Some Ph.D. Wrote an Academic Paper About Deathcore, Job For a Cowboy and MySpace Bands
The following is a real, live, actual quote from a proper academic paper, the kind of document you had to wade through in college on LexisNexis just to pull one quote that would support whatever stupid argument you were making in that one paper that you swore would determine the fate of your entire life but ended up being completely insignificant:
At the end of the year 2003 the deathcore scene constituted only a thin slice of the global metal/hardcore scene. The bands working in a context that could be called relatively new, building on certain elements of the traditions of metalcore and death metal (e.g., Between The Buried and Me, Red Chord or Despised Icon) were followed with attention by only a very narrow audience [3]. However in almost less than two years’ time the situation had changed radically: deathcore, an earlier marginal subgenre grew to be a crowd attracting, extensive and, compared to earlier underground conditions, almost mainstream scene. Similarly to the extreme metal scene described by Kahn–Harris (2007), the deathcore scene — or the origin of the genre — has never been bound to a specific local scene, but was, from its outset followed with attention by a global, international fan base [4].
The transformation of the deathcore scene was, in effect due to the success story of one single band, Job For a Cowboy. The band burst into extreme music consciousness through means and speed not experienced before and on the track of its success, not only the community of the deathcore scene, but its inner logic and attitude towards the scene and genre was radically altered. But what had actually happened?
The quote comes from “MySpace Bands and Tagging Wars: Conflicts of Genre, Work Ethic and Media Platforms in an Extreme Music Scene” by Tamás Tófalvy, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The infamous commenters of Lambgoat, who first posted the article, are even cited in the paper, which provides an academic look into the culture surrounding MySpace bands, their success stories, their detractors, and — in hindsight, with MySpace now firmly in our collective rearview mirror — a reflection upon their historical significance and an extrapolation onto today’s online media.
If at some point in the future “flushing” and “my 6 year old son” are cited in an academic paper… THAT will be the day!
