I’m going to need you to read the following paragraph in an Adam Curtis-esque British accent.
2002 was a transitional year for the punk rock underground. The world was changing. The final embers of ‘90s counterculture were fading. Emo and post-hardcore were making the slow climb from the basement to the Hot Topic. Garage rock was topping the charts. Kids with swooshy bangs were discovering Gang of Four, while art-damaged sects in Rhode Island and Michigan were developing new ways of making ear-piercing sounds out of equipment found in the rubbish bin. Over in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, on the other side of the aching Manhattan skyline, cutting-edge trucker hat technology was changing the way we think about the world—and ourselves. It was an exciting time to be young and interested in annoying music. But at what cost?
Michiganfest was a yearly punk rock festival that happened at a wedding hall in the Detroit suburb of Wayne, Michigan. I think the 2002 edition might’ve been the last. Luckily, some kids made a DVD to document it; luckier still, that DVD is up on YouTube. The fest skewed towards the emo and hardcore sides of the scene, but it’s still a decent snapshot of what was going on in the bubbling American underground around that time.
As a band, Milemarker were all over the place, but they sound spock rock here—all that carnival-ish keyboard. This style of sassy, half-dissonant and half-dancey post-hardcore stuck around for a long time. It found its final form, it could be argued, in the output of the band Paramore. Unlike many, I think it’s interesting when underground music is reappropriated and sold to the mainstream.
Midwest sludge supreme: Vaz were a duo that featured members of the Minnesota band Hammerhead, who were known for releases on the legendary Amphetamine Reptile Records. 2002 was a banner year for duos—Lightning Bolt, The White Stripes—so it's interesting that Vaz were the only two-piece at the festie. They sound pretty good, but not nearly as good as godheadSilo’s cover of “In The Air Tonight.”
In what will be a common refrain here, Hey Mercedes featured members of a beloved, defunct band. In this case, it’s Midwest emo kings Braid. At the fest, they play a song that is more straightforward and polished than their former band, the kind of song that ultimately would be mastered by Fall Out Boy. Not quite there yet.
Now we are getting into the weeds: Haymarket Riot combined a few of the more loaded parts of ‘90s counterculture into one whole. I’m talking about math rock and radical politics, both of which were discarded by hipster nation USA. The specter of Dischord Records haunts this entire festival.
Rocket from the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes… Objectively good and influential bands, but never did all that much for me. I assume it's a generational thing. If I were five years older, I would probably understand Spiderland, too. No doubt, RIP Rick Froberg.
More leftover ‘90s shit. Though Crooked Fingers got played constantly on my local college radio station, I don’t think a single DJ stopped to explain who Archers of Loaf were or why they mattered. It was just assumed that everyone was on the same page. I probably make the same mistake over and over on John’s Music Blog. I’m making it right now.
I will not cap: I have not heard of this band. Mellow indie rock from Michigan with a Red House Painters influence. Even though Michiganfest took place post-9/11, it often doesn’t feel that way. Let’s keep it moving.
Did I see Small Brown Bike live back in the day? I’ll never remember. They played a standardized version of melodic post-hardcore and they deployed a dual vocal attack; if you squint hard enough here, you see a band that predicts the whole “tough guy/wimpy guy” vocalist thing that would come to define mall screamo a few years later.
For a long time, seemingly no matter what kind of music you were fucking with, you had to throw it through the Dischord lens—at least if you wanted to rock some shit like Michiganfest. By 2002, Rye Coalition were attempting some kind of gutbucket hard rock thing, but they tempered that impulse with snaking guitars and Guy Picciotto vocals. The song they play is actually catchy. They even repeat the chorus three times.
Oxes jammed instrumental math rock; in their festie clip, they perform with wireless guitars and walk around the crowd, a gimmick that must’ve helped them stand apart from similar bands. The bar for entertainment was low back then. In between this video and the next one, there is a short interview with Jessica Hopper. She notes that, of the 37 bands playing that weekend, only one features a woman.
