Check out this Wormrot video. You haven't seen hardcore until you've seen Wormrot, amirite? The most hardcore part of all: they are fully owned subsidiary of the Toyota corporation.

Part and parcel of the full scale Selling Out of America is the full scale Selling Out of the American Music Industry: in which the decline of the traditional album-centric model and the rise of free digital file sharing has driven desperate musicians into the welcoming arms of corporate sponsors, who are happy to toss them a few bucks in return for—nothing so gauche as a traditional commercial endorsement—only THEIR VERY SOULS.

Ben Sisario chronicles the marketing plan for Toyota's ugly-ass Scion cartruckvan things, which consists almost entirely of paying for underground bands to record music, put on concerts, go on tours, and all the other normal stuff that record companies used to do.

Over the years, Scion has paid for dozens of indie bands to make recordings and videos, and it has put on hundreds of small events like the Roxy show, which the company said cost about $10,000. In its search for ever more marginal forms of music, it supports heavy metal and garage-rock bands, as well as obscure dance subgenres like dubstep and moombahton (a style loosely related to reggaetón).

The idea, according to Jeri Yoshizu, Scion's manager of sales promotions and the architect of its cultural strategy, is to build good will through many small actions rather than a few large ones.

Scion has now built an incredible amount of good will in the moombahton and dubstep communities, which is maybe why Scion sales have been falling for years.

Every band that works for Toyota Scion and does not make a song entitled "Fuck the Ugly Ass Toyota Scion" is no longer hardcore. Sorry.

[NYT]