Culture
VICE Publishes List of Bands You Already Know and Also Still Like
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY, In a landmark piece of digital journalism published Tuesday, VICE Media informed its readership that three female-fronted rock bands from the 2000s deserve more love, stopping just short of explaining where that love should be sent or in what denomination.
The article, which ran under the tag "nostalgia" and also "culture" and also "music," did not include contact information for the bands. It did include three embedded Spotify players.
Sources confirm that all three bands are currently on tour.
The piece opens with the observation that "2000s nostalgia is at an all-time high," a sentence that has now appeared in approximately 4,600 articles published since 2019, not counting this one. Analysts say the nostalgia for the 2000s began in the early 2010s and has been at an all-time high every subsequent year, which is a thing that can apparently keep happening.
"I feel like people just don't talk about these bands enough," said one commenter in the article's replies, beneath a thread of 340 comments about the bands. A second commenter said she had seen one of the listed bands live four times since 2022 and felt they were criminally underrated. The show she attended in March sold out in eleven minutes.
The VICE editorial team declined to comment on the record, but a spokesperson issued a statement describing the piece as "a celebration of artists whose cultural contributions exist at the intersection of nostalgia, identity, and the enduring power of distortion pedals."
The bands themselves were not quoted in the article. The article was about how much they deserve love, not about them specifically.
Readers who clicked expecting to discover unfamiliar music reported a complex emotional experience.
"I literally have a poster of one of them in my bedroom right now," said Marcus Ellison, 31, a graphic designer from Portland who described himself as a longtime fan of a band the article was attempting to introduce him to. "I've been giving them love. I give them love constantly. I gave them love last Thursday at the Paramount."
Ellison said he was glad the piece was raising awareness, but noted that awareness seemed to already be fairly high among everyone he had ever met.
Cultural historians say the phenomenon of telling an audience it should appreciate a thing that audience already appreciates is a cornerstone of modern media, serving an important function that no one has yet been able to name.
"What we're really doing," said Dr. Patricia Cho, a media studies professor at NYU who was not quoted in the VICE piece but agreed to be quoted in this one, "is giving people permission to love something they were already loving, but with the added comfort of a numbered list."
Dr. Cho paused.
"Three is also a very comfortable number of things," she added. "Four feels like work."
The VICE piece has since been shared 14,000 times, primarily by fans of the three bands, who described it as a long overdue recognition. Several of them posted it with the caption: "finally."
At press time, VICE had begun work on a follow-up piece about four male-fronted bands from the 90s that also deserve more love, pending approval from an editor who grew up listening to them in his car.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3-female-fronted-rock-bands-of-the-2000s-that-deserve-more-love/