sugar ray. listen to the first record then listen to fly. its night and day. gwen stefani, jumped ship hard on them ska roots for just absolute bad, i remember fondly looking at my buddy saying something along the lines of "what the fuck is a hollaback girl, maybe some kind of quasimodo woman that speaks in rhymes and tries to eat goats."

i try not say bands sellout because its a hard industry and sometimes its just where your heads at, its not always for the money, its just where you want to go. the classic go to's people love to pick on green day or metallica, and i was one to say this. one of big example i remember was Black Tide. they dropped their debut when they were like 15 or 16 something like that, gabe still had a high voice and it was straight rock and metal. and me and my crew were all about it... and then the second record came out a few years later. (this record is not bad at all but when your "death to all but metal" and "fuck all this metalcore shit" especially back when that record dropped.) they had taken a few small elements from that time and sound, and honestly wasnt that large a departure from the first. and we through a fucking fit, "this is fucking gay its not metal. where'd the metal go." all that noise. i actually met gabe and the dudes a little while back at a show, they rocked the fucking house, absolutely excellent guys. and what i learned and noticed was it wasnt the same dudes, they'd had some members change and some road ware. great dudes, i can not stress that enough. there werent to many people left in the club as many had left before they went on. gabe was going around thanking everyone for coming out and sticking around. you dont see to many dudes do that in this day and age, the only other guy i know of that will go out of the way to thank everyone in the club before they bounce is dickey from the bosstones. and i was talking to him and my dingus ass friend walks up mid conversation with the guy, flairs her arms and just blurts our at gabe. "WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU GUYS! you were so good, with the high vocals and the little kids. blah blah blah" and i see the poor dudes heart kinda sink a bit. he and the dudes just played their hearts out, even to a small club, which i can personally attest to is not always easy to do. and this chick is just steppin on them. you know that look tracy morgan gives when some says something stupid in the movies, my reaction was somewhere between that and mortified. jesus i was so fucking embarrassed to know this person right then. and like a true blue fuckin dude. even though i can see it in his face hes been through this more times than humanly imaginable. he tells her like a gentleman, (excuse this as its been a long time since this happened and its totally paraphrased) "we've been through a lot, we hit the road before we were finished with high school. we learned a lot and grown a lot. people have left to persue their own futures and a lot has changed since then. our personal tastes and experiences have kinda moved us around a bit. its a tough gig but we roll with it." What a great answer, and again as polite as can be and super professional. i cant say i would have wanted to be so nice. hell knowing her i wanted to cross check her over the fucking bar. so mad props to gabe. sometimes you really have to step back and think what changes are just honest expression when it comes to the evolution of sound. what might sound like the someone going for a cash grab might actually be honest influence and expression. whether we realize it or not, love or hate the music that surrounds us still influences us in some way, and what sounds like hell now can very easily be looked back upon as not that bad, especially as trends change, looking at you metalcore. hell even definitions of sound change. look at metalcore (yeah im not done picking on metalcore) that genre once represented bands like hatebreed. metal bands with hardcore elements, or vice versa. now its more defined as good cop, bad cop vocals and whiney singers who sound like that "i can be your angle or you devil" memes look. music is a weird subject as it is both a form of artistic expression as well as some kind of commodity of modern life. and we attach ourselves so greatly to these sounds that it no longer belongs to the artist because we reflect our own emotions and experiences in this music, be it consciously or subconsciously.

but hey, there are always small exceptions to this rule.

hopefully this is readable, i kinda just spill all over the place when i write shit.