How Pop Punk Killed Scene Music

Recently I had this huge kick of listening to the album Someday Came Suddenly by Attack Attack! I even bought the CD off of someone and had their old singer, Johnny Franck, sign it at a show for his new band, Bilmuri (it was even the 10th anniversary of the album to the day). All of this throwback 2008 nostalgia had me wondering where this whole scene went and what the hell happened to

that Warped Tour style simple metalcore “scenecore” stuff. There was such a huge surge of that style back in the early 2000s, and scene culture back then was insanely popular. Today, you see none of that. Metalcore has changed, the style has changed within the genre and the Warped Tour scene. The bands on Warped Tour are different or they’re the same bands/people with a new aesthetic. Obviously, this

is a classic example of a fad or trend dying out over time, but what lingered in my mind for weeks was WHAT THE HELL KILLED SCENE CULTURE?

I have looked up YouTube videos of what it meant to be scene, what it was really all about, and what people thought of it to be back in the day. There is no straight answer that I could find that solidified anything, but for our intents and purposes in this

piece, I am going to consider “scene” music to be 2000s bands who played Warped Tour during that time and played either some form of metalcore or post-hardcore or electronicore/ crunkcore, etc. Bands like Pierce the Veil, Sleeping with Sirens, 30H!3, Bring Me the Horizon, Of Mice & Men, Attack Attack!, Asking Alexandria, even Suicide Silence, and Chelsea Grin. While almost all of these bands are still around today, the culture around them has absolutely changed.

So what is the answer to what killed scenecore Warped Tour culture? Pop punk. 2010s pop punk killed scene. (Again for the purposes of the piece, I use the term pop punk lightly. It will probably include a blanket of other “emo” leaning bands and stuff like that, but bear with me.)

But yes, pop punk and the culture around that killed scene music. Some of the biggest evidence that I can provide is the bands who were playing on Warped Tour. Kevin Lyman always tried to get bands that would draw crowds. Bands who were in popular demand got a hot spot on that summer’s tour. At a certain point in time, the bands shifted from those scene culture bands to a more pop punk scene like The Story So Far, The Wonder Years, and bands in that vein. Between 2006 and 2011 bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Escape the

Fate, Blessthefall, Silverstein, Gym Class Heroes, 3OH3!, Bring Me the Horizon, Pierce the Veil, Attack Attack!, Brokencyde, Breathe Carolina, Saosin, Jeffree Star, Suicide Silence, Alesana, Underoath, From First to Last, etc. were playing Warped Tour. From what I see, 2011 was the turning point, and by 2014 was when everything started to seriously change.

In 2011, The Wonder Years played Warped Tour for the first time. This was also the year that they released their album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing, which was huge for them. The Story So Far also played that year in support of their album Under Soil and Dirt. 2 years later, The Wonder Years played again in support of what many consider to be their best album, and maybe the best pop punk album of that wave of bands. By 2014, The Story So Far was near the top of the bill and Neck Deep made it onto the bill. We all know how huge they became. Not to mention, all of these years bands like Simple Plan and Mayday Parade were dominating the lineup. Those bands, though, are still associated more with the scene crowd, and while they still get huge draw if they played in more recent years, it was the newer up and coming bands like Neck Deep, The Wonder Years, The Story So Far, State Champs, Knuckle Puck, etc. who were getting the rising attention.

In very recent years, bands like Movements were dominating crowds at Warped Tour. The shift in

culture has been unreal lately, and it seemed to happen overnight. No more do girls walk around praising Pierce the Veil and Sleeping With Sirens as their saviors, but its stuff like State Champs, Knuckle Puck, and especially Neck Deep who are drawing huge amounts of fans. In place of scene culture has stepped in the whole new wave of pop punk bands and indie/ emo bands. The fashion has shifted, and boy, is it great.

It would be really easy to argue, again, that this is all just a product of time, and something like scene culture was never going to last that long in the first place. Something was going to have to take its place eventually. Pop punk was always huge anyway. If you look at Google Trends, the term “scene” saw a surge of searches around the time that I mentioned, but pop punk was always higher than it no matter what. I will argue, though, that pop punk reached an insane peak around 2014-2015. This is right in the prime moment where it was reaching a huge popularity, while scene was steadily declining into nothingness. This is truly all fun and games. Maybe pop punk didn’t truly “kill” scene music, but it surely and steadily replaced it. This was just a fun theory I thought up in my head while reminiscing on past times, but I still find it fascinating that we can almost pinpoint the exact moment when things shifted. Maybe soon we will be able to write about what kills pop punk.