Greenville Scene

The Ten Mile MySpace Challenge
by: Keith Groover

This is what I did: I went to this page on Myspace and did a search for any band within ten miles of my zip code, which is 29607. You’ll notice that there are ten bands per page, and 100 pages listed. That’s 1000 bands. So, I took 100 or so bands, listened to the first song they had listed, and put them into my Excel spreadsheet. These are not exhaustive reviews of an entire band’s work, they’re based off of listening to one song. I always listened to the entire song, and tried to keep an open mind. As a big surprise to me, my highest rated musician in this first batch is a white Christian rapper. However, his songs really hit me in a way that no one else’s quite did. On the opposite end are some high school kids with no discernible talent. In between are some really great bands (Lecherous Noctourne), some niche bands (Infiltrados), and then there’s Claudia. Yikes.

Here’s sort of a rough key of how I rated the bands:

10 - Perfect.
9 - Excellent. I strongly recommend, even to people who don’t like the genre.
8 - Really good, with excellent production, songwriting, and performance. Definitely check these guys out.
7 - Solid, stuff that I liked, but not quite as good as the eights
6 - Well done, but with some untapped potential
5 - Decent, but on the high side of amateur
4 - Possibilities exist to be good, but they aren’t readily apparent
3 - Nothing much going on
2 - Bad
1 - Bad, but worse

Here are the first fifty. Enjoy!