The funny thing about the Warped Tour is that the older the tour gets (it’s now in its 17th year), the younger the crowds get.
Part of me wants to believe that’s how tour founder Kevin Lyman envisioned it. What started out as a traveling punk-rock festival is now a full blown carnival of genres.
Everything from rap (Top 40 hitmakers 3OH!3, nerd rapper MC Lars) to heavy metal (pop-hardcore hybrid a Day to Remember, the Devil Wears Prada, a sizable chunk of other bands on the tour) has found their niche on the touring summer camp.
This year’s road show may be tailored more toward heavier genres (with most of those bands taking prime spots on the biggest of the tour’s eight stages), old-schoolers still have a place to call home — like Warped staples Less Than Jake (who shaved a kid’s head into a mohawk during their set) and Unwritten Law (who played Warped during its first couple of years).
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2011.