Remembering the East Coast-West Coast Emo Feud

    Throughout the whiny annals of the emo genre, no two bands have made such an indelible mark on the scene as have Cutwrist and Sadface. The former, led by the ever-mopey Gerald Holland, was established in Los Angeles shortly after Holland’s girlfriend broke up with him; the latter was founded by friends Alex Patterson and Mark Cohen in New York City, when Cohen heard Patterson artfully bitching about having to do his chores.
    “Hey, let’s put some music to that mope,” Cohen is said to have remarked.
    The two bands rocketed to superstardom in their first few years of existence, with Cutwrist issuing such hits as, “Heart-Punched” and “I’m Really, Really Sad,” and Sadface offering such memorable hits as “Alone in the Blackness” and “But I Thought We Were Soul Mates...” With such immediate success, the two bands found themselves touring together in 2003 and became fast friends.
    In less than a year however, their friendship--and careers--would be torn asunder by mutual enmity.
    The feud began at Wet Blanketsville, USA, the studio owned and operated by Sadface. It was a cool November evening, and Holland was recording vocals for the Cutwrist track “Sleeping Pills--That’ll Do the Trick.” Between takes, he stepped out of the booth and into the brisk Manhattan night to smoke a cigarette. He had just lit the cigarette when an unknown and masked assailant accosted Holland and stabbed him three times with a used knife from a nearby Arby’s.
    After the stabbing, Holland whinged with even greater zeal, and Cutwrist’s financial success, after the release of “Stabbed With An Arby’s Knife... In the Heart”, grew to rare heights; but his friendship with Cohen was over. Holland claimed that the attack was set up by Cohen and vowed revenge. Shortly thereafter, Holland was arrested on two counts of being a pussy when he was seen sobbing at an airport. His stay in jail would do little to assuage his feelings of hatred toward his former friend.
    Upon his release, Holland took the beef to the studio. He released the dis track, “You Can’t Kill Me (I’ll Do It Myself)” just three weeks after he was freed, a resonating screed against Sadface, their record label “Boo Hoo Records” and, indeed, all East Coast emo bands. Accompanying the track was a video, in which a tearful Holland intimated that he had sex with Cohen’s girlfriend.    
    For the usually reserved and despondent Cohen, this was the last straw.
    At the Source Awards For Emo in New York, Holland continued his verbal assault. After winning the award for Most Likely To Sob In Public, he took aim at Sadface’s producer, Sean “Puffy Eyed” Mattingly, who could be heard crying in the background many of the group’s songs and videos. “If you want to just be sad and alone, and not have the producer all in the videos... all on the songs... come to Sad Sack!” he said, a reference to his label, Sad Sack Records.
    The remarks were met with bristling from the New York crowd, but this time, Cohen would fire back. After presenting the trophy for Pussy of the Year, Cohen remarked, “You don’t know a thing about sadness, buddy,” pointing at his former friend. “It’s sunny every day in LA! No existentialist thinker has ever come from a tropical climate, douchebag!”
    The audience once again bristled, but the war of words wasn’t over. After a performance of “Cuttin’ The Day Away,” Cutwrist’s cofounder and guitarist Aaron “What’s the Point?” Heckert took aim at the New York audience. “Y’all don’t got love for Cutwrist?” he yelled. “Y’all don’t got no love for Sad Sack Records? Well fuck y’all!”
    It was a seminal moment for both bands. Rather than continuing on being a bunch of whiny-britches, the mutual enmity between the bands made them angry, and this was reflected in their lyrics. The titles of the respective bands’ subsequent albums were “Suck My D***, New York” and “F*** Yourself, LA.”    
    Fans, used to the downtrodden whinging of Holland and the melodic bitching of Patterson, were disappointed by the bands’ newfound sense of not being disappointed and sales plummeted. Meanwhile, the tension between the East and West Coast emo scenes grew, as they blamed one another for the anger that had so affected the genre.
    Soon, both bands split up.
    But the story doesn’t end there.
    Both Holland and Cohen experienced a similar, and possibly career-saving phenomena after their respective bands split up, their lives as musicians possibly over: they got sad. The new sense of sadness has reportedly become fodder for a comeback, and there have been talks of an upcoming comeback tour for each band. We recently reached Cohen at his sadly unfurnished New York loft, and he has confirmed that plans are being made for the “Still Sad Tour” 2012, and that a new, depressing record would be released later this year.
    Will the two bands be able to finally bury the hatchet and just focus on being sad? Will Cutwrist and Sadface return to the heights they so quickly achieved, and from which they even more quickly fell? “Would,” Cohen asked us rhetorically in our recent chat “anyone care if I was gone?”
    With that attitude Mark, you better believe they would.

