the ultimate snackrifice Yes! Things \emph{are} fucked. Makes sense that art should strive to be important. At the same time art is not particularly good at conveying complex analytic information. So if people focus instead on making art about emotions and other more human things that is still worthy of an honorable mention at least! We cant all be strawman army. Some of us just gotta noodle a bit too.
A Case for Hatching: My Eulogy for Egg Punk Explained by Martin Meyer
11th hour stubble They're a fun live band. I've seen them at Mosswood Meltdown, Gonerfest and in a club. They're playing Mosswood again this year. I'd say I enjoy them live more than on wax but they're def. not the only current band I feel that way about.
Edith says, “GIVE ME SOME EGGS!”
Nathan Loud So much of the egg punk over-saturation coincided with our Age of Over-Saturation. There’s too much of everything. Maybe it seems worse with egg punk because it’s fairly one-dimensional.
100%... i think that's what worked people up so much, the illusion that everything sounds like this-one-thing, when in a pre-2016 world you'd never even hear half the bands that sound alike, or they wouldn't exist because their influences would be broader and less funnelled through the hot labels/bands social media channels or whatever... it's funny too in that hardcore/chain punk whatever, has the exact same problem: how many d-beat photocopies are out there, but because it's steeped in a long-lasting tradition, you don't get that same visceral recoil.
it's actually really interesting how similar this whole thing is to what happened with dolewave over the years in australia. those early bands and recordings were really refreshing and cool to listen too, and sick to have this kind of gentle pop band playing next to a punk band, etc... but over-saturation really sank that ship.
but i think you're totally rightL these newly appearing micro-genres get to a point of over-saturation now, and that's when the industry starts to latch on and repackage them, creates the spotify playlist, plucks 'one new band' out of the mix and offers them a big touring deal, etcccc
Uptown ruler 666 420 I thought “egg” and “chain” were just memes. Very embarrassing for all parties involved
You're not the only one, I'm so naïve to all of this that I thought "egg vs. chain" was just a pre-pandemic meme as well!
Nathan Loud So much of the egg punk over-saturation coincided with our Age of Over-Saturation. There’s too much of everything. Maybe it seems worse with egg punk because it’s fairly one-dimensional.
This is exactly why I don't like egg punk.
Being one-dimensional and over-saturated in this day and age seems to be the criteria to get astronomical. This goes hand-in-hand with having a big Instagram following, cultivating a Spotify presence, et cetera. Egg punk is disseminated through these avenues. A lot of egg punk followers are quite young - people who have grown up on 'modern' social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, etc.). This includes me.
That being said - punching down by calling egg punk artists 'clueless' in [current year] is so silly - especially under the guise of 'protest, feeling, and expression in our community.' Despite it all, how the egg punkers are getting their music across is also a good frame of reference to get 'protest, feeling, and expression' across in the landscape we are currently in!
We can talk about how DIY is not what it was due to the music industry catching on, and subsequently fucking us over by way of middleman services, however that is a debate for another time...
re: oversaturation, i do think it's sort of interesting how excessively online music/people can result in genre acceleration. obv "the egg sound" predated the pandemic. and i'm not sure where i read this (some review -- sorry state or something?) but seems like a lot of eggy bands like prison affair grew out of 2020 pandemic bedroom recording and digital idea swapping. so you get these bands all riffing on the same idea in germany spain australia usa. i wonder if the feeling that it's all unmoored is in part that overly-digital element.
and yes, all of this is further facilitated role that spotify plays in scraping forums (probably this one!) for genre ideas, compiling them into playlists, and then feeding them back to listeners. in the liz pelly book she talks about this wrt the "lo-fi beats" scene which feels really similar to egg insofar as there was a creative origin that quickly got ground down into its most derivative elements. as mentioned above, there is nothing particularly new here in the history of music. but the speed and scale with which it happens does seem to leave something to be desired.
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Reading this thread I realize that I don't know who "Snooper" is and I feel pretty happy about it. Getting older isn't so bad after all!
Also, interesting take above, "kai". I guess another thing is how "insular"/ "self-sufficient" (not sure these are the right words) micro-scenes can get nowadays. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if there are kids out there who only, or almost only, listen to "egg punk". And who consider Coneheads as the prehistory of music or something.
It kind of just seemed like an incendiary fun thing to say to promote a record, but ended up hurting people’s feelings. It does feel like Martin is punching down on Jack White. I understand why, but I always felt really uncomfortable being called egg punk. Until that spin article and now you can suck on these eggs. I guess I just came here to say buy my record.
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Circling back, TV Ghost. I remember they had definitely one dude that was like 16-17 who was just a dickhead even for a teen.
I thought Matt Horseshit coined Shitgaze (in that (online?) mtv interview?)? Either way, PH were great. We could have used more of the same.
Where does WEIRD PUNK fit into all of this? Someone needs to make a spreadsheet or at least a flowchart.
jeff g yeah I've heard quite a few people reference shitgaze but to me this feels more in line with weird punk. I feel weird punk became way more flooded with copycats and there were way more records that came out under that umbrella. Plus it was also made up of a lot of one person bedroom acts where the main focus seemed recording tricks over songs.
jeff g I definitely don’t really know what Egg Punk is but chop it up extensively regarding Weird Punk and Shit Gaze.
The Touch The Feel
for posterity's sake. Apparently, it was Kevin Failure
I'll rep Weird Punk to the grave. Not so for Mysterious Guy Hardcore.
It was the keyboardist of TV Ghost, he got into legal problems and really mellowed out.
I always thought dry-Roy ruled in the MGHC camp.
Where does the FNU Ronnies and clone sit in all this for everyone?
From the Permission EP to the This Is A Forest 7" has to be one of the top funniest followups in music.
Then you flipped to the B side and it is Lumbar Yard. jfc. wasn't the producer Sublime associated? I mean now i wouldn't complain about a sax solo ride out on certain songs, but for the preEggs then it was more frowned upon.
I'm glad someone mentioned Weirdo Punk bc that's what I called Egg Punk bands when I first heard them.
Nathan Loud So much of the egg punk over-saturation coincided with our Age of Over-Saturation. There’s too much of everything. Maybe it seems worse with egg punk because it’s fairly one-dimensional.
Egg punk's issue isn’t merely oversaturation, but the way it happened. It wasn’t so much that too many bands emerged, but that they all ended up sounding the same. The outsider spirit that once made it fresh and unpredictable has been flattened into an endless series of clichés. As a result, what began as a spontaneous movement has turned into a codified aesthetic—and when a style stops evolving, it ages rapidly.
Perhaps I’m over-analyzing a genre that, in the end, sounds like an alien short-circuiting on a drum machine. Regardless, the Coneheads remain the best.