Various Artists II: How Compilations Influenced a Generation - Atticus: ...dragging the lake. Penned By: John E. Swan (SideOneDummy Records)

INTRODUCTION: Maybe, it's in the gray hairs that I've started finding in my thinning hair. Maybe, it's that dreaded third decade of life that seems to have been rearing it's ugly face around every corner. Maybe, it's a quarter life crisis, but something has been keeping me up at night. I sometimes, stay awake into the early hours of the morning spinning records and fumbling with CD jackets from high school, grasping hold of my youth for dear life. I search out elusive first presses of albums I'd somehow, lost to time, hoping that they'll somehow, tighten the thread leading from middle school to adulthood.

To be clear, I'm not fishing my torn band T-shirts or "bondage" pants from the depths of my closet, but as I make the transition into my 30's, shedding roommates and getting oil changes at regularly scheduled intervals, I can't help ruminating on where these albums came from and how they've shaped me. I can't help begging the question, "How did I get here?"

How I've come to be surrounded by this specific collection of music is largely, the consequence of efforts made by larger labels and their annual sampler CD's, but even today, I search out small Indie labels that pump out quality collections of exclusivities and excellent representations of a variety of music scenes.

Typically, priced at $4-5.00 and featuring, sometimes, up to 40 songs from just as many bands, compilations have always served as convenient and affordable ways to discover new and obscure bands. This is imperative to the formative years of a generation of listeners; compilations were the compass that one used to navigate the endless sea of Punk Rock and consequently, Hip-Hop, Hardcore, Indie, Reggae, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Many of these discs were used as shovels to tunnel into cozy nests of Punk records and artistic eccentricities.

It's this ability to influence and inform listeners that I'll be here every month to discuss. I'll be stopping The Witzard by to shed light on those discount albums in the so often overlooked "Various Artists" bins of the world, along with their influences within their communities, within their genres, and within the chronology of listener interests all across the globe, here in, Various Artists: How Compilations Influenced a Generation.


VARIOUS ARTISTS II: The year is 2002 and Punk Rock has been mined for all it's worth. Black Flag T-shirts can be purchased at outlet malls. Misfits stickers plaster the bumpers of young drivers' cars all across America, mistaken for some flash tattoo design or a vintage comic book character. The initial conception of the genre is nearly 40 years behind us, but that's not stopped corporate conglomerates the likes of MTV and Hot Topic from wrapping their collective fingers around the art form's throat and squeezing until money pours from it's eyes like coins from a cheap Vegas slot machine. Your classmates purchase their hair dye and nose rings from Wal-Mart. Their skateboards are unscathed and held by the trucks.

And for some reason, Blink-182's Tom DeLonge & Mark Hoppus have started a clothing company. If this sounds like a glimpse into a dystopian landscape, don't be alarmed. This indicates only that you are of sound mind, capable of differentiating between that which is genuine and that which is not. But let's not allow personal preference to blind us from the truth, which is as follows: whether or not the popularization of Punk Rock contributed to it's eventual bastardization, discs the likes of Atticus: ...dragging the lake. were a gateway to a history and sub-culture seemingly lost to the Disney-ification of American culture.

While many fans likely purchased the ...dragging the lake. series from Atticus Clothing for the sole purpose of hearing previously unreleased Blink-182 songs, the series also, opened the door for a slew of other industry giants. In 2002 alone, the franchise featured singles from debut albums from acts such as Simple Plan and The Used, bringing them into the greater American consciousness for the first time. This is to say nothing of the contributions of New Found Glory, Sugarcult, and Midtown, acts wrought with cheesy Pop hooks that appealed to the oftentimes coddling nature of American parents.


But to the credit of Hoppus and DeLonge, not everything on that first Atticus installment is coated in sugar. In fact, sprinkled throughout that first volume are valiant efforts at launching the careers of bands that the public at large still doesn't seem to be aware of over 15 years later. Bands such as Madcap, Kut U Up, and Bad Astronaut ("Featuring Members of Lagwagon") more closely resembled their Punk and Post-Punk predecessors, far removed from the greater Pop sensibilities of the majority of listeners.

While Atticus' initial attempt at defending Pop-Punk didn't exactly fall short, it seems implicit that by 2003, record label and distributor, SideOneDummy Records, saw it fit to inject the franchise with a bit more grit. On ...dragging the lake. II, we're introduced to unsung heroes and Gainesville, Florida legends, Hot Water Music, then-Vagrant Records signees, Alkaline Trio, Fat Mike's own Fat Wreck Chords new-comers, Dillinger Four, and the throaty stylings of Jim Wards' (ex-At The Drive-In) Sparta, providing an authenticity that so many burgeoning young Punk Rockers seemed starved of in the early 2000's.

So that the second volume of their compilation wasn't entirely hijacked, Blink was sure to add more than just a few lackluster radio friendly acts, championing the likes of Maxeen and Matchbook Romance, to name a couple. This resistance to music made on the fringes of the music industry shows. By this point, the young clothing company's "dead bird" and "double-crossed" logos could be found splayed across the chests of gel-encrusted, would-be skateboarders across the country. By 2003, the relationship between music and listener was almost entirely commodified, which may not have been so great for the gravel-throated zealots of the underground, but it sure did sell a lot of T-shirts, perhaps marking the death of legitimacy in Alternative music.


But for whatever can be said about the arguably unholy unions of Taking Back Sunday and Suicide Machines, Thrice and Down By Law, Volume II of ...dragging the lake. provides a much more encompassing and accurate portrait of the American Alternative music climate of the time, offering some sort of middle ground between the die-hards and the tourists.

