After post-hardcore/emo band Thursday announced an indefinite hiatus last year, frontman Geoff Rickly took to the road as an acoustic performer on the Warped Tour last year. Well, following the relatively scathing post he published yesterday on The Talkhouse, it doesn’t seem like he’ll be invited back should Thursday return from their hiatus. The title of the post, “The Nine Circles of the Warped Tour by Geoff Rickly,” directly compares the yearly tour to Dante’s vision of hell in Inferno and begins “This past summer I took a terrifying journey.”
And while he comes off as contemptuous of the tour and the people that go to it, describing “masses of shirtless bros with temporary Hello Kitty tattoos, clouds of mosh-dust, and bespectacled emo kids doing pull-ups at the U.C. Marine Corps tent,” perhaps he saves the most contempt for the a meeting he had with the band Blood on the Dance Floor and Scooby Doo actor Matthew Lillard:
I was in a bus crash on the Warped Tour this past summer. A handful of us Acoustic Dudes and a bunch of fresh-faced production kids hit a gigantic horse on the highway in Montana. We all kind of woke up in medias res, with broken glass, a wrecked bus, horse blood and meat on us and our belongings… and a storm raging outside.
But that’s not the violence I want to talk about. The violence I’m talking about is violence against art. I have a picture. It’s a picture of me, a band called Blood on the Dance Floor, and the actor Matthew Lillard, who is the new voice of Scooby Doo. And I believe, in the truest sense, that this photograph is a Violent Crime Against Art, and maybe also against Nature. Here’s why, in three simple steps.
1) Blood on the Dance Floor makes me feel old and irrelevant. Why? Because I don’t know what the fuck it is. It’s electro-pop-scream-metal-violence in goth drag that celebrates “cumming” on the audience with giant foam canons and has one of the most positive, inspirational record inserts that I’ve ever read. It’s either horrible nonsense or next-level art. But it’s truly made me realize, I don’t know the difference. So the singer with red hair and scary make-up told me that Thursday’s song, “You know,” he says, “the car crash one” changed his life. Luckily I was wasted and said, “How can I change it back?” Rimshot, dad… Am I right?
2) While he was complimenting my old band (sniff, it pains me to say that), Matthew Lillard starts to quiz him, apparently in earnest, about how it was that Blood on the Dance Floor came to be so mind-numbingly awesome.
2) Just then, snap, someone took picture of us. And now I permanently reside in Hell.
That picture is so bad that Rickly apparently forgot how to count. At least he got a sick burn in on the Blood on the Dance Floor dude. The article ends with the realization that the real darkness lies within the souls of the main characters. Which I guess means that maybe Thursday actually will ultimately play Warped when they inevitably reunite.
[via theprp]
