MySpace began in 2003 as an online social networking community similar to Friendster. But its unprecedented explosion in popularity -- from no one to 30 million users in a little over two years -- is due mostly to musicians' literal reading of its name. Profile pages quickly became outposts of rock & roll entrepreneurialism, hosting promotional material, photos, tour info, MP3s, and entire street team networks. The MySpace Revolution gave every band on Earth its own tireless A&R man, every registered user's very first friend, site co-founder Tom Anderson. Anderson moves into real A&R with
MySpace Records, Vol. 1, an unsurprisingly emo-centric cross-section of notables and hopefuls. These are the bands bred inside MySpace's fiber-optic wires, a brood of attractive child rockers whose frame of reference travels only as far as
Green Day,
Jimmy Eat World, and the occasional 1980s flashback hour. Well,
Weezer too, who contribute here with "We Are All on Drugs." There's an acoustic version of "Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner" from relative veterans
Fall out Boy,
AFI sounding nicely
Cure-ish on the previously unreleased "Rabbits Are Roadkill on Rt. 37.," and
Against Me! being typically righteous on "Don't Lose Touch." As for the up-and-comers,
the Click Five sounds more like a junior
Fountains of Wayne than ever on "Angel to You (Devil to Me)," and
Jupiter Sunrise offers some dark humor with its
Weezer Starter Kit product "Arthur Nix." (By default
Say Anything wins the award for most risqué line on "Every Man Has a Molly": "For you/I won't ever have rough sex with Molly Connelly again.") Overall the 17 songs on
MySpace, Vol. 1 effectively sample what the site has to offer. But that begs the question: why buy them when you can log in for free and hear two million versions of the very same thing? ~ Johnny Loftus