresh blood and getting the 40 year olds with dyed black goatees off the stage to make room for the next generation so to some extent i kind of roll my eyes at this i'm like do we really need 6 a.m to exist in 2020 can we not maybe make room for somebody new to take their slot like are people really gonna riot at the funnel cake stand if they don't play but at the same time i get it the butt rock fans want something that not many newer artists are offering and you can't replace 6am until there's someone coming along who does what they do these fans want those big hooks that i talked about earlier they want that big arena rock experience for the most part they just want to [ __ ] rock out and have a good time and that's really kind of not what rock is about anymore for the most part but you are seeing some of the older metalcore bands successfully transitioned to the hard rock serious xm octane core scene bring me the horizon asking alexandria and a day to remember as a couple examples which as much as i make fun of metalcore bands for going butt rock i actually completely understand and if i was in their shoes i'd probably do the same because these bands always got so much [ __ ] from the media and the real music gatekeepers that if i was them i'd be like you know what [ __ ] it if you don't want us and you're gonna hate us no matter what we do then peace the [ __ ] out we're gonna go play for some fans that actually support us which to me really cuts to the core of why butt rock is still so successful their fans are pretty much like chill normal people who are old enough to have real jobs and therefore a little bit of disposable income and also because they're adults they understand that stuff costs money so they don't mind paying for things and when it comes to seeing one of their favorite bands play it's kind of like a special occasion to them rather than just this thing they do every weekend and kind of take for granted oh honey look i saw on facebook that skillet is playing at the tacoma dome we should get a babysitter and go it'll be so fun to dress up in our rocker outfits they'll drop 150 bucks on tickets 15 for beer and 40 bucks on a shirt as opposed to the real music fans who give you nothing but [ __ ] anytime your band does something that actually makes a little bit of money so butt rock fans might not be cool but they're actually very valuable for a marketing perspective they're super loyal they're happy to pay for things that they support and as long as you keep delivering the goods they'll be your fan for life this is why def leppard still makes millions of dollars a year even though they haven't had a hit in like 30 years and it's why skillet can keep playing county fairs as long as they want and making way more money than all these bands grinding it out in the clubs so although i do oftentimes make jokes about the festivals booking the same bands over and over on the radio playing the same songs year after year i mean turn on rock radio and you will literally hear the same stuff that i heard when i was in high school in 1996 like green day offspring metallica guns n roses it's like frozen in time but i get it that's their market and if it ain't broke don't fix it and so part of me kind of wishes that i did like butt rock because honestly their fans are a real breath of fresh air compared to the like judgmental uptight arrogant and sometimes honestly kind of toxic culture that comes along with a lot of the music that i do like better like hardcore metalcore death metal and weirdly even pop punk i would not have guessed that toxic pop punk gatekeepers and elitists exist but let me tell you they definitely do so just to kind of sum all this up my advice to the butt rock haters is just relax if you don't like it that's cool but i'd ask yourself what can i learn from butt rock even if i don't like it because guess what they're definitely doing something right those numbers kind of speak for themselves like you don't sell a hundred thousand tickets or get six million monthly spotify listeners by accident and to be specific i'd say there's two main things to take away from the massive yet weirdly ignored success of butt rock number one the songs you don't have to play butt rock to write great hooks and you shouldn't be ashamed of trying to write a catchy song it's not cheating or selling out or compromising or dumbing your music down or anything like that cannibal corpse had hooks hammer smashed face is the hookiest death metal song ever [Music] morbid angel had hooks with like god of emptiness and so did all the other greats like slayer anthrax pantera the list goes on people like hooks and number two the culture of butt rock and i don't mean getting a soul patch and wearing american fighter shirts in a leather wrist cuff although i do always support anybody who represents that aesthetic i mean the way that butt rock fans are generally chill friendly people who don't judge you for listening to the wrong thing or dressing the wrong way they're cool to anybody who's cool to them and that's how a scene should be right and if you want your scene to be as healthy as the butt rock scene is then i would try to emulate that i think a whole lot more people would be into quote unquote real metal if it was as inclusive and welcoming as the butt rock scene is so just to kind of sum it up the big takeaway here is one of my favorite sayings don't hate congratulate i talk to dozens of people every day who are trying to make things happen with their music and if you are one of those people i would say pay a little bit more attention to what has made butt rock so successful and a little bit less attention to pleasing the critics no rogaine in the propane all right my friends that does it for this video on the misunderstood genius of butt rock as always let me know what you think in the comments if you haven't checked out the punk rock nba podcast i would love it if you would do that it's all about doing what you love for a living so i sit down with musicians photographers designers youtubers anybody who's managed to do that and i try to unpack exactly how they got to where they are today with the goal of helping you do the same you can check that out at the link in the description and as always i want to sincerely thank everyone who supports us on patreon it is because of your support that we're able to do a lot of things but especially the podcast because of the patrons i was able to hire a producer and editor who makes it all happen so thank you very much for your support if you would like to join the patreon patrons get access to every podcast a week early there's a members only private discord server that i'm in all the time there's a way to have me review your band podcast youtube channel design portfolio anything else that you might want to get my feedback on so if that sounds cool you can check that out at the link in the description and with that i'm going to sign up for now but i will see you next time

Channel: The Punk Rock MBA

Views: 506,461

Keywords: butt rock, post grunge, breaking benjamin, shinedown, papa roach, skillet, three days grace, puddle of mudd, hoobastank the reason, disturbed, avenged sevenfold, seether, evanescence, sixx am, bring me the horizon, sirius xm octane, asking alexandria, a day to remember, finn mckenty, punk rock mba, i prevail, five finger death punch

Id: J6gOFMkia2Y

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020