This whole let's go to the Warped Tour and interview brokeNCYDE thing started out as an (admittedly stupid) joke. It was April or May, and I was in my basement watching that FreaXXX video everyone on the planet has watched and laughed at many many times. The crunk mixed with autotune mixed with guttural screamy lyrics was such a calamity I couldn't plug up my ears or look away. I believe most people would call it "classic."BrokeNCYDE's MySpace had a behind-the-scenes video of their recording process. Evidently they get incredibly high, stand around in the studio for ten minutes and scream into a ribbon microphone, and then let their fresh-out-of-recording-school audio engineer figure out the rest. I had to wonder if these guys were evil geniuses--the way they combine every single shitty and annoying feature of popular music and regurgitate it back at their enthusiastic teenage girl fandom. I got in touch with their manager, who responded within an hour, and scheduled an interview at the Toronto Warped Tour.I planned to ask them questions like, "I read on the internet that you guys tell your lady fans to 'show their cooch and win a smooch.' That's genius. Who came up with that?" or "Have you ever slept with a 16-year old by accident?" or "Do you ever get angry about people that make fun of your band then laugh and remember how much cash you're making off tweens and then do a bong rip? Do you ever do that?"The crowd at the Warped Tour consisted of a couple hundred kids running around in a "crunk pit," screaming along and trying to touch Mikl or Se7en. The other two guys, Phat J and Antz, didn't make it across the border: one had a warrant out and the other didn't have a passport. The scene was even weirder from onstage. The front row of the under-18 crowd was going wild for songs like "Booty Call." Mikl bantered about how much the girls in the crowd wanted to "sex on Se7en's penis" and encouraged the crowd to "get crunk from this sexy girl on the left to that gangster ass dude on the right."Their management informed us that the interview would have to wait until after brokeNCYDE's autograph signing, which, all told, lasted two and a half hours. Their tour manager, a big burly black guy named Chad, lead us to the press area and told Mikl and Se7en to bring us back to their bus. The two of them walked in front of us for five minutes without even once saying hi or shaking our hands. But they are rock stars so I guess that's acceptable behavior.When we got to the bus, The Millionaires were sitting in the front area listening to Dipset, so my friend and I carefully unloaded camera equipment and hit on the girls. Eventually, Mikl wandered towards us and asked if we wanted to do the interview.All in all, it seems as if brokeNCYDE is not a joke or an act. They are genuinely the new wave of awful high school day-glo punk crunk T-Pain fuckery and I guess that should have been obvious from the getgo. When we left them, brokeNCYDE and The Millionaires were sitting around politely watching Family Guy DVDs. A far cry from their sex and alcohol anthems but I guess that's why you should never meet your idols.PATRICK McGUIRE
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