UNSUCCESSFULLY COPING WITH THE UNDENIABLE FACT YOUR FAVOURITE BAND IS NOW GARBAGE

  It is a heartbreaking moments in one's life when it is time to face the cold truth and admit the unavoidable: your once favourite band has turned into utter and absolute bollocks and there is no saving it anymore. It is a fact you have been turning your eyes away from for the last five albums, refusing to acknowledge it, as if by sheer force of determination and unfaltering adoration you could will it go back to what it used to be, will them to not suck anymore. Yet everything and everyone has a limit and if your favourite band reaches that limit within your lifetime, there's not much you can do anymore.

   I  chose to pretend this never happened. I refused to accept that for the last decade and a half this steady decline of my favourite band was happening. I searched frantically through their latest albums to grasps at shreds of a lyric with poetic intentions, a single guitar riff that might send my body into involuntary rocking out, a pumping drum intro, desperately trying to fool myself that the band I knew and loved was still somewhere in there, that my taste was skewed by albums that held a sentimental value to me and that the subsequent work was just as good. But it was not. And I kept coming back to the older ones, slowly warming myself to the idea the last seventeen years simply didn't happen.

   Ultimately it was their last album, released a couple years back, that long awaited holy grail that I feel the need to wear latex gloves in order to touch the CD as if it is contagious. All my shattered hopes entombed in a jewel case. I had to purse my lips tight, bow my head, and finally accept that, for all the vitality of its middle aged members, this band was dead and rotten.

   Bit they just.won't.let.it.die.

   LET IT DIE!

   It was with a sigh of resignation that I found out the much fawned over new album was given a release date later this year. I decided to close my ears to the proverbial sirens and not even glance towards the new single. The promotional interviews have already informed me that not only has the band strayed too far from their original content into unfamiliar territory marred by a mockery of a Hollywood replica of their once-young antics, but that this pathetic attempt at fan-milking is full of shit that even the culprits-sorry, artists-themselves cannot quite bring themselves to swallow.

   Sleeplessness, exhaustion, and sheer boredom led me one night, well after midnight, to click on a dreaded thumbnail that popped up on my YouTube feed. I knew better, but my ill advised curiosity got the best of me. I knew what was coming, and yet I was not prepared for this.

   Was it the subpar songwriting skills, the outright joke of the band pretending to be in their twenties again even down to the clothes they can no longer pull off not because of their age or surprisingly well kept bodies but because they reek the stench of selling out for a VIP seat at the Rainbow Room, or the eyesore that the entire music video was, whether we are referring to the actual technical part of edgy directing and recording or to the lowest of indie Hollywood b list horror films of the last decade? As much as I had hated everything that came with the previous album,  I had not seen the last of it. This last single, in all of its major label glory, was the final nail in the coffin of the band that had painted the soundtrack of the best days of my life. Not matter the memories, no matter the love, there are some things that all the devotion in the world can not save.

   It is a sad day indeed. You turn off the radio and go about your stuff in silence, pursing your lips tight. You turn off MTV and sink back into the sofa, lighting a cigarette and inhaling long and deep, trying to keep the ache in your chest from leaking out. You close the entire browser window-not just the tab, and get up to ace restlessly back and forth across the room, trying to fathom a world without that band. The realization creeps in, numbing you to the core, making your limbs cold: that this, in fact, is not about a and growing old, irrelevant, or uninspired. This is about an era of your life ending. You suddenly look back and see all the years stretching behind you, and realize just how long it has been. You realize where you are standing. The merciless time. And worst of all, the great unknown stretching before you where you have to venture alone for the first time, without the love that now exists only in the past, alone and with a cold hollow in your chest where that one song used to be  not that long ago at all. Some things should better be left to die when they should, rather than drag their hollow carcasses on world tours trying to convince the disillusioned fans to buy the merch.

   We are encouraged to believe, particularly in the rock scene, that music has no expiration date. And while this might be true, bands certainly do, and unless by some cruel twist of fate or divine intervention the and in question ends before that point of no return is reached, the results are plain disheartening. For every band that has endured over the decades delivering quality content to the fans, there's a dozen more big names whose latest endeavors in the music business are plain pathetic. Should blame lie with the companies who are hellbent to milk every last penny out of the tried and tested moneymakers or with the artists whose vanity and insecurities prevent them from acknowledging the obvious and moving on to something new? Your call. But one thing is not up for debate:

   Some bands belong below the ground.