“There’re a lot of artists today – Soundcloud rap, kind of – who I know in my heart that we’ve influenced significantly,” Shea says. Then there are full-on rappers like Ghostmane, lil aaron, City Morgue and $uicideboy$, who are all making abrasive hip-hop that’s much closer to Brokencyde than any other major rap-rock groups of the 21st century. 100 gecs’ 2019 debut was a uniquely comprehensive spread of formerly dissimilar styles, but even neighbouring artists like the recently defunct noise-pop duo Black Dresses – and others, like Mood Killer and William Crooks – are playing with Brokencyde-esque emo melodies and scream-rap verses. The rigid boundaries between heavy music, hip-hop and glossy pop don’t really exist anymore. If Brokencyde were starting out today, that might not be the case. “If you liked Brokencyde, you were an outcast, pretty much.” “It was cool to hate Brokencyde,” he adds. “I think we’ve died five or six times,” Shea says with an exhausted sigh. There was even a bizarre mill of TMZ-style rumours that Brokencyde had died in one way or another, as well as a quickly debunked hoax that they were arrested on child pornography charges. “They wanted to hurt you and be cool, but yet still go to your show and recite the lyrics,” he says. “We really wanted to do music with Lil Jon at the time, and Lil Wayne, because he was using that auto-tune.”Īccording to Shea, many of the people who would try to fight or harass the band at shows would also be in the crowd singing every word back to them. “We were always fighting to get into the rap world, but we were just pushed into the rock world because of how we were making a hybrid of a bunch of different sounds and genres,” Shea says. Even though Se7en screamed in the style of metalcore bands like Attack Attack! or The Devil Wears Prada, they always thought of themselves more as rappers. Shea and Gallegos, both of hispanic descent, grew up in poverty and ingrained in hip-hop culture. But, as it turns out, these were earnest nods to a realm of music they always aspired to cross into.īrokencyde were outsiders in the Warped Tour scene, which was largely associated with white suburban rebellion and middle-class mall culture. It was as if they were in direct conversation with the pop zeitgeist, taunting it with their jarringly crass lyrics and screamed deliveries. In other tracks from that era, Brokencyde were referencing Nelly and Justin Timberlake through throat-searing metal shrieks and odes to “ Scene Girlz”. However, when Brokencyde were breaking out in the late-2000s, they were navigating completely uncharted territory. In today’s hip-hop climate, auto-tune is ubiquitous, and taking influence from pop-punk, emo and metal has been completely normalised by legends like Juice WRLD, Lil Uzi Vert and the contentious XXXtentacion. “I know there’s been other mixtures of music, but I don’t think there’ve been many that have caused so much controversy, chaos and happiness at the same time,” Michael Shea tells me, while reflecting on Brokencyde’s legacy. But unlike Brokencyde, the music press has universally crowned 100 gecs as the apex of “cool”, and there are many other well-respected rappers and left-field pop artists now being rewarded for merging musical elements that Brokencyde used to receive literal death threats for. Within the last year or so, though, a strange shift has begun to take place.įor every negative article Brokencyde accumulated in the early 2010s, there are now just as many tweets lovingly comparing them to the electronic pop duo 100 gecs – an act who, like Brokencyde, combine auto-tuned pop with hip-hop, metal and electro beats. The band’s racoon-haired members, David “Se7en” Gallegos and Michael “Mikl” Shea – who dressed like they’d been dragged through Camden Cyberdog – danced, sung, rapped and screamed awkwardly with a group of girls who looked like disinterested contestants on Nathan Fielder’s ripoff of The Bachelor. When the video for their 2008 breakout single “Freaxxx” emerged (which currently boasts 10,000 more downvotes than upvotes on YouTube), it was as if every metalhead or “scene”-adjacent figure was contractually obligated to shit on it. There’s a strong argument to be made that Brokencyde is the most hated band in internet history. In the late-2000s, the New Mexico duo were known for two things: bringing the word “crunkcore” into existence (their music was an even split between bouncy Southern hip-hop and Myspace metalcore), and being absolutely fucking despised for it. However, even a rawring monstrosity like myself thought I was way too based for Brokencyde. I was a high-schooler who owned multiple Asking Alexandria T-shirts, used an A Day To Remember lyric as my yearbook quote and could recite every line of Hollywood Undead’s “Everywhere I Go” on command. That wasn’t me, because my mum didn’t let me get gauges, but it might as well have been.
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