SOUND AND FURY (2011) VS. HELLFEST (2001)

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The Internet is buzzing with the second Sound and Fury announcement this morning and it's also the day I realized I don't like hardcore as much as I used to. It's kind of sad.

S&F is a three day HC music festival in Santa Barbara, California and it's the thing that everyone (that listens to that kind of music) is looking forward to this summer. I looked at the first announcement and the only bands I even kind of wanted to see were Ringworm, The Suicide File and Harvest. I looked at the second announcement (that happened this morning) and the list of bands I wanted to see didn't change.

Looking at this year's Sound and Fury line-up, I can safely say I've never heard 85% of the bands playing. Some of them are probably great (like Twitching Tongues, who I heard a few days ago) and some of them are probably just... there. Not good and not bad, but just generic enough that I won't remember them five minutes after I've heard them.

I made some jokes about it on Twitter and what not, but I don't really have the right to do that. It wasn't Sound and Fury, but 10 years ago, I got really excited for a different summer festival called Hellfest. This is where S&F has me beat—it's in Santa Barbara, which is a beautiful place. It's a little bit more north than I like to be in California, but it's still in California. Hellfest was in Syracuse, New York which, if I'm ranking the cities I've been to that I hate the most, is right near the top.

But there were bands that I had to see. Earth Crisis playing their last show (supposedly) Burn It Down's last show, Martyr AD, Hatebreed (when all they had out was Under the Knife and Satisfaction is the Death of Desire), SkyCameFalling, Arkangel, Length of Time, etc. Those were the ones that got me on a plane to New York. I don't regret it, either. That was an awesome weekend.

But, times have changed. If you put the Sound and Fury 2011 line-up next to the 2001 Hellfest line-up, you'll get older guys like me that will take Hellfest 9 out of 9 times. But I'm almost positive that anyone just coming up in the hardcore scene (probably 22-23 years old or younger) will take Sound and Fury without any hesitation.

And that's fine. The excitement for Sound and Fury (and ensuing Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr posts) just got me thinking about how excited I was when the Hellfest line-up was announced ten years ago. Of course, that was through a really well done Geocities website. Then we all had to jump on AIM and talk to our MakeOutClub friends about how excited we were to see the bands and finally meet up.

Some things never change.

You can find the Sound and Fury line-up everywhere on the Internet this morning, most notably here. And you can click that picture to see the Hellfest schedule from 2001.