If you’re reading this, I’m sure that by this point you have heard of the controversy surrounding the fresh-faced pups in Knuckle Puck and scenecore comedian/social comemetator Jarrod Alonge. I’m not here to recap it again for you, and I’m not interested in the petty Twitter drama (well, I’m not interested in writing about it; I’ll read your butthurt tweets for dayyyys tho). I’m here to explain why Knuckle Puck represent a dangerous trend in pop-punk.

Listen, they’re a great band. The Weight That You Buried and While I Stay Secluded were two of the best, most inspired EPs to come out of the glut of bands aping the Story So Far, and I even liked Copacetic quite a bit despite the flat production and occasionally quite cringe-inducing lyrics. The kids in the band seem nice enough, most times, and they can write a hell of a hook.

They were probably in all Honors and AP classes in high school (which, let’s be honest, is the only way you can get clunky lyrics that feel like you’re being beat in the head with a thesaurus like “Consider this a repercussion of the actions which you were never properly punished for due to an overbearing demeanor brought on by your own self-awareness,” from “Pretense”). And, it’s important to note, they’re pals with a bunch of other bands in the scene, even having a side project with some of the guys from Real Friends, which adds to their “approachable good dudes” pedigree. So it’s a huge bummer to find out that they are members of the No Fun Club.

There is nothing more aggravating than when bands allow the rhetoric of over-enamored teenage fans to get to their heads. Modern Baseball and Sorority Noise are great examples of how to appropriately handle it when kids start telling them that their bands have kept them from killing themselves; they provide safe spaces at their concerts and speak openly and candidly about their own issues and getting help, refusing to allow people to stigmatize mental health or put the band members themselves up on a pedestal. In other words, they humanize both themselves and the audience.

The opposite would be so-called “hopecore” bands like Memphis May Fire and The Color Morale; bands that seem to have made a career out of peddling bland platitudes that encourage only the idolization of the bands’ lead singers. The overall effect is that the listeners (usually vulnerable teenage girls) get caught in a vicious cycle of feeling bad about themselves and not good enough for the band members (via the band members being polished and presented to them in pre-perfected form, on mediums like Alternative Press and Facebook photo shoots) and listening to the band’s records to make themselves feel better, because the vague promises of “don’t give up hope, kiss your scars” bullshit is a mildly soothing remedy to low self-esteem. It’s a culture of wallowing in your own pain and making yourself a blind consumer to the self-serious Cult of Personality that people like Matty Mullins and Austin Carlile have so cunningly cultivated.

And the thing is, Knuckle Puck originally came from a pop-punk scene that was reacting to that rock star mentality. The underground pop-punk scene of roughly 2009 to 2013 was arguably much more related to hardcore than the sanitized Disney-punk of bands like All Time Low and Forever the Sickest Kids, who had been enjoying a heyday right before that era. Bands that have now become household names– The Wonder Years, Fireworks, Man Overboard, and Title Fight chief among them– played side-by-side with hardcore bands in basements.

Unfortunately, coming from a scene related to hardcore usually results in a rather austere mentality, and that is why the wave of bands taking themselves too seriously hit especially hard in 2011 when The Story So Far blew up, and again when The Wonder Years became a genuinely arena-filling outfit in 2013. Bands were copying their sound and aesthetic without really looking into their attitude, and they started buying into their own hype. Pop-punk isn’t the only culprit; the emo revival scene slowly phased out the silliness of Algernon Cadwallader for the self-righteousness of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die.

We’re left with a double-edged sword now. For example, a band like JANK, held in relatively high esteem and with a strong, steady buzz behind their releases, can be vaporized within a month over the revelation of their frontperson, Matt Diamond, being an abuser. Although it’s great that people in the scene are completely unwilling to tolerate awful, abusive, toxic people in their music community, the situation surrounding JANK’s dissolution is blurry at best (apologies for linking to Reddit, it is literally the only place that has any kind of archive of the events, specious though it may be) and nobody really knows the whole story, making their disappearance a complete mystery.

But there has to be a point where the scene-policing becomes absolutely ridiculous, and I think Knuckle Puck has reached that nadir. What kind of attitude is it that they think they have a monopoly on such a simplistic, widely-used shirt design? Do they really think “money is being taken away” from them because Jarrod is selling a clearly satirical shirt (no one is going to misread “Kanookla Pook” as “Knuckle Puck,” is all I’m saying)? This isn’t even getting to the hypocrisy of this coming after their PlayStation parody hoodie (all of these points are covered in Jarrod’s excellent rebuttal video). The modern pop-punk scene is supposed to be made up of these laid-back, humble, down-to-earth dudes, and here comes Knuckle Puck and their egotism to take the wind out of that sail.

So the way I see it, the scene really has two options from this point on:

1. Completely give in to the self-serious, scene-police attitude. This is, in my opinion, the more likely of the two directions; the band Sioux Falls decided to change their name in an effort to be more sensitive to Native Americans. I’m decidedly not the type of person to get up in arms over the perceived injustices of “SJWs” (whatever that term even means anymore), and in fact, many would probably consider me an SJW, so take that into consideration when I say that is kind of ridiculous. Additionally, a slightly more irritating trend is that bands are pretending to still be DIY when they are pretty much all corporate-backed. I love The Wonder Years with all my heart, but Hopeless does pretty much all the work for them now, outside of writing the music and playing live. Gone are the days when they have to worry about booking their own tours or paying for recording time. They’ve moved past that point, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but watch them live and see how much they refuse to own it. Soupy can be candid all he wants in the audience Q&A sessions, but the fact remains you had to pay an extra $40 or whatever for a VIP session so you could participate in it. How punk. Excuse me if that makes me take you a bit less seriously than you’d probably like me to.

2. Go the completely opposite direction and become a completely neon-saturated, EZcore revival utopia. The odds are a bit shakier for this happening, but I’m not sure if it would be the better outcome. On the one hand, I wish bands would own up to what they were and double down on just trying to get kids to have a good time again. On the other, I sincerely doubt that the return of the “XD RAWR” scene kid aesthetic would be very good for anyone. Blood on the Dancefloor, Hollywood Undead, Falling In Reverse, BrokeNCYDE, and many other scene bands were basically a who’s-who of jailbait-snatchers. Warped Tour was essentially a breeding ground for child molesters. And let’s not forget that it took fucking years for the revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp to get taken down. I guess when it comes down to it, I’d rather take the current scene’s stick-traumatized asses over the dismissal of blatantly obvious problems that was at its peak during the neon scene era.

3. A perfect world where the No Fun Club doesn’t go crazy over non-existent offenses and serious things are taken seriously when they need to be? Neon scene and flannel-soaked tr00-ness coexisting in harmony? Never gonna fucking happen. Kids are extremists, and the scene is filled with nothing if not kids (of all ages, myself included). I guess we’ll just have to keep fighting for that better world.

A world with No Gods, No Masters.