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I know what you are thinking now, in all honesty, hand on my heart, I would do too, since everything has been felt ten thousand times.

So why one of these supposedly poppy-ironic texts with a superlative in the title, which promises clarification about the supposedly worst song in the world, but then only uses the transparent clickbait strategy, now also the last one, at least halfway interested in music Entice the user to click on the article so that he can quickly check out the band, the song title and the genre mentioned here and then compare it with his own inner musical aestheticism compass, only to finally leave a note in the comment field, which song in his opinion is the

really

worst song ever.

For everyone who wants to get it over with quickly.

Band name: Design the Skyline.

Song title: "Surrounded by Silence".

Genre: It's complicated.

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For everyone who wants the long version: This is really bad, really bad, and yes, the superlative in the title is justified.

Great music journalist's word of honor.

But what is this actually about?

It's about one of the first, really big, virtual shitstorms in the YouTube music world bubble at a time when there were actually no shit storms in the YouTube music world bubble.

Crime scene: Internet.

Defendant: Design The Skyline.

Never heard?

Not bad at all!

Maybe just rightly forgotten.

The drama happened exactly ten years ago when the eight-piece band from Corpus Christi, Texas, was introduced as the great young hope of the then still respected hardcore label Victory Records.

But that with the hope that it didn't go really well.

Their first single "Surrounded by Silence" was the song that had the worst like-dislike balance of all rock songs of all time.

In the end, music is not just music

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The music critics have seldom been as unanimous as here, as in this case.

This one, the critics printed and blogged, this is without question the worst song ever.

Sure, one could argue now, let people write in the music press and on the internet what they want to write in the music press and on the internet.

Everything here is already littered with words and opinions, a few more comments don't hurt any more, and besides, music is music, and it is well known that one can argue about musical tastes.

For some it can be a little louder here, for the others more beat, the guy over there thinks rap is better than rock and, sorry, maybe a little more bass?

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But no, no, thinking too liberally.

Forget music tastes and genre affiliations, "Surrounded by Silence" actually managed to be known and hated far beyond the circle of its subculture and

is

actually the worst song you will have ever heard.

Musical crime against humanity

The first still bearable seconds are the seconds before the band, well, you would be almost tempted to write: “starts to play”, which doesn't really feel right, because this musical crime against humanity can no longer play be.

Rather, it is a simultaneous exhaustion of the instruments, the creation of a single, painful and disharmonious noise.

The creation of an auditory disruptive factor that triggers escape reflexes or click away impulses.

You can take “Surrounded by Silence” for exactly one bar.

That's it!

Legend has it that not a dozen people in this world have managed to listen to the entire track in its four-minute, sixteen-second godlessness without interruption.

The sound is a single dissonance, a big crash, a clash of dysfunctional elements that would be bad enough on their own, but when they clash become an auditory torture.

And the way the band performs is deeply disturbing.

It seems like the parody of an emo band is parodying the parody of an emo band.

A nightmare in picture and sound.

There was probably no band in the whole fucking history of Rock'n'Roll that got everything, literally everything, as fundamentally wrong as Design The Skyline.

Not only the big picture, no, even the smallest details, on closer inspection, have been lovingly driven against the wall with such vehemence and determination that it is almost admirable again.

From the neon-colored strings of their instruments to their highly ridiculous stage names ("Dani Doom"!), It's all just wrong, very, very terribly wrong.

Lots of shadow, but no light at all

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It was so terribly wrong that even the rule of polarity, which is always valid, was suspended.

The internet has the amazing effect that everything, really everything is accepted by somebody in some way.

Every song, every video, every opinion, no matter how crooked, no matter how wrong, no matter how stupid they may be, find on the internet a minimum of mentally segregated people who somehow find it "quite good" and defend it.

Only with Design The Skyline this was not the case.

Design the Skyline was just hated by everyone.

Lots of shadow, but no light at all.

The seven completely untalented school friends from Texas should never recover from this debut single.

Everything they tried after “Surrounded by Silence” was doomed to failure.

.

But what was it all about? How could such a work be published by an established label that the band also advertised as his great hope for young talent? To understand what you couldn't understand back then, you have to try to understand the band's self-image. Musically, Design The Skyline once called what they called their "music" as Mathcore in an interview.