That these more Pop-oriented acts experienced more commercial success than their traditionally-minded counterparts speaks more to the consumer market of the time and less to the credibility of our potty-mouthed Pop-Punk duo in charge. By 2004, with crystal clear vocals and over-produced guitar tones dominating airwaves and music television, the genre was finally deemed "profitable" for the first time since the late 1970's, albeit, this time, under false pretenses. With Alternative music festivals being funded by corporate sponsors and mohawks gracing album covers throughout Wal-Mart CD stands, bands founded on a more traditional ethos were forced back into their tour vans, feeding on the scraps of acts whose faces plastered glossy teen magazines and television screens.

It's a testament to the power of a teenagers dollar that by the time 2004 brought high school around for many of those original Atticus fans, ...dragging the lake. had become a jumbled mess of Pop-leaning melodies more reminiscent of the Top 40 hits that it was implicitly railing against.


Peppered in with these monotonous attempts were a handful of pseudo-Metal bands shamefully presenting themselves as "Hardcore" and likely, brought on by the unfortunate success of acts such as Avenged Sevenfold. Only Mike McColgan's (ex-Dropkick Murphys) Street Dogs represented any sort of ties to traditional Punk Rock, and even that's a stretch.

At this point in the young clothing brand's career, it seems more or less apparent that Mark Hoppus & Tom DeLonge's intent and relationship with the counter-culture and its music is significantly less pure than it had seemed a decade earlier. With ...dragging the lake. III came more cookie-cutter bands, such as Funeral for a Friend and Lydia, catering more to frat parties and the MySpace profiles of 16-year-old girls than to the tastes of those original listeners still citing Volumes I-II as being highly influential.

In a world where Motion City Soundtrack is billed as a "Punk" band, The Bled is sold as "Hardcore," and it's suggested that Alexisonfire is some sort of "Metal" band, it becomes difficult to take Atticus Clothing at all seriously. In fact, one feels comparatively lied to when musing over some of the more hair-raising songs put forth only one year earlier.


However, there appears to be a promising future for underground music as a whole, if not for Punk Rock, specifically, and it's hinted at in the contributions of The Sounds with their New Wave-infused brand of Garage Rock and The Kinison's aggressive take on Indie Rock. So whose fault is this? If our dollar is our vote, then, what's to be said for those of us who spent the later part of the 2000's pirating our favorite albums, while the dollars of our peers went to highly over-priced Fall Out Boy concert tickets and whiny Saosin albums?

While we should reserve the right to criticize these artists for their lack of originality and willingness to pander to the lowest common denominator, we must also, reject the notion that these bands are responsible for the death a genre founded on experimentation and contestation of the commonplace. These bands are mutually exclusive of the original art form and therefore, run parallel to it's timeline. Though, time and time again, it has been the case that these shallow acts have led us to treasure troughs rich with a history of political consciousness, activism, and civil disobedience. One needs only to work their way backward. And this is, perhaps, the lesson to be taken away from ...dragging the lake. and the first 10 years of the 2000's, in general.

While Hoppus and DeLonge should be held accountable for the bait-and-switch tactics that misinformed a generation, we need only to look in the mirror, when placing the blame for the mainstream's ignorance of legitimacy. Somewhere in the excitement of the Pop-Punk and Fourth Wave Emo explosion of the early 2000's, listeners became complacent and a naivety was bred that suggested that whatever the radio was giving us was all there was to be had. Fans expected to be spoon-fed originality and retailers and network executives conducted themselves accordingly, exploiting this ill-founded good faith.


As a consequence, we are a generation that bore witness to the fragmentation of a genre, whether we were aware of it or not. Any bands of substance were not so much shunned or ignored, as they were unnoticed entirely. The only alternative to obscurity seemed to be a compromise of artistic integrity and this, we see in spades as exemplified by the gentrification of the sub-culture by Pop musicians and upper class rich kids getting dropped off at basement shows in their parents' mini-vans.

Atticus may not have been responsible for this shift in the cultural soundscape, but surely, this popularization of less nuanced, carbon-copy Pop riffs promised a paycheck and by the end of the decade, it seemed everyone was buying in.

In spite of the commercial successes of so many of these bands individually, Atticus: ...dragging the lake. III went on the sell poorly, peaking at #63 on the Billboard Charts, a stark contrast, when compared to the second installment's time spent at #1.


It is, perhaps, because of this poor reception that Atticus stayed dormant for nearly half a decade before releasing 2009's mostly forgettable Atticus: IV, so far removed from the franchise's original concept that the release featured neither founding artists Blink-182 nor the original "...dragging the lake." title, further evidence that the franchise had digressed to being nothing more than a cash cow, as so many compilation series' were at that time.

Later that same year, in an attempt to stay relevant, the brand released Atticus Presents: Volume 1 and then, that following year, Atticus Atticus V Compilation. However, by this time, having alienated their original fan base in favor of a demographic now dying their hair back to natural colors, no one really seemed to care.

In the last eight years, with CD's seemingly gone the way of the outlet malls where they were initially purchased, Atticus Clothing seems to have kept mostly quiet, choosing to focus on the clothing line aspect of their brand, as this once-promising series drifts further and further into obscurity.

John E. Swan (@midwest_stress) is a novelist and short story writer, as well as freelance editor and journalist. His first novel, Any Way to Elsewhere, takes its name from a compilation cassette that he curated during his time with Berserk Records. When he's not writing, he can be found making music under the moniker "t h e m e s" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he lives with his girlfriend and their dog, Diesel.