More than anything else on this DVD, !!!’s performance points to the direction that indie music and youth culture would head in over the next decade: party-forward, apolitical, and “fun.” It’s not a coincidence that bassist Tyler Pope would go on to play with LCD Soundsystem. If you were a kid, it must’ve been fairly mind-blowing to see !!! play here: After hours and hours enduring the most serious guitar music imaginable, you get hit with an 8-piece band that rocks like some strange mix of early Chi Peps, A Certain Ratio, and Happy Mondays. There’s someone on stage wearing both a trucker hat and one of those knit beard things. This is hipster culture 101, people. They are literally teaching the indie kids how to dance. (I opened up for !!! when I was 17 and had to get snuck out of the back door of the club after my set because, I guess, a rival club owner called the cops—I was underage.)
The lone Providence representation at Michiganfest comes from Arab on Radar, which is a shame. Related: Even though Michiganfest took place outside of Detroit, there’s no Wolf Eyes, no Bulb Records crew, and no garage rock. Looking at late-’90s hardcore fest bills, the promoters always threw at least one of these no wave-adjacent bands into the mix. Maybe The Locust was already booked.
57:27: Planes Mistaken for Stars
Before Planes Mistaken for Stars rock, a Michiganfest organizer tells the tale of a drug-fueled hotel afterparty. The cops get called; he gets snuck out and saved by some straight-edge kids. Real transitional moment. Anyway, what was this band’s deal? Were they actually the real heshers—the kind of heshers that a band like Rye Coalition were too cool to ever become? Watching Planes Mistaken for Stars, post-hardcore’s path to Hot Topic becomes more clear.
I’ve had about enough of all these spindly guitar riffs and shouty sailor vocals. And I still have more than an hour to go.
First Oxes, now Owls, who featured every member of Cap’n Jazz except for Davey Von Bohlen. You can see and hear a band attempting to push their musical language into a new space, but they can’t get beyond that twinkly, mathy baseline. Bongos are involved. The end result is a less intelligible version of their more famous bands. Straight-up weird music.
Was Dillinger Four the best melodic punk band of the 2000s? They were certainly the most entertaining. I remember a D4 gig at The Globe in Milwaukee with The Murder City Devils, of all people. The bassist got naked and had a tattoo on his chest that said, “HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE?” Only later did I learn that phrase was taken from an SS Decontrol song. It’s kind of better without context. Either way: pretty formidable thing for me to see at age 14.
There is currently a hardcore band called End It. They are from Baltimore, and I think I like them better than this version of End It, who are not a hardcore band at all but more of a brutal metal unit. The guitar player wears a Bathory shirt.
Somehow, I never got into Death Cab; sometimes, it seems as if the list of emo bands I liked when I was 13 was arbitrary. But then I think a bit harder, and I remember that Davey Von Bohlen was the Jonathan Richman of ‘90s Midwest emo and that The Promise Ring were playing with a deck that was a little more tweaked out than their peers. They were both more American and more twee, and they wrote better songs. I need sleep.
For many years, I’ve been emailing with the singer of Coalesce about merch logistics. I only figured that out recently... Nice guy. The band sounds good and brutal here. There are no ninja mosh moves in the crowd, at least not any I can detect, which is somewhat surprising—maybe that was, at the time, a bit of a line in the sand within this milieu.
Another local. Sunny Day Real Estate kind of thing. My psoriasis is getting bad.
All these math-edged emo and hardcore bands start to bleed into each other. Here’s another instrumental one. Wordless math rock is some of the most tedious music known to god, and I appreciate that about it. It’s prog without the capes.
Talk about “atmospheric” keyboard work! After that short intro, it’s time to chug. Still, no ninja moves. Getting a bit of a TOOL vibe. Is this what Neurosis sounds like? I’m not going to cap, round two: I don’t know if I’ve ever once sat down and attempted to listen to Neurosis. It would be more than a decade before this band’s name would read differently around the world.
