Culture
VICE Publishes Extremely Brave Article About Linkin Park Doing Rap Stuff
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY. VICE Media, the once-fearless voice of counterculture journalism, has published what internal sources are calling a "deep dive" into three early 2000s rock bands that were, quote, not afraid to dabble in hip-hop territory.
The piece does not name the genre. The genre has a name. The genre is nu-metal, and it has had that name since approximately 1999. VICE did not use it.
The article, which runs just under six hundred words and includes a stock photo of a microphone in front of a guitar, identifies the bands as having "blended elements of rap and rock" in a way that was considered "bold" and "genre-defying" at the time, which was twenty-three years ago when the readers of this article were in middle school doing exactly this with their CD binders.
"I felt seen," said Marcus Tilley, 38, of Portland, who read the article during his lunch break and immediately texted his college roommate a link with no message. "Like, finally someone is covering this."
His roommate, Derek Foss, also 38, responded with a question mark.
The bands were not ranked. The article was careful to note that each band "brought something unique to the table," which is the editorial equivalent of a participation trophy distributed across a genre that peaked during the second Bush administration.
A VICE spokesperson, reached for comment, said the piece was intended to "celebrate the sonic adventurousness of a misunderstood era" and to "create space for audiences to reconnect with music that shaped their formative years in ways they may not have fully processed."
When asked if they had considered just calling it nu-metal, the spokesperson said that the term "can carry certain connotations that the piece was hoping to move around."
The connotations are that it is nu-metal. The piece moved around them by not saying nu-metal and instead writing the phrase "hip-hop territory" six times, as though hip-hop were a neighborhood these bands had briefly visited on vacation and returned from with a very interesting souvenir.
Fans of the actual hip-hop being made at the same time these bands were "dabbling" were not quoted in the article. Representatives for the hip-hop of 2001 could not be reached by press time.
"Dabble is really the word that gets me," said Carla Simmons, 41, a music teacher in Tempe who had a Hybrid Theory poster in her bedroom for four years and once drove six hours to see one of the featured bands perform at an outdoor amphitheater. "These guys were not dabbling. They were doing it constantly. That was the whole thing. The rapping was half the songs."
She added that she still knows every word to every song mentioned in the article and that this information made her feel complicated.
VICE has not announced whether it plans to follow up with a piece about early 2000s hip-hop artists who were not afraid to dabble in rock territory. Sources inside the publication indicate that no such piece is currently in development.
The article has received eleven thousand clicks, making it the outlet's best-performing piece of the quarter.
Linkin Park has not commented.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3-early-2000s-rock-bands-that-werent-afraid-to-dabble-in-hip-hop-territory/