Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) bespreekt huidige rockmuziek

Onlangs verscheen er een artikel online waarin de auteur claimde dat de huidige rockmuziek slecht en depressief is. Hierin worden fun. en Mumford & Sons de beste rockbands van tegenwoordig genoemd, maar neemt de auteur deze bands wel kwalijk dat zij het genre ‘pussifyen’. Je kunt het volledige artikel hier lezen.

Mike Shinoda, frontman van Linkin Park, heeft besloten zijn mening te geven over dit artikel. Hij is het er zelf niet mee eens. Je kunt zijn reactie op het artikel hieronder lezen.

My name is Mike Shinoda; I’m a songwriter, vocalist, and founding member of the band Linkin Park, and I’m a regular visitor of Pigeons and Planes. When I read the Ernest Baker piece called “Rock Music Sucks Now and It’s Depressing,” I had a few reactions. I sent them to the folks who run the site, and they asked me to share them with you here.

“The guy from Linkin Park visits this blog?” you say. Indie music purists may want to hate on this piece before I start, simply because I represent a mainstream music act which they think is at odds with their “independent” or “underground” aesthetic. If that’s you, so be it; I know your deal.

I was the same way when I was younger. I leaned toward (and still lean toward) independent, underground music. And then one day, my own band was embraced by the mainstream, and I was forced to reconcile my feelings about the situation. I remember a specific moment when the issue struck me: we were playing four to six shows a week when our song “One Step Closer” first started getting played on the radio. Up until that point, we were playing for a couple hundred people a night. Suddenly, that number doubled. Then quadrupled. And one night, I looked out from the stage and something made me think:

“Oh my God, we probably have fans who love music that I think is terrible.”

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not dissing our fans—the vast majority were (and are) cool. I was seeing people in our crowd singing along to our music, who I didn’t have anything in common with, and it made raised questions about integrity.

What does it take to balance integrity and record sales?

Integrity is subjective. Numbers are not. Today, for those of you who aren’t up on the latest of Linkin Park, we haven’t slowed down. Linkin Park is one of the biggest bands on YouTube; we’re the biggest band on Facebook, and we still headline most major rock festivals in the world when we go out on tour. We’re not a “legacy act,” riding out classic hits on tour like The Stones and Roger Waters, playing shows for nostalgic middle-aged crowd—instead, we’re constantly striving to innovate, in the studio and online with our fans. Every album we’ve released in the last 10 years has debuted at  No. 1 in at least 20 countries.

Yet, even with things still strong and growing, we’re not in the real mainstream, the Kanye-Taylor-Gaga mainstream. And we don’t really want to be, as individuals or as a band. Our fans sit in the shadows, like little sleeper cells all over the world, loyally supporting the band at every turn. Pop radio doesn’t play us, and award shows ignore us. We’re not bitter—we actually work hard to keep the delicate balance.

In Ernest Baker’s piece, here on this site, he wrote: “What’s interesting is exactly how the Rock Music Economy has collapsed over the years… It’s not that I don’t know about or listen to the awesome, great, independent, underground rock music that’s still being made and released every day. But the fact that it’s underground and not mainstream therein lies the problem. There was a time when rock had a complete, undisputed, suffocating stranglehold on the entire realm of popular culture, and that time is no more.”

I have absolutely no problem with the bands Baker cites—Fun., Vampire Weekend, and Mumford and Sons—in fact, they’ve released some of the better albums in recent years. But they’re not who I think of when I think of “rock.” Baker didn’t include huge, active artists like Linkin Park, Muse, Arcade Fire, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Green Day, The Black Keys, Jack White, Fall Out Boy, Of Mice And Men, Nine Inch Nails, and hundreds of others. But it doesn’t matter which rock bands you’re talking about. You can make any list of popular rock bands out there right now, and you’ll find they truly have little influence, individually or together, on the zeitgeist