The Forgotten Child
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 22, 2005 4:42PM
With all the brouhaha surrounding the brand new Intonation Festival and the revived Lollapalooza, one of the longer running festival stalwarts seems to have slipped in-between the proverbial cracks of buzz. We suppose that’s the price you pay when your tour becomes a more of a tradition than an actual event.
Tomorrow thousands of suburbanite kids will snap on their wallet-chains, drop their jeans below their boxers, adjust their eyebrow stud, shellac their hair into spikes, lace up the Docs and pull on their crisp brand new Thursday (the band, not the day, you old fogey) T-shirts before making their way to the Tweeter Center to catch this year’s Chicago stop of The Vans Warped Tour.
Now Chicagoist is too old to really get excited about this tour anymore but we can still respect some of the underlying principles. Band schedules change daily and are picked at random so if an attendee wants to make sure they don’t miss their favorite group they have to get there early. The end result is every band has an equal opportunity to play to a decent sized audience as opposed to the usual festival practice of performing to a nearly empty amphitheater until late in the afternoon.
Tickets are still relatively cheap at just under thirty bucks so we can’t really gripe about that either. In all it seems to have actually turned into a rather positive punk rock concert event for the area’s teens to attend without having to be chaperoned by their parents. Wait, we did say punk rock, right? We lied. This tour is as punk as Docksiders. What this tour does is package the safest common denominator of either tried-and-true or potential radio fodder and then presents it, with the whiff of rebellion, to teens all across the nation. We could get upset about this but since we are old fogeys we’ll instead sit back and applaud the organizers for putting together such a pleasant daylong summer-camp for the kids of today.
There are a few Chicago groups playing this year’s festival though and we would be remiss not to mention them. Both Fall Out Boy and Split Habit play by-the-numbers pop-punk but we don’t really care since both bands know how to marry a catchy melody to a chunky guitar riff and that is a-ok with us. Also worth checking out, and a Chicagoist guilty pleasure, is the art-punk screamo (yup, we typed screamo to show we are still slightly hip) of My Chemical Romance. Those guys slay us.