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Cute Is What We Aim For: The Past Sure Is Tense
Posted by Steven Robertshaw on 21-Jun-07 @ 05:28 PM|
CUTE IS WHAT WE AIM FOR are poised to be emo's next great success story. The real challenge is if they'll be able to actually sit back and enjoy the ride. Story: Trevor Kelley In East Amherst, New York, it's the kind of day that the people in city council preserve on film for those brochures that they give out to potential new residents. Despite the fact that it's January, there's not a flake of snow on the ground or a gray cloud in the sky. The air is crisp and the sun is shining. As he steers his Honda Element around these quiet streets, Cute Is What We Aim For frontman Shaant Hacikyan gazes at the scenery through his windshield, takes a moment to revel at its beauty. Then he resumes talking about how he thinks everyone in the world hates him. The other day, Hacikyan read a nasty comment someone wrote about his band on some website and it's been eating at him ever since. Apparently, this happens a lot with the 20-year-old singer. "People I know will straight up be, like, 'You can't look at those sites,'" he says, before admitting that, of course, he almost always does. "But it bums me out." For Hacikyan-whose band has made as many fans in the past year as it has detractors-such trash-talking is nothing new, but it still gets to him. The minute anything is posted about Cute online, he's already checked it on his PowerBook and the second someone slams the group, he's probably read that, too. "You know what sucks?" he asks. "You'll have a good post, then there'll be that one [negative remark], and I'll shut off my computer and think about it for three days and analyze every last bit." Such negativity has always had this gnawing effect on him. As he drives around the suburbs of Buffalo this afternoon, Hacikyan points out one of his old high schools, Williamsville North, located on a humdrum suburban corner. While attending Williamsville, Hacikyan often told his classmates about his musical aspirations; he even told a certain teacher. Then one day, said teacher came to class and gave Hacikyan a folded-up piece of paper. When Hacikyan un-creased it, he realized it was a picture of a once-popular star who is now positively tawdry. As he stared at the shot of this douche bag with his frosted tips and bleached smile, Hacikyan asked his instructor why she would ever think to give him such a thing. Her response: "Because that's as close as you'll ever get." It's been two years since Hacikyan graduated from Williamsville. In the time since, Cute Is What We Aim For have hit the proverbial big time on the strength of The Same Old Blood Rush With A New Touch, their full-length debut. When that album was quietly released last June, it stunned the music industry by selling 14,000 copies in its first week alone. Today, Blood Rush has surpassed well over 100,000 copies, making Hacikyan's band one of the most promising of 2007. In the past few years, only one other act signed to Cute's label, Fueled By Ramen, have taken off as quickly, and that band is Panic! At The Disco. When you take into consideration that Cute sold around 4,000 more copies in their first week than Panic!'s debut, you do have to wonder: Could it happen all over again? "We do have a big year planned," responds label chief John Janick. "It could be another Panic! if things click the way we hope they will." In the meantime, Cute, like their labelmates, will probably have to endure countless online jabs about how they don't deserve to be at the level they are now. Hacikyan and his bandmates-guitarist Jeff Czum, drummer Tom Falcone and the bassist at the time of Blood Rush's recording, Fred Cimato-know that they emerged from a world where bands are supposed to spend years traveling in a rickety van and sleeping on strangers' floors before they get famous. And they know that's not how it worked out for their band. However, look closer at their story, past all the gossip and drama surrounding them, and it becomes clear that Cute Is What We Aim For had to struggle all the same. Upon forming Cute Is What We Aim For in early 2005, Hacikyan had already gone through some struggles of his own. His parents separated when he was four, causing him to bounce between his dad's home in East Amherst and his mom's farm in Westfield, a rural town in upstate New York. He also lived in Virginia for a brief period and, though he hates to admit it now, was thrown out of several different schools before he graduated from Williamsville in 2004. By his early teens, Hacikyan had also sunk into a deep depression and began drinking not only with older friends, but also when no one else was around. When talking about this today, Hacikyan is careful not to glamorize his bouts with the bottle, but one incident he doesn't mind revisiting is the time he was busted for hitchhiking in Canada, where he'd been sent to attend boarding school. "It was just stupid," he says. "I got way too wasted and hitchhiked with a customs officer back to boarding school. I had no idea he was a customs officer. I was running down the road, wasted, waving my arms." Hacikyan left Canada shortly thereafter and returned to his dad's place, where he gave up drinking for good. "On June 21, 2003, I stopped drinking, cold turkey," he says proudly. "I haven't taken a sip since." Shortly before getting sober, Hacikyan joined Czum in his first band, the ska act Cherry Bing. For the next two years, the pair played around the greater Buffalo area. By the fall of 2004, however, Hacikyan realized that jamming onstage with a bunch of Catch 22 fans wasn't for him, and soon called the band's drummer, Adam Schroeder, to announce that he was leaving the group. Originally, Schroeder took the news well. But before Cherry Bing played their final show that December, Schroeder and a few other members of the band had a change of heart. "We were completely cool," Hacikyan recalls, "then once we played our last show together, they flipped out. They brought baseball bats. They hated my guts." Hacikyan recruited Czum shortly after and formed Cute Is What We Aim For along with Cimato, Cimato's cousin Falcone and Mike Williams, a friend of theirs who very briefly sat in on keyboards. Within months, the five of them began writing catchy emo-pop songs about girls-many inspired by a year-long relationship that Hacikyan had with a 20-something single mother-and before they knew it, Fueled By Ramen's Janick approached them about putting out their first record. It was also at this point that the online haters who would later become so synonymous with the group began to emerge. The day before giving AP a guided tour of Buffalo, Hacikyan has his bandmates over to his father's small, yet tastefully furnished home. New bassist Jack Marin, who replaced Cimato last summer, is in town from Chicago. After talking about the band's history for a spell, he asks if anyone saw the news item that ran about Cute on AbsolutePunk.net earlier in the morning. "It got posted that us and Paramore got confirmed for Warped Tour," Marin says, "and the one line that got me was, 'So much for them not having big heads.'" He laughs. "Dude, for being on Warped Tour?" Though Hacikyan cracks a smile, he admits that this sort of online bullying "kills" him. A couple years ago, he was seeing a psychologist on a regular basis, and he still owns up to having issues when it comes to self-confidence and anxiety. "I think the [other] guys can relax and separate from the band," Hacikyan says, "but no matter what, I can't break away from it. I'm terrified. I freak out about it. "And that's what really gets me down," he admits. "I can hear a lot of compliments and amazing things that I never thought that anyone would say about us, but no matter how much good [stuff I hear], one bad comment can make me spiral." You name it, Shaant Hacikyan worries about it. He worries that his band's name won't be taken seriously. He worries that he swears too much and that he should have gone to college. He worries about, well, everything, even his often-mocked hairdo, which he says he wears to cover up his pimples (which is something he worries about, as well). "Honestly," Hacikyan says the next day while eating lunch at a dumpy fast food restaurant, "I don't have this hair because I think it's the coolest thing in the world. I have it because I'm 20 and I still have acne." Want the rest of the story? Pick up AP issue No. 225. |
