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I am very happy to have my second ever guest article. This one comes from a good friend of mine, TJ O’Neill. TJ is a self-proclaimed music geek from suburban Philadelphia. He is a high school senior with interests ranging from theatre to music to sports. You can contact TJ at this email address. His article details 10 artists/bands that should are screwing up the Music World. Here is his article, a Taking the First Exclusive.

10. Scott Stapp
Ok, I admit; I was a Creed fan in their heyday. I even stuck by them long after most of their fans grew tired of their theatrics. And while I was sad to see them break up in 2004, I knew it was their time. Now Mark Tremonti, Brian Marshall and Scott Phillips have regrouped as Alter Bridge with Myles Kennedy at the helm. Scott Stapp, on the other hand, appears to have missed the memo once again. After public statements suggesting an acting career went the way of late-night TV fodder, Stapp has returned to his drunken Jesus Christ fantasies, as though his former source of income never left. His 2005 solo effort The Great Divide sounded like a Creed tribute band. Suffice it to say he’s used up his own 15 minutes, and is now on Alter Bridge’s clock, and is effectively wasting that time. Performers like Scott Stapp don’t know when to quit, and as a result ruin the music world for everyone.

9. Fall Out Boy
These guys are an enigma to me. I have both of FOB’s major LPs (Take This to Your Grave and the major-label debut From Under the Cork Tree), and for the most part enjoy both albums. It’s the artistic “growth” from Grave to Cork Tree that gets at me. Now, I’m not saying FOB sold their souls to MTV, the music-world equivalent to Satan; they haven’t even sold out yet. But any group that goes from cult (read: Warped Tour side stage) following to MTV constant rotation in the space of 3 years can do incalculable damage, not to mention the fact that since From Under the Cork Tree took off Fall Out Boy’s heads have enlarged to roughly the size of a small island. They haven’t done anything grossly criminal yet, but I fear for their future, more so than I did Dashboard Confessional after “Vindicated” got popular.

(By the way, convert From Under the Cork Tree into an acronym and you’ll see why I didn’t abbreviate the album name in this section)

8. The White Stripes
This one will undoubtedly earn me some hate mail. They are quite simply over-rated. I realize and accept that they have taken a “less is more” stance with their music in an age where bands like Linkin Park and KoRn are utilizing expensive electronic devices. But to say that Jack White is heading up a revolution in music is plain old grandstanding, pompous bullshit. I’ll even go so far as to say that Jack White is an innovative musician. But Meg White will never earn any respect in my book, and their grandiose attitude toward what they do does not fly in my world either. An attitude like that was first seen in a guy by the name of Fred Durst. We don’t need a repeat of that nonsense in music.

7. Gwen Stefani
Eminem once rapped “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do black music so selfishly/And use it to get myself wealthy”. Step aside Marshall. Gwen Stefani proved that she could do worse than most of what she did with No Doubt by teaming up with Eve for “If I Were A Rich Girl”, a complete bastardization of a song from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. If that didn’t make you want to throw up in your mouth, she followed it up with “Hollaback Girl”, a gross attempt at white-female rap, something that shouldn’t happen in the first place (See: “Milkshake”). Go ahead, TRY to tell me you didn’t want to throw something at the radio when you heard “This shit’s bananas/B-A-N-A-N-A-S” for the gazillionth time. I dare you. The only thing that keeps Gwen from being higher on this list is the small portion of listenable rock she put out with No Doubt, ie “Underneath it All” and ‘Don’t Speak”…

…That and the fact that the next group is equivalent to seven Gwen Stefani’s, minus the talent.

6. Pussycat Dolls
Remember when showgirl groups were good only for being glorified in crappy movies, and even THAT was only in Las Vegas? I want those days back. PCD embodies most of the crappy things about MTV pop. My friend Ashley Yezuita pointed out the hypocrisy in their two hit singles; we have “Don’tcha”, whose lyrics basically translate to “Forget your girlfriend. Screw Me!”, and “Stickwitu”, which conveys the opposite. While I’m on the subject, notice how neither of the titles of PCD’s hits are actual words. And yet both still sell. The lesson here? Showgirl groups shouldn’t be allowed to sing outside of strip clubs, and MTV viewers probably can’t read.

5. Courtney Love
No crappy music list is truly complete without mentioning Courtney Love. The allegations that she killed Kurt Cobain notwithstanding, she is holding hostage the rights to Nirvana’s music, effectively botching any hopes of a Foo Fighters cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. And I need not mention the waste of recording space that was America’s Sweetheart, which sold approximately 7 copies worldwide, surpassing William Hung’s Inspiration on the list of Gloriously Failed Career Attempts.

