Hyped Up The Ass

Illustration of the band adapted from photos on their MySpace by Paul Sammut

Introducing Black Kids, the new “buzz band”. Every couple of months a buzz band pops up, sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not. What unites them all is an array of attributes, no matter how trivial, that manage to get people inside the music industry—labels, journalists, PRs etc—talking about them. A lot of these bands end up making the jump from being industry buzz bands into successful acts. This happens through journalists writing about them, radio then playing them, and people eventually buying their records. In this tradition, we wanted to let people know about Black Kids, a band from Jacksonville, Florida, who make indie rock, not a million miles away from The Cure on one of Robert Smith’s happier days. To our dismay, a mutitude of attempts to set up either an interview or a photoshoot with the band were continually met with disappointment, despite them having very little press anywhere. We saw they were playing New York’s CMJ festival, so contacted their management to arrange things. Initially their management got straight back to us with a time for the shoot. Luckily we had a photographer down the road. Then, after an hour, he emailed back saying that the shoot had been cancelled. After chasing for a reason why, the management said that they’d booked a full day of meetings and apparently now couldn’t even spare a five-minute window in the whole 24 hours they had left, despite the fact our photographer lived 20 seconds away. Weird. So we gave them a couple of days to get home, and emailed asking if one of their mates could just take a candid snap, and if they’d be able to spare us five minutes on the phone. Sadly, it was not to be. Black Kids, at the time of writing, weren’t playing ball. You might expect this from a multi-platinum-mega-award-winner. Seems the buzz has developed so fast they’ve got a little ahead of themselves. Vice: Hey, so we were wondering if we could do a quick interview with one of the guys for this feature? Black Kids’ management: They’re in rehearsals at the moment, so they’re not really in the mindstate to be doing interviews. Oh, erm, right, er, okay. I mean, we don’t want to ask them anything too strenuous. We appreciate the interest, but it’s just not the right time for them. OK then, when will be the right time? I don’t know. December? Hmm, maybe not. RANDY PAN
myspace.com/blackkidsrock