Mathcore is a highly complex, almost academic sub-genre that emerged in the 90s. It gets rid of classic song structures and relies on complex timing schemes and deliberately inserted dissonances. The kind of rock music you'd rather think about than actually hear. Mathcore is a subgenre for freaks, for tech-savvy experimental instrumentalists who know exactly what they're doing when they do what sounds like noise to most people, but then follows an inner logic.

Design The Skyline were not talented enough to justify what they created as a wall of noise as Mathcore, and yet you still have to tell this story about this piece of music today, because this story is also a Piece of music history.

Design The Skyline came into the public eye at a very exciting time via a very exciting platform.

They were designed by Victory Records, a small hardcore label from Chicago that was initially founded by Tony Brummel and made a name for itself in the New York hardcore scene in the 1990s.

With bands like Bad Brains, Earthcrisis and Refused, they gained respect in the first decade of their existence.

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With bands like Taking Back Sunday, Hawthorne Heights, Thursday and Silverstein, all of which were discovered by Victory, they established the last great, guitar-influenced youth culture in the following decade and brought a new wave emo to a commercial boom in the mid-noughties -Years.

Victory, the small former hardcore label that still reminiscent of the (too) early deceased New York music legend Raybeez (Agnostic Front, Warzone) on every single album, earned millions.

Business behavior became more and more dubious.

And when the draft horses of the genre migrated to the big major labels because they no longer wanted to accept gag contracts from Brummel and the emo hype subsided a little anyway, the Victory CEO was desperately looking for the next hot thing.

And he came across Scene.

Scene was the natural continuation of emo, a hollow that reduced the genre to its superficialities.

Scene kids used emo fashion without adopting the underlying values.

And also Tokio Hotel say hello

You weren't tied to the first or second generation of emo bands, preferred to listen to everything between pop-punk, crunk, electro and screamo across the country, and looked like an emo with your skinny jeans, kohl under your eyes and teased hair. Update that ventured into Japanese cosplay culture.

The early Tokio Hotel, a scene band par excellene, send their regards.

From today's point of view, one could say with a lot of benevolence that Scene was the first subcultural anticipation of the current generation of Remix, which made use of a wide variety of pop-cultural building blocks and put them back together according to individual tastes.

Perhaps that was exactly what Victory Records mistakenly believed to be seeing in Design The Skyline: A band that was outwardly arrested yesterday, but already anticipated tomorrow's genre transgression.

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There's a lot to be said for taking apart what the band tried to do with their first song.

"Surrounded by Silence" can thus be read as the - theoretically - not unexciting attempt to fuse circulating trend building blocks that have emerged from the most varied of sub-genres.

The electronica parts suggest that an attempt was made to adapt elements of trancecore, for example.

In 2003 the English band Enter Shikari mixed trance with hardcore for the first time and made this new, sticky Red Bull fun fair rock clash at least halfway compatible with the masses.

Bands like Attack Attack!

in the USA or Eskimo Callboy in Germany picked up this sound and initially developed it further in the underground.

The effects and shock waves of this musical fusion are becoming more and more evident today and find their long way from the niche into the mainstream.

What was once trancecore will musically influence the 2020s more than anyone could have imagined at the beginning of the century.

Design The Skyline took up these elements even then and placed them next to hard shouting parts that were taken over from Grindcore, they linked them with pseudo-harmonic vocal parts, as is usual in Metalcore, and then structurally broke the whole construct up as far as it does in Mathcore was common in order to finally combine the whole thing with the look of the scene culture.

The problem: Every single component of this remix idea, which is not that bad in itself, was implemented so horribly diligently that the supposed visionary assembly of many rock'n'roll components became a kind of worst of everything. A musical and visual nightmare that caused so much ridicule that the band fortunately broke up a few years later out of shame. Unfortunately, Victory Records would never recover from this severe blow either.

The label did not find its way back to its old size and was finally sold and discontinued last year. What will remain is the rightly given predicate that Design The Skyline in their attempt to do something new only created a monster with their first single that will remain bigger than themselves for the rest of the time. Even if the song is in its original version was secretly removed from YouTube on his tenth birthday.