Deep Thoughts on the 2010 Bands You Can Ignore List

This list was intended to do a handful of things. Those things after the jump.

1) Present a sort of Rawkblog taste state of the union: These are bands I don’t like. I’m not going to be writing about them on Rawkblog. As a Rawkblog reader, I’d like you to be aware of this, in case you were expecting paragraphs of gushing about Teen Inc. or whatever. Consider it a full disclosure.

2) As a response to the orgasmic heights of drunken, Twitter-driven CMJ coverage. These bands may sound great in a tiny club at 2 a.m. after a day of free booze, but try listening to them on headphones.

3) To point out the obvious ridiculousness of multiple bands having “Teen” in their names. (Or “Sun” in their names.) This, to me, is funny — stringing them together is a joke, though the fact that none of them are very good is not. I also used the word special (in italics!) and mentioned the bands’ moms as a joke, to take some of the edge off of me listing a bunch of bands and saying they suck.

4) To cut through some of the general “Every new band is a buzz band!” bullshit of 2010. You don’t need to listen to everything. Most of these bands just don’t have much to offer: Even the best of them, which is probably Sun Airway, sound like pale imitations of better bands, and probably imitations of bands with records out this year! I’m not against imitation — I’m for quality. It doesn’t matter what recipe you use if you’ve baked a delicious meal; the bands I’ve listed are burnt vegan cupcakes.

5) Did I want to piss people off and get “mad hits?” Of course. Am I entitled to do this once a year after spending the other 250+ weekdays writing about bands nobody cares about that generate literally a couple of dozen Hype Machine hits? Of course.

That all said:

Re: not writing descriptions of every band: The whole point is that these are bands I think you can safely ignore. I’m asking the reader to trust me as a critic here. If you disagree with any of these selections, you already have your mind made up and don’t need me to explain to you how your taste is “wrong” or “bad.” This is the thing that, insanely, seems to have offended people the most — when I did the opposite, posting a list of nine great free albums the other day, nobody said, “Jesus Christ, Dave, why don’t you tell us why these are good?! This is so reckless!”

I think this points to a larger cultural issue in 2010, which is: bloggers are always looking for content. If you post a song every day, or five songs every day, some of those are going to be better than others and inevitably, some of them are just not going to be very good. There is almost no negative writing on blogs, because it’s generally not very productive — I’d rather spend my time writing about why I think a band is great and worthy of your time than doing the opposite, which seems pointless, and why I chose to do a list like this rather than write something on every single one of these bands — so its very existence, almost regardless of what bands I chose, inspires backlash. Why? I guess it’s seen as a threat — to taste, to other blogs, to something.

So there it is. Send back more deep thoughts.