4 minute read
Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS
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By Brock Wilbur
“Thank you all for coming out tonight,” the lead singer of Alien Ant Farm shouts into the mic. His words echo out over the crowd at one of the largest music festivals in the country.
“My dude, it is 11:30 in the morning,” I say aloud to a few strangers standing in my vicinity.
As a Christmas gift to ourselves, my friend Zach and I had procured tickets to the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas, where 66,000 have gathered for a single Saturday to resurrect the corpse of nu metal passed—a Family Values Tour twist on Easter. It’s one of these newfangled throwback festivals that’s all the rage these days, wherein a lineup of bands is seemingly overbooked for a lone performance day that will theoretically allow 100+ mid-tier to formerly-huge artists to perform full sets. To pull this off, four different stages are employed, each with rotating performance spaces, creating a campground of unceasing, overwhelming stimuli.
That’s why I’m seeing Alien Ant Farm, famous for a 2001 cover of a Michael Jackson song from 1988, in a pre-noon setting—one that is disorienting for the band themselves, as evident by the lead singer’s late-night salutation.
Sick New World’s unyielding assault of bands like System of a Down, Incubus, Deftones, Mr. Bungle, and 80+ others whose work you would’ve heard on the in-store mix of any Hot Topic in 2008. It was supposed to make for the kind of tongue-in-cheek experience that one plays off as an intentionally hilarious adventure in self-flagellation—a descent into anti-culture for shits and giggles; dunks on high school Brock for owning a 7-string guitar and forming a Limp Bizkit tribute band. Predictably, this did veer more into the sincere, as the muscle memory of metal riffs and scream-along choruses flooded back without a hint of irony.
Less predictably, it hit like a ton of bricks when I found myself having an equally emotionally tumultuous time the very next day. I’d flown home to KC and immediately hustled out to a very lightly attended show at recordBar. You’d think that catching a few young performers in a space with a mere handful of onlookers would feel like nothing in the shadow of an event so deliberately over-the-top, but no. It turns out that the joy of music—especially musical community—can scale to any situation. Within 48 hours, I’d hit both hard endpoints of the live music spectrum and found both equally joyous with almost no preference betwixt.
That’s one of the reasons why The Pitch’s Music Issue means so goddamned much to us each year. This chance to celebrate the joy of our local talent is, of course, a year-round job for us as a publication, and in our dream world, each issue of the mag would have an extra 40 pages of just music content. Our July 2023 issue lifts up the women behind the soundboard, the people swapping vocal mics in a studio, the future of political shitkickers in dresses, and the foundations of a half-century of hip-hop culture. It’s a beautiful magazine that we’re wildly proud of. It’s also just the tip of the iceberg for the immense talent in this region.
Get thee to a local concert, house party, festival, or coffee shop jam this summer at your soonest opportunity. Find local artists, and buy their work. And no matter what time of day you’re reading this, thank you for coming out tonight!
Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,
