Most of you who know me personally know that I am involved with a website called ThePublicRecord.com. It's generally a place online where people all over the world have the chance to collaborate on musical projects with each other and with established artists. Recently, however, a side-project popped up involving the metalcore band Black Veil Brides. The contest involved finding a girl to appear in a video the band was scheduled to shoot for the song "Carolyn" and the contest winner would be flown out to LA to portray the title character in the video. Let me preface the following by saying that I think the contest was very cool and a good move for the Public Record website.
Black Veil Brides is a band with a heavy Hot Topic following, meaning that their followers can find just about everything that they need to be a hardcore fan in any one of the stores in the Hot Topic chain: make-up, t-shirts, shoes, posters, CDs, etc. There's a synergy at play here that is something of a music marketing holy grail. If you're a band that fits whatever the current vogue genre is and you can get on with a Hot Topic tour then your fans are exposed to the fans of similar bands and it's like one big happy money fest. The current, er, hot topic, is sort of a mish-mash of early Mötley Crüe and Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" (the movie title is foreshadowing, btw) with heavy, gothy make-up, and usually parent-friendly "metal" music in the detuned, crunchy guitar style.
The primary audience for bands like this is girls. Young girls, say 13-18. Now, heavy metal in general has always been the province of younger, disaffected males. Think Black Sabbath through Metallica. The audiences are typically devoid of girls save the ones who want to "meet the band" and girlfriends who have been dragged along by their hair. In my day there was a very similar fan/band relationship akin to what the Black Veil Brides enjoy but the band in question was The Cure. Robert Smith spoke to the young, isolated, depressed, young girls of America like nobody else. He told them that they were part of something bigger. They were never alone because they had him. The big difference is that, in Robert Smith's case, this wasn't intentional. It was accidental that he became the thing that caused thousands of teen and pre-teen hearts to go pitter-patter. Maybe it was something akin to the senior citizens I see all around my community driving vehicles that were designed specifically to be sold to young, hip urbanites. Robert Smith totally missed his target to his economic advantage.
Bands like Black Veil Brides are designed to sell to a certain audience and they nail it. Something like The Monkees or The Back Street Boys. It's just a pure marketing ploy. I'm not going to say that the guys aren't into the music they're making or that they aren't making well-written and well-crafted songs because that's simply not the case. It's just a different kind of pop that's designed to sell to young girls. There's certainly a precedent there.
Where the nightmare before Christmas thing comes in is when the band chose a winner. I watched many of the videos submitted for this contest. The vast majority were from girls in the 14-17 year-old range with parental consent sitting in front of their webcam in the private bedroom of their quaint, white, suburban, middle-class home surrounded by Black Veil Brides (BVB) posters and possibly wearing make-up inspired by band front-man, Andy Six. The majority of the videos touched on one central theme: the girl is a misfit who is hated at her school and is picked on for being "different"; the only thing that is saving her from a total meltdown or possible suicide is the music of BVB and the lyrics of Andy Six who speaks to her in her language. The voice tells her that everything is alright. It tells her that she is not alone after all. There is at least one person in this cold, dark world who feels her pain and who is there for her with the immediacy of a flick of a power button on her iPod.
The girl who won the contest is a thirteen year-old from San Francisco who is a die-hard BVB fan, or a member of the BVB Army as they say (yeah, just like the KISS Army when I was a kid). The problem is that she appeared really HAPPY in her video! She seemed well-balanced. She wasn't wearing any make-up. She smiled. She laughed. She seemed full of energy and, well, like a very hopeful person with a bright future. She's been acting and modeling since she was four. This caused some pretty big waves in the community. Additionally, in her video, she made mention of the fact that she didn't share the "misery" of many of her fellow soldiers and then, as her cat did something crazy off-camera, she laughed! This was taken by some to be her laughing at the pain of other members of the Army. So some claws came out. Many thought that the girl who should portray Carolyn should have a necessary amount of misery under her belt. She should have had to fight the demons of suburban isolation and have the scars to show for it.
There was a backlash against the "haters" and many white, teen, suburban girls dropped many an F-bomb in defense of or in protest against the decision the band had made. Meanwhile, this cute little girl in San Francisco is having to weigh just what has happened to her and having to try to figure out why she shouldn't be a happy person.
Middle-class, suburban angst is nothing new. I was part of that club when I was coming of age. In the early '80s I was a punk. I was all Ramones and Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols. There was no internet and no Hot Topic though. I had to work hard to pull off the clothes and the look. I had to go to New Orleans to find my music. I had to walk to school up hill both ways in the snow. The point is that I was trying to stand out. Same thing these girls are doing. The difference is that when I was picked on or bullied, I expected it. That was the point. I was trying to get a rise out of everybody. Gradually people began to accept me and my strangeness because I was also always happy. I was gregarious. I was eventually voted most outgoing my senior year in high school. It was just damned hard to not like me because I was likable. There were still some who didn't like me because I kind of put a mirror up to their conformity but, ultimately it didn't really matter. It was all just a difference in music, clothes, and politics.
The thing that hurts me about these young girls is that, like many middle-class suburbanites, they don't really have a very strong relationship with their parents. These are parents of my generation who are self-absorbed. They have their eyes on the prize and many have had children because their friends were having children and it just seemed like the thing to do. Maybe that's always been the case. The difference is that, in my day, if you were with your parents you were actually WITH them. You spoke to each other when you were driving, when you were watching TV, etc. A lot of kids didn't have TVs in their own room and there were literally NO computers. Everybody in the house shared the same phone line. Parents knew who their kids were talking to. They knew who they were hanging out with. These days parents and their children are only physically together. Mom is on the cellphone while the kids are plugged in to their iPod and/or texting their BFFs or watching a DVD in the back seat of an SUV the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. When they're at home the kids are in their own little rec room with DVD players and gaming consoles and their own phones and the internet. It really has become a type of isolation. Everybody indulges themselves, focuses on themselves, segregates themselves within their own homes.
A lot of the BVB Army lives in a search for more pain and the kind of "misery" afforded them by a chain store that allows them to separate themselves from the pack at school. They willingly put up barriers between themselves and their peers. They unwittingly put up barriers between themselves and their parents who literally don't know what they're doing. The parents are of a culture of giving to your kids, not raising them, not parenting them, not sacrificing anything of yourself in the process. You indulge yourself, you indulge your children, and they just grow up and make a life with all of the things you've given them materially.
A couple of years ago I was teaching private guitar lessons to some very wealthy families' kids in the tony Buckhead area of Atlanta. Many of the kids I taught went to one of four or five private high schools in the area with yearly tuitions in the $25,000 range. Most were good kids but it never ceased to amaze me that most of them had stay-at-home moms AND nannies or au pairs or something along those lines. The reason was because the mothers were doing their own thing, living their own lives in addition to being a titular parent. This has always been the case for the super-wealthy but it's increasingly true for families that would be considered middle-class by any measure in America. What needs to happen is that these families need to take the time to give their children some real love, real guidance, and give them some genuine perspective on what real misery is. Unfortunately misery today is a lifestyle that you can go to the mall and purchase.
On a side note I'd like to say that it's funny that there has been sniping in the BVB community that the girl who won the contest is "already a model", as if she's already gotten her shot and won in the game of life. I don't think they understand that being a model almost always means that your parents have given money to somebody who in turn has gotten them some modeling gigs. Typically anybody can be a model. Typically the money put in never comes close to the money gained. Watch any episode of Toddlers and Tiaras (love that show) if you don't believe me. Most of the girls who entered this contest were VERY pretty and could easily go into modeling if they and their parents so chose.
At any rate, here's the winning video and I hope she has a good time.
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