This week in annoying music trends...

It's possible that this phenomenon is located entirely within the Arizona local music scene, but I doubt it. It appears to be spreading throughout pop punk bands faster than zombies in an urban setting where apparently not one single person has ever heard of zombies before.

The illustrative properties of this image are endless.

I'm talking, of course, about the apparent need of every pop punk band lately cover a hip hop song.

I first noticed this when that "Punk Goes Crunk" CD came out and subsequently launched the career of The Maine due to their cover of "I Wanna Love You". Their career didn't stay launched for long, mind you; most people stopped caring about them the second they realized that their original songs were, well... not that good. However, courageously ignoring that second fact, a whole bunch of pop punk bands decided to follow suit, boldly going where many, many bands had gone before.

I'll admit, at first I liked it. The covers were catchy and fun and all that, but mostly, I thought it was some sort of social commentary. By taking the mainstream hip hop culture and stripping away all the manufactured tough-guy posturing and leaving only mostly inane, nonsensical lyrics and overbearing themes of misogyny camouflaged by catchy hooks, these covers were essentially holding a mirror up to the genre and the people who buy into it, and asking them all if they liked what they saw. I thought it was trying to make a statement. Of course, it's not like most people would see it that way; but then again, that just kind of proves the point, doesn't it? A good social satire's strength comes from its subtlety, and if the point is to prove that most people who actually like mainstream hip hop are tasteless drones, then those same people not getting the parody would make sense.

Alas, after about the forty thousandth band that put out a cover like this, I started to get the sneaking suspicion that perhaps I was giving these bands too much credit. It's become a prerequisite that if you're a pop punk band and you hope to be popular, you goddamn better have a great fucking hip hop cover, or else, get the fuck out of my face, goddamn it. It isn't social commentary, it isn't clever, and it's not even original; it's just a gimmick.

Pop Punk's biggest musical influence.

It's my fault, really; while the first generation of pop punk grew up listening to bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat and The Descendants, the current generation grew up listening to Good Charlotte and Simple Plan. I shouldn't have expected any deeper punk sensibilities than what was on the surface, and for that, I'm sorry.

But still, it doesn't make sense to me. Ask yourself, if you were in a band, would you want to be known as "the band who covered 'I Wanna Love You'", as opposed to "that band who covered 'In Da Club'"? Or would you want to be known by your band name, and for your original material and live performances? It makes more sense to want to be known for the latter, but by spending money to record a version of someone else's song, you're setting yourself up for the former.

Not to mention, a cover like this often serves to make your original material seem very weak in comparison. So please, pop punk bands, enough with the hip hop cover recordings. Practice a lot and work hard on your song structures and at putting on dynamic, entertaining live shows, and don't rely on a gimmick that is quickly becoming played out and boring.

Or don't. I don't pay much attention to you local pop punk bands anyway.