With issues such as war, hunger, disease, murder, addiction and poverty running rampant throughout the world today, it seems an injustice to call these things just problems. However, this epidemic of never-ending crisis doesn’t simply feed upon the physical, everyday aspects of life. Over the past few years it has stealthily slipped through the floorboards and has begun to infect a previously untouched part of life: our creativity. At this moment, rock n’ roll seems almost catatonic, making no new strides towards innovation to further the genre. However, just as I began to worry if rock n’ roll could survive this sickness, California’s The Bronx seems to have found the cure.
“We’ve all been playing in bands together, and in the Los Angeles scene for the past 10 years. The Bronx just began as another band; we never really expected to get this far,” reminisces guitarist Joby J. Ford. Regardless of their expectations, having only been together for four years, The Bronx has already accomplished what any band with integrity and heart strives its entire career for: furthering its own music and its genre.
With the release of just one self-titled, full-length album, a handful of EPs and some seven-inch records, The Bronx has successfully taken the ethics, conviction and attitude of 1980’s punk, akin to acts like Black Flag and Fear, and streamlined this raw presence into something totally unique. Ripe with catchy rock n’ roll guitar riffs, hardcore drumming, and piss and vinegar vocals, The Bronx makes this highly influential and classic style relevant for today without compromising a thing in the process.
This becomes completely obvious when hearing the band live. Taking the stage with confidence and humility, The Bronx soars through songs dealing with everything from a conflicted love for home, to fights with bad drugs, to even worse bouts with broken hearts. While some of the material may appear to be cliche, The Bronx offers and asks for no apologies. It’s clear that while this band loves and appreciates its fans, this music at the end of the day is from the heart and made for the members.
This adamant and unapologetic approach to its music doesn’t end with simple talk, though. Priding itself on moving forward and not being scared to do so, The Bronx outright refuses to be just another “catchy” band, for no other reason than to boost record sales.
“I’m sure there are plenty of bands out there playing music for the wrong reasons, and I mean it’s not really their fault, they’re just afraid to try something different, or even worse, to be themselves,” Ford said.
This fear of putting out music that truly expresses who a band is nothing new, though, and usually it turns a band into just another cookie-cutter artist filling the part of stereotype for a totally played-out genre. In fact, for years labels have gone out of their way to find bands exactly like this, not to further the status of creativity in music, but just to further increase their over all profits.
When rock ‘n’ roll first appeared, it was fierce, scary, sexy and unexplainable, but with so many bands and labels lusting after nothing more than their record sales, it’s become brutally obvious that this is what is killing the rock music community.
“These people just don’t have any respect for music,” Ford said, “even worse, though, they have the audacity to call themselves artists, that’s probably the biggest slap in the face ever.”
With no sign of this plague on the rock music community letting up any time soon, though, we can only hope to have more bands come out with even a tenth of the same integrity or raw talent that The Bronx possesses. In this world full of stifled and corporately infected creativity, a band like The Bronx is truly necessary, because it always helps to know the name of someone with the antidote.
