RANT - Protest The Hero's Rody Walker

Protest The Hero's front man, Rody Walker, has a hard time comprehending the success of Internet spawned band. From his blurb at Hedbangers Blog.

I don’t understand music anymore, and I don’t really care to. It seems to me the way to get a name for yourself in music was once traveling your ass off and playing as many shows as possible. It was good ol’ fashion hard work, passed down from our father’s father. That’s the only way I’ve ever known to achieve even so much as a meager level of underground success. However, it would appear the up coming generation of lazy-no-good-soda-guzzling-gluttonous-crap-factories have an easier plan — a plan that involves them sitting on their fat asses in their parents’ computer rooms and achieving a much more significant level of success than I have ever known.

They make some sketchy internet presence, receive an obscene amount of MySpace friends and then start a MySpace band profile, often before they have even touched their instruments. Then, they slap together a handful of breakdowns and one crummy two-second vocal part that all their goofy haired friends can sing along to, and their first show is automatically sold out (it also helps if they shout out their homeboy Jesus).

This seems to be a pretty successful equation for success. Naturally, after they accumulate an adequate amount of fans, they start their stupid t-shirt company, which prints inane phrases on shirts, and kids just eat it up. Five years ago, if you showed me one of these bands I would have proudly proclaimed, “There’s no way people are stupid enough to buy this absolute s–t and I will eat my hat if they do.” …Today I am enjoying a delicious meal of mine own chapeau. I am the proud uncle of a monkey, and I am paying that monkey’s way through university. I have even gone so far as to slap a bumper sticker on my car that reads, “My monkey and my money go to Western University!” I want to throw in the towel before I arise to the stunning realization that at the end of this decade I’m not a veteran of anything, I’m just old.