"Kids These Days!": brokeNCYDE

The "ironic" rock take on a dumb rap single is an old concept, almost exclusively perpetrated by the type of band that likes their rock Pro Tooled and pitch-corrected til it's as dangerous a baby-bumper, but think they're making real music just because it has guitars. And so get misguided covers like brokeNCYDE's screamo rendition of "Low," which entirely misses the fact that you can't make fun of music that was meant to be dumb fun in the first place. The cover is cute and all, but given the premise any listen could pretty much imagine how it might sound to 100 percent accuracy in his or her mind. ("Apple-bottom jeans, and them boots with the FUUUUURS! (backing vocal: WITH THE FFFFFFHUUUUUURRRHRRRSSSS!"))

Harmless enough, but these guys are apparently milking an entire career out of their limited shtik, churning out the same joke over and over and over again in their original material. What do you even call four dipshits from Albuquerque winking and smirking their way through their worst approximation of hip-hop beats and their best efforts at emo shrieks? Their last.fm tags offer some suggestions: plain old "screamo"? No, these lads have traded their guitars for a synth. "fashioncore"? I don't care what today's 14-year-olds tell me, a bleached streak in five-inch bangs with a scarf and girls' jeans will never be fashionable. "crunkcore"? The genres are there, but it doesn't quite capture their essence... are, yes, there we are: "myspaceshit."

brokeNCYDE is somewhat funny for five-to-ten minutes, but absolutely intolerable in larger doses--they're the musical equivalent of a third-tier recurring SNL character being fluffed out to fill an 80-minute movie. Yet they've got over a million plays on last.fm.

Kids these days!