The famous punk rock concert, the Vans Warped Tour, has screamed its final song. After 23 years of touring the country all summer long, Founder Kevin Lyman has decided this summer is to be the last of the millennial rock festival.
Lyman took to Twitter to express his reason why.
“To be honest, I’m just tired” Lyman tweeted.
Since its beginning in 1995, many famous bands, such as Blink182, Green Day, pre-Fergie Black Eye Peas and Paramore, get their start by performing at Warped Tour. It has been a contributing factor of the 2000s music culture and millennial scene that many Harding students born in the 90s and early 2000s have grown-up with.
Senior Kayla Meeler, had the opportunity to attend Warped Tour this summer while doing her internship with To Write Love on Her Arms, a non-profit organization that helps people who struggle with depression, addictions, self-injury and suicide. The organization has partnered with Vans Warped Tour to have an awareness booth set up at the festival.
“Think of your prime-angst, seventh-grade peek, and Warped Tour is just the holy grail, the holy land, of all of the mainstream, punk rock bands. I’m really sad that it’s ending” Meeler said. “I think punk music is really hitting a low right now, it was really popular in culture for a while and now it’s kind of dipping and other music like electronic and alternative music is kind of taking over, … It will be sad for the people who have been going for years on years that they won’t have that to look forward to.”
Though Meeler feels differently about Lyman’s reasons for ending the festival, rumors are floating around that the end is being brought on by safety issues with no solutions to solve.
“A lot of the reason why Warped Tour is ending is because of the sexual assault issues that happen at concerts and especially at Warped Tour. There just wasn’t a lot of regulations or ways for that to be monitored because everything gets so wild and it just got to a point where the Warped Tour couldn’t really handle it” Meeler said.
When asked about how she felt about the end of Warped Tour, junior Paige Maxwell, who has been attending the festival for years, shared a different feeling about the end of it.
“I think everything ends in its time. I think it went out on a good note, and it’s better than it struggling to survive for a couple years before dying, though it was definitely a part of my childhood.”
While there are many mixed emotions about why the Vans Warped Tour is ending, it is clear that the punk rock touring festival has had an impact on millennials as they aged through the 2000s and will be missed as a new era of music festivals such as Bonnaroo and Coachella sing a new song.
