SHOWS all hail the yeti, anti flag, bleeding through, city morgue, dead kennedys, fear, featured, hatebreed, ho99o9, limp bizkit, musink, suicidal tendencies, the vandals, TSOL, voodoo glow skulls Rob Shepyer March 15, 2019 0 Comments

OC did it all for the Nookie: Musink Tattoo Convention & Music Fest 2019

At the beginning of the year, I foresaw the resurgence of nu metal. Long dismissed and derided as one of the most cringe-worthy, toxic, and talentless genres of all time, it would turn out the place it held in the hearts of elder millennials never faded away as they grew up. Bands like Korn, Slipknot, and Deftones have maintained a place at the top of the mountain as bands that can always draw big crowds but Limp Bizkit still seems like an outsider among them even though back in the day, they were arguably the biggest of those bands.

Musink 2019 would blow the flood gates open and give nu metal the retribution people were silently begging for. Limp Bizkit would headline Day 2 and signal to all the haters that the Bizkit is back. That same week, LB announced a surprise show at the Troubadour for only 3 dollars. Those that were in attendance know Limp Bizkit put on what was without question, love them or hate them, a legendary performance. Featuring covers of the Who, Nirvana, and Journey with guests such a Billy Corgan, Marilyn Manson, and Machine Gun Kelly, the show was so raucous one fan even jumped from the balcony. With a much larger audience in attendance at Musink, I knew the energy that was present at the Troubadour show would only be multiplied at the OC Fair.

Musink wasn’t just Limp Bizkit fest though, all 3 days featured great bands, each night spotlighting a different genre. Night 1 was hardcore, night 2 rap metal, and night 3 punk, the genre that is and will always be the Musink’s core.

Day 1

My hardcore Friday afternoon began by strolling into the OC fairgrounds and gazing at all the polished low riders in face-melting awe. Moseying into the tattoo convention, the collective buzzing of tattoo needles made their own orchestra.

The first band to take the stage was All Hail the Yeti, a metalcore outfit with standard good cop/bad cop vocals only with a signature country/outlaw tinge to the good cop. Every member had plenty of chops to deliver the perfect sound to satiate the Orange County hardcore bro.

The band I was most excited to see on Day 1 was Orange County’s own, Bleeding Through, a band I selected in my top ten albums of the year for their 2018 release, Love Will Kill All. Their sound is always heavyweight hardcore, featuring plenty of chug and undeniable riffs that will make you slam, mosh, and dive to no end. They praised the next band, Sick of it All, as the band that taught them everything after taking them on the road for the first time.

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Even though Fred Durst represents the sort of toxicity that is kryptonite to wokeness, wearing a jersey with the last name Jackson appearing on the back days after Leaving Neverland premiered, talking about sighting Donald Trump Jr in the crowd, and telling people not to believe everything they see in this age of fake news, seeing Fred behave so against the grain was endearing, amazing, hilarious, and refreshing. Maybe you’d call them sell outs at one point of their career but now everything they’re doing is completely non-compliant.

The band played all their greatest hits, “Break Stuff”, “My Way”, “Faith”, “Nookie”, “Rolling”, and all the rest. They performed multiple covers of 90’s classics like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Heart-Shaped Box”, Green Day’s “Brain Stew”, and The Who’s “My Generation”. One of the most climactic moments of the set was during “My Generation” where Durst let tensions rise by asking the audience “Do you think we can fly?” over and over until answering, “I do” and letting the beat drop too hard for words to ever describe. Though there was a vocal track playing to enhance Fred’s singing, no one seemed to mind. We had suspended our elitism for the evening, this was about fun, dancing, making out with strangers, smoking cigarettes indoors, and all sorts of questionable behavior.

Day 3

I had almost forgotten how much of a frenzy plain ol’ punk rock can stir up until seeing the bands featured on day 3 of Musink fest. I’m so used to hardcore, crust and all these extreme versions of punk that when I see pop punk bands on a bill, I assume they can’t bring it compared to what I’m used to. This is simply not the case, especially on Musink’s dissident Sunday.

Voodoo Glow Skulls absolutely ripped the stage to pieces with a ska punk assault that was both apathetic in that delicious punk sort of way but also as focused as a laser, this was the combined force of many raised fists, concentrated in the Glow Skull’s sound.

If I were to rank the bands I was most excited to see all weekend, Anti-Flag would make top five and it would top the list when it comes to day 3. They don’t get the praise and credit they deserve, perhaps it’s the pop punk accessibility of their sound that makes some hesitant to embrace them but in reality, this is one of the most powerful, genuine, and genius political bands I had ever seen. They’re angrier than most hardcore bands and they have a message you can’t look away from. With a giant upside-down American flag strewn behind them, the moment they opened with “Die For Your Government” the audience was sent into a revolutionary fury. At one point, the band brought up a few activists from Amnesty International to denounce Trump’s foulness, giving this set a feeling of being greater than music.

I love TSOL but at this point, if they don’t play songs off their goth album Change Today?, then there’s nothing new under the sun for me at one of their shows. They still kill it of course, playing the songs that make circle pits spin at unstoppable speeds, but other than Jack Grisham’s stage banter, I didn’t feel the magic I once did seeing them. Grisham, who just received an honorary doctorate, would like to now be referred to as Doctor Uncle Jack, a title he proclaimed to the audience which was then met with a heckle to which Jack spat back with, “you just doubled your therapy fee!”