empty agreed; gatekeeping is in fact important and it’s why everything got so much worse after the 2020-2022 “screamo blowing up on TikTok hype train” shit, since nobody was being listened to when they said “hey this is some clout farming garbage and is a pale imitation of what emotive hardcore and screamo are as art forms”. some of the worst bands in the scene, contemporary (widowdusk, febuary, yaamc) or otherwise (old gray, merchant ships), are consistently the ones that get pushed in algorithmic forms because algorithms always strive to highlight the least challenging, easiest to consume content. this in turn leads to them being pushed in real scenes because now the scenes are populated largely by people who don’t think critically about the music, don’t view it as art, and just use it as something to do or as a way to be entertained without any reverence for the emotion, the technique, the intentionality, the challenging notions that extreme subgenres have always pushed the envelope on, usually as a side effect of being introduced to the art form via short form content and memes/social media/shitposting. it’s an inauthentic way to approach a medium grounded in authenticity, and it feels like at least a symptom of the larger problem of the death of artistic curiosity and the unwillingness to take art seriously. as such, you’re definitely right; the music will just keep getting worse and worse (as bands are either formed with the intent of being “popular and successful” or “just being a fun hobby”, both of which repulse me for different reasons), because that which acted as foundation for the genre and scenes for years gets discarded in favor of sounds, live performances, and overall interactions with bands that instead focus on being as hegemonic as possible so as to reach a mass audience. social media is but a vessel for it, but goodness is it an insidious one.