Oh yeah, and she’s a crack whore.

4. Avril Lavigne
When I first announced that I was working on this list, I had a surprising number of people call for Avril to be on this list. Personally I didn’t find her that offensive; Let Go may not have been great, but it was fresh. It was a teenage girl taking a stand in a genre dominated by questionably effeminate guys. However, the case my friends made was overpowering, to say the least. Claming to be punk rock and not knowing about Duran Duran isn’t exactly helping anyone’s case. Then there’s the feud she had with Britney Spears when Let Go got big, where Lavigne said uncomplimentary, albeit truthful, things about Spears, only to then dodge the recoil from it by hiding behind clichéd punk philosophy (“Oh, she does her own thing…”). Also Lavigne falls into the grouping of artists mis-categorized as punk when in reality they fall into the vein of pop music (See also Simple Plan and Yellowcard). So as much as I can make a case in her defense, Avril Lavigne has indeed committed some unforgivable acts against the sacred altar of present-day music.

3. Lars Ulrich (Metallica)
The word “Napster” should be sufficient evidence to justify their place on this list. But just saying that neglects the past six years of depressingly bad music overshadowing two decades as a staple in heavy metal. Garage, Inc. and St. Anger were bad CDs; don’t give me that “they were changing their sound” crap. If that were the case, don’t you think they’d play their music on tour? Not so much. And then there’s the corporate crap that has alienated millions of fans. The whole “We want fans to REALLY support us by buying our CDs, not just paying for downloads” is a tasteless, greedy maneuver. Maybe if they started putting out music worth listening to people would buy their music again. Till then Ulrich and Metallica shall remain among the wastelands of those that are destroying something formerly beautiful.

2. Ashlee Simpson
Rule of thumb: Being the younger sibling of one of the Pop Princess Trio (Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson), let alone any late ’90s popstar DOES NOT justify a record deal. The Saturday Night Live fiasco would be noteworthy, except for the fact that she has no business appearing on SNL! Ashlee Simpson is a measly nuisance falling into the same category of ‘talent-less yet recognizable TV personalities signed to the Disney record label to generate sales without actually trying’ (See Also Aaron Carter, Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, and the cast of the abominable High School Musical). I would gladly burn the evidence of the SNL incident if it meant I never heard from her again.

Let me take this time to note that I am aware of the fact that 5 of the 10 artists on this list are female. DO NOT take this to mean that I bash any woman in music on principle. There are plenty of good female acts out there (See: Evanescence, Kelly Clarkson). Unfortunately the talented artists are overlooked in favor of the ones you see on this list. Let this be another commentary on the unfortunate state of the music industry today that favors sex appeal in female artists over actual talent.

1. Hawthorne Heights
These guys just might be the Anti-Christ of music. In the beginning, there was emo. Emo was glorified by the works of such greats as Chris Carabba and Adam Lazzara. And for a time it was good. Then other bands entered the realm, and with them came ‘hardcore’ and ‘scene’. And suddenly everything became muddled. Fans of these styles of music started becoming one in the same, to the point where no one could tell the difference. Now people hate the entire concept and blame MySpace for the whole collapse of punk music. As far as I’m concerned, it all started when Hawthorne Heights got big off that lame-ass “Ohio is for Lovers”. See, contrary to popular belief made so by Hawthorne Heights, emo music isn’t about severe depression, self-mutilation, and feeling sorry for yourself (OK, maybe the last one…). It’s about feeling the pain of loss, and remembering with a bittersweet twinge in your heart all the beautiful times with that certain someone who doesn’t see you the same way anymore. When Hawthorne heights started whining “Cut my wrists and black my eyes”, they got lumped into emo, a kick in the teeth to all the principles of emo music. So began the fall of Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, and other true emo bands. Now all those great bands are blurred by what’s ‘scene’, ’hardcore’, ’emo’, and so on. Hawthorne Heights took a wonderful, cathartic style of music, and single-handedly destroyed it so that I’m almost ashamed to align myself with it. For this, I say that they have done the most damage to the music world in recent memory.

OK, so there you have it. Disagree with something? Please, cut me open on this one. I’m starving for a good discussion on music these days. There’s enough of a scarcity of truly great artists that bashing the bad ones is the best way to get people talking. So yeah, have at it people!

TJ’s sites:
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