“You guys are supporting a very independent band,” Ben Liebsch of the emergent emo band You, Me, and Everyone We Know told a crowd of 100 or so from a small stage on a remote slice of asphalt in the parking lot of Nassau Coliseum here on last month. “There are lots of dependent bands playing elsewhere.”
It was a quaint complaint to voice on the Vans Warped Tour, now in its 14th year, which long ago accepted that punk music and punk values were not an exclusive match. And had Liebsch’s band not been so charming and skilled, it might have been harder to ignore the logo for Kia Motors waving on a banner just above them.
Over the years the Warped Tour has become a staging ground for discussions about punk inclusion. But given the range — or, perhaps, the lack of focus — of its current incarnation, what’s evident is that punk may well encompass whoever’s willing to show up and be counted.
On this stop of the summer-long tour, about 100 bands on 10 stages made for several forms of success: impressive, punishing sets by the Christian metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada and the detail-oriented, melodic metal outfit Protest the Hero, a stage-overwhelming turn by the promising young emo band Forever the Sickest Kids, and masterly performances by the emo veterans Say Anything and the politically minded punks Against Me!
As in recent years, hip-hop was a recurrent theme, even if there were few actual rap acts. The rapper Shwayze, whose musical partner is the rocker Cisco Adler, of Whitestarr, was benign; Adler also appeared onstage with 3OH!3, which suggested a less literate Beastie Boys. Gym Class Heroes drew one of the day’s largest and most fervent crowds with a mix of emo-rap and power-pop. They toyed with a range of influences like 1980s soul and metal — the group covered a song by Lamb of God, while its frontman, Travis McCoy, fiddled with a controller from the video game Guitar Hero — that had barely any discernible traces of punk. Later, in a separate acoustic set, the band covered the Zombies’ Time of the Season, and McCoy exuberantly riffed on J. Holiday’s Bed, one of last year’s best R ’n’ B songs.
In a new twist for this tour, electro reared its head in the music of Family Force 5, whose members dressed as if they were extras in Starlight Express; the Finnish shouters Disco Ensemble; and Cobra Starship, whose lead singer Gabe Saporta averred, in between smart-alecky numbers, “We’re not the conventional notion of what a Warped Tour band is.” As if that center were somehow holding elsewhere.
For the classicists in attendance, Reel Big Fish played ska-punk that hasn’t aged a bit since the band formed in the mid-1990s, when it was already an anachronism. And Street Dogs, a Celtic-influenced punk band, brought out C.J. Ramone, a late-period member of the Ramones, for a cover of Motorhead’s R.A.M.O.N.E.S. While these bands played to reasonable-size crowds, they were basically punk signifiers, credibility stamps that allowed for experimentation elsewhere.
Not that the crowd of several thousand minded. For most of the festival’s nine hours there were as many, or more, fans doing things other than watching bands: checking out books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, taking a stab at the video game Rock Band, buying studded belts and pastel-colored sunglasses.
The final set of the day belonged to Katy Perry, an anomaly on this tour for several reasons: She is a woman; she is a pop singer; and she has a song, I Kissed a Girl, which has spent the last month atop the Billboard singles chart. But in spite of a teal top and matching shorts, and perfect hair, she played to the scene, rolling around the stage like a rock star, and leading her band in heavier, more guitar-driven arrangements of her songs. By the time she closed with her big hit, boys were singing along, and dozens of girls were crowd-surfing. On this day it was not the least punk thing to have happened.
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In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
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