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Choose Your Own Adventure #296: Papa Roach
You are in a rap-rock band from California. You hit it big in 2000 with your multi-platinum album Infest, and its smash single, “Last Resort,” but your 2002 follow-up, lovehatetragedy, tanked amid the decline and fall of nü-metal. You want to keep the band together, but where do you go from here?
Choose: A. Keep putting out rap-rock records and playing to the same 35 fans at bowling-alley bars across America; B. Change your musical style and image (à la Kid Rock’s embrace of Southern-fried country rock) in the hopes of finding a new audience; C. Leak a three-minute sex video in a desperate attempt to stay in the public eye, in the process becoming such a lame has-been that even The Surreal Life won’t touch you.
You chose B. Congratulations! By slapping on a ton of eyeliner, singing instead of rapping, and crafting the kind of melodic, emo-ish hard-rock songs that get on the radio and MTV these days, you managed to revive your career — your latest album, Getting Away With Murder, is selling bunches, and you’re filling respectable-size venues on tour. Way to go!
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