I definitely saw The Arrivals live once or twice—probably with Dillinger Four. On a different tip, I can't open up "X" for a few seconds without seeing some sort of "discourse" about the state of music writing. Hear me out: What if, instead of posting about music journalism on social media, you used that time and energy to write a long blog about a music festival nobody remembers, which very few people will read, for absolutely no money?
Pleasure Forever was one of two bands that formed in the wake of The VSS, who themselves were formed after the dissolution of the legendary freakout unit Angel Hair. Real San Diego hours. Within the hardcore scene, The VSS was an early adopter of the keyboard, for sure, and Pleasure Forever continued that impulse, moving into more baroque, druggy territory. The keyboard player wears a cool hat.
Casket Lottery… Did I see them play live? They are from Kansas City, like The Get Up Kids, who I definitely did see live a few times—one time opening for Green Day, another time opening for Weezer. The Get Up Kids did get a little push, didn’t they? They were a band not without a few hooks.
More Michigan post-hardcore. I’m fading here, but I haven’t written much about festival fashion. I’ve been clocking parkas, small black-frame glasses, Diesel jeans, kids tees and studded belts... Those tiny frames are kind of making sense to me right now. I might have to cop a pair. I might have to put a long sleeve under a t-shirt. I'm feeling loose.
Aloha played some sort of indie/post-rock/emo fusion, and they did it with a vibraphone. Are hand drums involved? No question. Even weirder than Owls: Aloha are trying to burst through the form; you can feel it; they push and push, but they just can’t break on through to the other side. Black Dice did that on Beaches & Canyons, which was released the same year.
Another local Michigan post-hardcore band I’ve never heard of. Competent and angular. This music sounds better to me now than it has at any point over the past two decades. Maybe it’s time to give Spiderland another shot.
The Honor System were a perennial Alkaline Trio opening band. I saw them a few times. They never left much of an impression, to be honest, but I do have a memory of watching them play at a Christian coffee shop in Rockford, Illinois. I have a lot of memories of that Christian coffee shop, believe it or not.
More local mitten music I was unfamiliar with. The song here has a heavy, dubby feel, and it’s paired with proficient hard rock vocals. It sounds like Audioslave meets Fugazi. Kind of shmacking?
2:10:43: The Dismemberment Plan
Emergency & I is maybe my favorite record of the era and the style. What a weird mix of Brainiac-style damage and anthemic emo. And the band was definitely a frontrunner in the “pop music is pretty cool and innovative, actually” school of indie rock thought. I’ll never forget the time Travis Morrision attempted to neg his way into producing a record for me. Just one of the many perks of somebody writing a “creative nonfiction” book about your life as a failed musician.
2:13:30: Ted Leo / Pharmacists
I’ve always had a soft spot for Ted Leo. I love that song about ska. Leo was yet another ‘90s holdover, in his own way, having played in the mod-meets-D.C. band Chisel. Out of all of the ‘90s survivors here, he might’ve had the best post-2K2 run. And his old band was the most cutty.
Formed in 1999, Radio 4 featured a member of Garden Variety and played punk funk before every American post-hardcore band started playing punk funk. They had keyboards and even a percussionist; this song is pitched somewhere between The Clash and Gang of Four. Where is the electroclash representation here? I remember seeing The Faint in 2000. Hardcore kids' brains exploded. In the same month as Michiganfest 2002, “House of Jealous Lovers” by The Rapture was released. The wave was finally crashing in…
Sweep the Leg Johnny was a Chicago math rock band that did things a little bit differently. They had a saxophone player. There is a reason why this set is at the end of the video: One member climbs a speaker stack, falls through a tile, and breaks a ceiling fan. It’s time for me to go to sleep.
So many concerts.
Anyway, I'm a music writer myself. Let's collaborate or subscribe to each other's newsletters.
So many concerts.
Anyway, I'm a music writer myself. Let's collaborate or subscribe to each other's newsletters.