The Mixdown

You know those people who, when you first meet them seem pretty awesome, but once you get to know them better, you realize that they're just a bottomless bucket of fail?  My best friend is currently being wooed by one of them.  Disregarding the fact that my friend is very anti-hipster and this kid's photo would be found under urbandictionary.com's definition of the word, he's also a DJ of sorts.  Strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with being a DJ, and being a good DJ might even rank one about 3/4's the way up the Ultimate Scale of Badass, but this kid is not a very good DJ.  In fact, some might even call him a very bad DJ.  Most, if we're going to be honest.  

Exhibit 1:

In all fairness, when this kid and his band came up with the idea to compose rock songs and create "totally sick mixdowns" with the tracks, they probably thought they'd be doing something cool, like becoming the Nirvana of the 21st century, if Nirvana hadn't become so mainstream.  They'd be out there creating their brilliant music, and it'd be played in underground clubs across the nation.  Which is a cool dream to have.  It's cool to create brilliant music.  

Unfortunately for them, creating brilliant music takes talent, and talent can't be bought.  This kid sent my friend four tracks that his roommate's band wrote and he subsequently mixed down.  We listened to all four of them.  The opening of the first one wasn't half bad.

But then, someone started singing.

We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, as no one's work can be 100% brilliant all of the time.  It is however, as we quickly learned, possible for someone's work to be 100% unbrilliant most of the time.  By the end of the last track, we looked at each other, wiped the blood off of our ears, and cried.  It was as if music itself was offended by the existence of this band and had decided to not cooperate.

Music was like, 

"We stand with the 99% of recordings out there that consist of real music!"

And this kid and his boys were all,

"Naww, we like making that last 1%.  It's so edgy and underground."

Then Music went,

"Well, we refuse to be used by you!"

And in keeping with the precedent set for resistance to the #occupy movements, this kid and his boys grabbed the closest weapons they had, in this case, their instruments and equipment, and lit the music up.    

It wasn't until afterwards that the boys realized that not only had they destroyed anything remotely resembling music theory, but they had broken their instruments in the process.  That didn't stop these kids, though.  Nope.  Like cockroaches, they proved über resilient and still managed to record something, which is admirable in a way.  Until you actually listen to the stuff.  The only way I can describe it is by saying it sounded like -- wait for it -- people messing around on broken instruments.  

And that's before the mixdown.