Scoops here to rap at ya ‘bout the hot new beats on the music scene. Life’s been tough since I lost my job selling Sno-cones at the Special Olympics. As a matter of fact, Scoops has been banned at all future Special Olympics functions. This is unjust, because if you loose a foot race to me, you had better be willing to pay up without crying.
While walking home I found the new album by Maxeen in the dumpster behind the local music store. Picking it up was the second mistake I made that day. Lets get one thing straight, I hate pop-punk. So if that’s your groove, you can just stop reading and go make bad decisions on your own. I’m not even sure if Maxeen falls under the label pop-punk, but it sounds like something that angry upper-middle class white kids would listen to. I have dubbed it corporate-punk. The band has listed the 80’s as their major influence. Indeed they seem to have lifted several of their beats from U2, more specifically the song “Lead Not Follow.” A couple of the songs have a reggae feel that harkens back to the Police. They also claim to have been influenced by the Pixies, but it seems to Scoops that the Pixies get unfairly blamed for a lot of the faux-punk bands out there today. To compare Maxeen with any of these other bands seems an insult. The lyrics to most of these songs couldn’t have been more pedestrian. It reminds Scoops of the poetry he used to write in high school; but Maxeen chose not to begin their songs with the line “roses are red…” It seems to me that Tom Bailey is an incessant whiner, who sings about how hard is to be a young white male these days. Boo-hoo, Tom, you don’t know real pain until you walk in on your fourth wife with another man, and he’s wearing your favorite clown suit. Ouch.
