In one of the more surprising heel turns of 2024, Finn McKenty, the voice behind the Punk Rock MBA YouTube channel, has formally announced that he has quit the content creation game, in an interview with metalcore TikTok personality Jesea Lee.
Watch the Jesea Lee’s interview below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyYJROxKvVs
The fine purveyors of metal and hardcore Lambgoat had this spot on analysis about Finn
McKenty grew up entrenched in the West Coast hardcore scene, making zines for local bands, tagging graffiti, and attending hardcore shows. He even has an 11-second SPAZZ song dedicated to him. But despite the grassroots aesthetics, this interview sees McKenty explain that he only did it for the views: “I don’t really have any interest in music. I was just doing it for the money, and I hit my financial goals.”
The Punk Rock MBA began as a marketing channel before quickly pivoting to covering popular alternative music, yet McKenty’s experience in marketing still finds its way in a few videos. His bookshelf (present in the background in many of his videos) is stacked with texts ranging from punk biographies to books on web analytics, two different sides of the cultural coin. McKenty makes this aspect of his life very apparent; while The Punk Rock MBA is a channel about music news, it also gives business and life advice through the lens of DIY culture.
On his channel, McKenty discussed popular topics in the alternative sphere: the rise and fall of Nu-Metal, the history of the Misfits, the top ten worst metal fandoms, etc. He saw an untapped market for videos on the burgeoning fandom of pop punk and metal music online. “Nobody made videos about Bring Me the Horizon, and I was like, this band is very very popular, people like them a lot,” he says with Lee, “but there was nobody making videos about the type of music that I have.” McKenty devoted the channel to being an archive of the ins and outs of punk and DIY culture.
However, despite these videos garnering a lot of devoted fans, many have criticized McKenty for his lackluster commentary on the subcultures, bands, and genres he was covering. He even admits to never hearing a System of a Down song, despite having a video dedicated to them. This was true for many bands he covered in his “Rise and Fall” series – “for a lot of them I just like, literally just read Wikipedia,” he says to Lee.