Board this sport-music fest ; Four bands covering punk, rock, hip-hop carve out the sounds at Snoqualmie
-------------------------
Concert preview
Board This 2000: Cypress Hill, MxPx, Static-X, Incubus, gates open at 9 a.m., Summit at Snoqualmie ($36; 206-628-0888).
-------------------------
What is the perfect soundtrack to the experience of carving down a snow-carpeted mountain on a board, or moshing with the teenaged aggregate, earnestly braining themselves and others in a steaming pit of unbridled enthusiasm?
Well, in keeping with the emerging trend in pop music, it is the now all-too-familiar marriage of musical stylings - the punk-pop, rock-rap, electronica-thrash-metal gangstafied weed cuts that get less revolutionary by the day. It's a sometimes-fruitful melange, and other times nasty hybrid, of sound and style. Either way, it covers all the bases.
Radio station KNDD-FM (107.7) has put together a lineup of some of the biggest and most emerging names in punk, rock and hip-hop that represent the whole spectrum of snowboard-friendly sound. Hemp-hopper headliners Cypress Hill, Bremerton's own punk-pop MxPx, the self-described "evil disco" of Static-X, and the hard-charging rock-rap group Incubus will all play for the hordes of young snowboarders that gather at Snoqualmie Summit Saturday for Board This, one of the biggest sport-and-music festivals in the Pacific Northwest.
Here, the intensity of the music must match the intensity of the boarding. Years past brought the likes of Blink 182, Rancid, Silverchair and the Offspring to play to the crowd, which is uniformly dressed in snowboarding clothes, and inclined to tumble around in the large mosh pit that forms in the snow for just such occasions.
Cypress Hill won wide-based appeal first in the early '90s, combining hip-hop and alternative sounds, nasally barking out lyrics that extolled the virtues of hemp and marijuana in hits such as "Insane in the Brain" and "Legalise It."
The Los Angeles-based band continues to draw jazz, punk, alternative and hard-rock influences into its stew of sound on its new album, "Skull & Bones," which comes out in late April.
Static-X offers a mix of electronic dance and metal guitar, or "rhythmic trancecore" as they call it, on their latest album, "Wisconsin Death Trip."
Incubus follows in the tradition of the rap-metal genre, having toured with bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, which blur the lines between rock and rap but lack the intelligent political urgency of innovators Rage Against the Machine. Incubus incubated in Calabasas, Calif., and got signed to Epic Records when the members were just two years out of high school. They have sold 100,000 copies of their latest album, "Make Yourself."
This story is familiar to MxPx, a punk-pop band out of Bremerton and a mainstay in the boarding community. The trio of friends, now just 23, all graduated from Central Kitsap High together and went on tour two days later.
The band formed in the 10th grade, influenced by artists such as The Descendants and Black Flag, and later The Who and The Clash. The three members of MxPx, Mike Herrera, Tom Wisniewski and Yuri Ruley, are all sponsored snowboarders.
"That whole boarding culture, that's the punk-rock scene," said Wisniewski.
They began on the Tooth and Nail label, touring throughout the country and building a following.
"The first tours were kind of bad," Wisniewski said. "There'd be maybe 10 people at a show." Now MxPx is opening for bands like No Doubt and The Sex Pistols, traveling to New Zealand and other far-flung locales.
But, Wisniewski said, they all still live at their parents' houses in Bremerton near the Kitsap County Fairgrounds, home of the annual EndFest concert.
The major-label, world-touring members of MxPx still plan to jump the fence into EndFest in years to come.
Says Wisniewski, "We live here, we deserve to get in for free."