The essay below was beautifully written by my best friend Kevin Cameron, and fellow guitarist of I Killed The Prom Queen. It was originally written to combat a slew of negative comments on our Facebook page and aside from being heavily biased towards veganism, he makes very relevant points pertaining to a lot of bands/music and in a way i think it sums up the problems with modern heavy music and its lack of a real ‘message’.
“Firstly the reason this band (I Killed the Prom Queen) uses its very lucky platform to bring what we feel are ultimately positive awareness to issues from this page is because we are from a different “era” to most bands we are lumped in with these days. Our strongest influences both as musicians and on a personal, everyday life level stem from the ethics of 90s hardcore bands which we grew up on, when bands would parallel their music with ways of causing awareness to destructive practices in the world, and in a true punk spirit, aim to rebel against it. This can include various degrees of animal rights, humanitarian issues, social injustices and other (what we believe) are harmful kinds of behaviour on the earth. We would hope that people that enjoy our music and can differentiate IKTPQ from the whole “myspace” generation of heavy bands (aka bands without any conviction or “hardcore” correlation aside from single note chugs and making sure they get diamonds tattooed on their forehead at 18 etc etc)
At the end of the day, all the posts are doing in encouraging people to look into alternate living, where sentient creatures arent subjected to unbelievable extremes of torture for people’s stomaches when in 2012, with the smallest amount of research and planning, sustaining a healthy lifestyle where cows, pigs, chickens, sheep etc aren’t mutilated and put through hell is ridiculously simple. We consider ourselves are hardcore band, and our interpretation of what hardcore encompasses is unfortunately overlooked in the wave of modern day, bastardised clone bands which are ingested by naivety. Bands should stand for something, we are all meant to be the “outsiders” the “punks” and the “alternate thinkers” yet noone wants to raise questions and go against the grain, it’s easier to just make shitty music and throw it on YouTube with a pretty looking filmclip and go along with the current, the pop culture. Hell most of the utter filth I see these days dominating the “…core” frequencies have more in common with n-sync than any punk attitude, and that’s something which I’m embarrassed by and don’t want the band I play for to be associated with…
There is NO ULTERIOR MOTIVE from us supporting this lifestyle and promoting it to you, I guess the motivation by extending these ideals is that animal rights/vegetarian related information is hardly ever embraced in any form of mass media, advertising, promotion whereas companies who thrive on profiting from mass murder are all over news, tv, billboards and in your face 24/7, generating income from slaughter. Social media is obviously a fresh and valuable way of sharing information, for example how many of you jumped on the Kony bandwagon without doing any research whatsoever? How many people are quick to jump to the defence of an abused domestic pet or a child but not see the parallels between all living animals/ mammals, with no bat of an an eyelid to the billions of farmed creatures forced to endured worse punishment every minute? Yet us drawing attention to slaughterhouse atrocities and hopefully sparing some lives from suffering is convoluted? Obviously it’s easily to take offence at the first sight and see this kind of info as an attack on your lifestyle, maybe out of subconscious guilt, maybe out of pride that something challenges an imposed upbringing. All I can say is I’ve heard every “against” hypothesis for the last 12 years, from “i bet you step on ants” to the agricultural arguments for land mass/ environmental damage harvesting natural resources outweighing edible animal stock numbers (a little hint: human interference with animal genetics to make “meat machine’s” and thus a need to accommodate them for a tiny life span/ exhausting natural vegetation doesn’t count. its a very easy go to in defence but sorry, no prize)
Anyways, i could literally go on for hours, and so in a very minimised summation, anyone who is enraged at us collectively bringing attention to animal cruelty, (a by-minute issue which anyone with a pulse should be able to interpret as abhorrent) take the same amount of time it took to slag us off over the internet for something useful and do a quick Google search of anything related to our “crazy” alternate lifestyle. Hopefully you can empathise and see that we’re clearly promoting something positive for all living things, and not shoving anything at anyone (we’ll leave that to McDonalds and organised religion) and if you’d like to further debate, contact me rather than airing poorly thought-out attacks on a bands page. See you in Europe this June/July.peace.”
Kevin Cameron
oh, i will