A Mother's Love

It was a cool spring morning, a Saturday in Bloody, New Jersey. Bennie sat alone in the family’s living room watching television and picking his nose--havin’ a good ole nose-pickin’ type of time. Between episodes of Cheaters, with a multi-textured bugger sitting just out of his reach, there was a curious rattling at the door and, disregarding the rules pertaining to opening doors for strangers, Bennie streaked from his perch on the family couch and answered.
    Upon swinging the door open, Bennie discovered that, unlike most guests at the Patterson house, this one was a bear. A grizzly. A bona fide, picnic-stealin’ trout gobbler.
    Bennie shrieked in terror. The grizzly growled in hunger. Bennie’s mother went, “Guh,” in confusion.
    She descended the stairs quickly to find her son cornered by the lumbering beast. Grabbing a broomstick from the closet, she knocked her son out of harm’s way. And you know how they say women experience an almost superhuman strength when their children are in danger?
    Well, she didn’t have that. She was mauled to death.

Suge & Me: The Doing & Undoing of My Career as a Gangsta Rapper

    My world was turned upside down.
    As I stared out at the cabana area of the Palm Beach Four Seasons, the blood rushing to my head, the concrete below looking up at me menacingly, I wished I had never run a foul of my business associate and, I thought until he decided to hang me by my ankles over a sixth floor hotel balcony, friend, Suge Knight.
    “I thought we were friends,” I told Suge, but he just muttered something over his cigar about his grip giving out.
    “You hear me honky?”
    “Yes,” I lied.
    The entire hubbub could be traced back to my debut album with Death Row Records, “Rich Gangster Junction,” which had flopped monumentally and lost the label a large sum of money. The album was panned critically, with music writers and fans contending that I was not, as I said several times on the album, from Compton, but in fact from a suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Farmers Branch.
    One enterprising investigative journalist dug up my high school year book and discovered that I had been a member of the glee club and the chess team, and was named by my classmates the “friendliest” guy with the “best smile” in all of the class of 2004 at Lakeside Preparatory School.
    Then came the TMZ video.
    In June of 2009, around a month before the release of “Rich Gangster Juntion,” an amateur video surfaced on TMZ.com depicting me falling to the ground and shrieking at the sound of what I thought was a gunshot, but turned out to be a car backfiring. “Still,” I told XXL magazine, “It was pretty loud.”
    The resulting article was titled “Scared Honky Junction: The New, Lilly Face of Death Row.”
    Indeed, my precarious position was greatly the result of this article, which Suge told me hurt our street cred like a motherfucker. Some fans down at the cabana were chanting “Drop him! Drop him!” and so forth, and that was when I faced the dismaying fact that my career as a gangster rapper, and maybe my life, too, was over.
    Suge opted against obliging the bloodthirsty, pool-goin’ masses, though, and let me go--under the stipulation that I never rap for any label ever again--with a light beating from his cronies.
    “I hope this doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” I told Suge as he threw me, literally, out of his hotel room. But Suge just slammed the door and went back to entertaining the bitches in his room. I walked home sullenly that day, groping the area where my “Death Row” chain had sat so menacingly just an hour before.