Noughties By Nature #44: BrokeNCYDE - Freaxxx

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in music. Thanks to the digital technology, and more specifically, the Internet, people’s perceptions and attitudes to music have completed changed. Whilst we can’t be certain which bands specifically will be remembered by the history books, we can say for certain that the noughties is, without a doubt, the era of the internet band. Having almost completely changed the way people find and digest music, the Internet has provided ample opportunities for new bands to sell themselves. The Arctic Monkeys used Myspace, as did Lily Allen, and Little Boots was all over YouTube before she hit the big time; however, The Arctic Monkeys would have made it big regardless of their friend count, and both Lily Allen and Little Boots already had their deals inked before their marketing people even dreamt of Web 2.0. No, the first true band of the Internet age was a much more questionable affair. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you BrokeNCYDE.

For the uneducated, BrokeNCYDE are a screamo-crunk or crunkcore group from America, which is as bad as it sounds. This is not the point. The point is that without the Internet, BrokeNCYDE would not and could not exist. Without the internet, no-one would have ever heard of BrokeNCYDE, there would not be hundreds of message boards threads entitled “Worst band ever”, there would never have been a petition to get them removed from The Warped Tour, there would have never been a fake ‘Mothers Against BrokeNCYDE’ website, they would never have been asked about said website in an interview, Warren Ellis* would never have blogged about them, we would never had to suffer the horror of crabcore. Frankly, BrokeNCYDE are some next level meta-shit. Without the advances in home recording that noughties computer technology has given us, BrokeNCYDE would never have been able to develop a sound and come into existence.

Yes, BrokeNCYDE are truly horrible, and I hope I never have to watch this video again (my favourite part is the guy screaming in some girl’s unblinking face), but this is also important. In a time when families go on day trips to V Festival and parents take their children to see Kings Of Leon, and no-one baits an eyelid at a band called Anal Cunt naming a song You're Pregnant, So I Kicked You in the Stomach, it’s probably a good thing that teenagers have a band to claim as their own, a band that anyone over the age of about 16 finds abhorrent and repulsive. If the noughties were the first true digital decade, then BrokeNCYDE are the first truly digital band. God bless the Internet.

PS. Two more points:
1. The original Mothers Against BrokeNCYDE doesn’t appear to online anymore. It was at www.mothersagainstbrokencyde.net
2. There is a crunkcore group called Millionaires who toured with BrokeNCYDE. They’re pretty shitty as well, but I believe that if they were ten years older and came from Portland, people would love the shit out of them.
David Pott-Negrine

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[EP: BC13]

(* The cult graphic novelist, not the Dirty Three/Bad Seeds violinist)