The Scene Is Dead

And Project Punk? Don't make me laugh. That noble experiment was taken out back and shot by a bunch of absolute degenerates who couldn't handle high voltage rock and roll without turning into feral animals. Those weren't punks, those animals were tourists in the land of rebellion. They'd rather get blitzed out of their tiny minds on cheap spirits at some nearby park, scaring the locals and smashing up venues, than actually stand in a room and absorb the music. They treated the sanctuary of the venue like a demolition derby for the lobotomised.

Casualty Records? The name became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A casualty of its own success, or perhaps a casualty of the inevitable entropy that swallows anything good in this overgrown country town. Kaleb Collings, the architect, the guy who founded it? He's a Bronco now. Let that sink in. He's traded the feedback loop for the footy field, the mosh pit for the corporate box. When your underground heroes start pivoting to mainstream sporting cults, you know the dream is over.

So, how in the hell did we get here? We are drifting in a tin can far above the world, but the radio is dead. Who is going to be the alien starman to crash land in this cultural wasteland? Who is going to deliver a message of hope and salvation for the scene, channeling the ghost of the imaginary Ziggy Stardust before the spiders from Mars ate his brain? Right now, the silence is deafening.

As your resident gonzo music journalist, and quite possibly the only person left with the synapses firing correctly to recognise the absolute state the scene is in, I feel obligated to grab you by your resold TEMU jacket you bought for $600 at a shitty thrift store and shake you. I am the only one who can actually articulate this rot in words rather than drunken blabberings, and I am the only one actually working to exhume the original spirit of the scene from under six feet of apathy. It is prime time to get some fucking shit done about this. The scene isn't a free bandwagon for you and your little eshay mates to get blind drunk on discount grog and initiate idiotic destruction as a reflection of your own minds, which are clearly already destroyed beyond repair.

You want to know what we lost when the scene died? Let's rewind. Let's crank the time machine back to 2024, a time that feels like a decade ago, a time where people actually seemed to have a shred of common sense and a pulse that beat for something other than clout. The day was May 4th. The location? Paddington Skatepark. Concrete, sweat, and the smell of ozone.

PIMP, a hardcore punk band that actually understood the assignment, decided to put on an event called the 'Big Takeover.' It was a manifesto disguised as a gig. It was a celebration of the community the scene was at the time. It was sprawling. It was hypomanic. It was unforgiving. It was a demonstration of how the scene had expanded far beyond its initial status as a small vehicle for Kaleb's band, Absolution.

It was glorious. You had Findaway there, a band that would go on to become a mainstay of the Brisbane underground, and one of the few acts left that really champion the unadulterated spirit of alternative music. They played like their lives depended on it. You obviously had PIMP, complete with their hardcore breakdowns that hit you in the chest like a sledgehammer and theatrical makeup melting under the sheer weight of the battle-hardened balls they had. They showed the uninitiated exactly what the underground is about. They brought the lifeforce of music to countless new souls who had been starving for it without even knowing.

You had people coming together to celebrate this space where you could just be. For a few hours, the crushing weight of the outside world, the bullshit, the heartache, the unforgiving grind, it all had the volume turned to 'mute.' Your inner pain and struggles were validated and liberated through the consensual violence known as moshing. It was a baptism of sweat. You could collide with a stranger, pick them up, and form a lasting connection with someone who was genuinely cool and nice. It was a tribe.

The memory of what the scene used to be? That's a far cry from the scene that exists today. Or, more accurately, the scene that used to exist a few months ago until the whole shitshow escalated into World War 3. Looks like Kanye was right about one thing. The people who started getting the attention and the fame weren't the ones passionate about the music anymore. They weren't the ones who knew how to connect, who stood for the ethos of punk rock.

The spotlight shifted to the carnival clowns. The people who did the 'craziest' bullshit became the kings of the hill. It escalated into a race to the bottom. The metrics of success changed from 'how good was your set' to 'how much damage did you cause?' People who held the most self-destructive 'parties,' if you could even dignify them with that word, took over. We're talking about individuals who clocked the most number of 'in-out, in-out sessions' with random people in bathrooms, people who literally have histrionic personality disorder or are literal lunatics. These walking disasters who should have never been born became the 'forefront of the scene. We let the inmates run the asylum, and you're surprised the walls are covered in shit?

Is this what we voted for? You know what? Yes. Look in the mirror. Yes, it is. The people in the scene stopped choosing to mosh inside venues to experience the visceral, transcendent power of music. They stopped choosing to connect with people who aren't literal lunatics. Instead, they chose... this. They chose the drama. They chose the spectacle of the collapse.

People can choose what they choose, we have free will for a reason, even if most people use it to make terrible decisions. But have you considered the consequences? Have you considered how the very thing that allowed you to have venues to destroy, people to piss off, and a place to congregate is now gone? It's vanished. Have you ever considered that you've metaphorically shot yourself in the foot with a sawed-off shotgun?

The scene is dead, and we've got to accept that cold, hard reality. Denial is the first stage of grief, and evidently, it's a state many people are wallowing in right now, clutching their old flyers like holy relics. But to make something new, something better, you've got to let the old beast die. You have to let it rot so the soil can be fertilised.

We traded community for hedonism. We traded raw power for polished 'professionism,' look at the case of Ixara Dorizac of Antidismal and the legion of others who have abandoned their roots. They pulled a Metallica. They abandoned the thrash, the grit, and the danger for their own version of St. Anger. St. Anger was a soulless, over-produced, pretentious tin can of a record that sounds like a mid-life crisis pressed onto vinyl. Imagine someone trying to copy that. No tree can survive without its roots, and the scene has been castrated for so long, that it's more worthwhile to start something entirely new instead of beating the same dead horse in the hopes it'll get up and win the Melbourne Cup.

This right here is just the beginning of a new scene. The poppy that rises from this blood-soaked battleground isn't going to be pretty, and it sure as hell isn't going to be polite. The scene won't belong to the degenerates and the lunatics anymore, because they have scorched the earth so thoroughly they have no place left to go like Hitler in his bunker during World War 2. They've burned their bridges and are standing on the edge of the cliff.

The spirit of rock and roll, the real stuff, the stuff that scares your parents and makes the neighbours call the cops, will once more be the foundation of the scene. We are going to build it on the bones of the old, and this time, we aren't letting the tourists in.