All Time Low's Jack Barakat at the Warped Tour in Cincinnati on Wednesday
Photo: Gil Kaufman/ MTV News

CINCINNATI — It takes more than a little Liberty-spike-melting rain — OK, an hour-plus torrential downpour with mega-flashes of lightning — to wash out the Vans Warped Tour '09. With a crowd undeterred by the weather, the 15th annual punk extravaganza rolled up on a steamy Wednesday afternoon to the Riverbend Amphitheatre with a typically eclectic mix of old-school and new-school punk, plenty of hardcore, tons of screamo, a dash of ska, a dusting of hip-hop and ... whatever crunkcore is.

As Warped — the longest-running summer festival tour in the U.S. — continues to evolve, one thing remains clear: No genre is safe. Where in years past screamo and metalcore bubbled up as the predominant sounds of the day, this summer it's hip-hop-inspired popcore's turn, with more than half a dozen bands at the Cincy stop mixing up beats, rock guitars, party-on rhymes and yes, even vocoders.

Among the most popular proponents of the day were Boulder, Colorado's 3OH!3, whose Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte bounced around the stage like 5-Hour Energy-fueled ping-pong balls, bashing out beat-heavy anthems like "Don't Trust Me" and "Holler Til You Pass Out."

Dallas' Forever the Sickest Kids took a slightly different tack, dropping in some rap breakdowns and glitchy keyboard bits into a set that would have made crunk-rock king Lil Jon proud. Mixing David Lee Roth-style campy rock with punk attitude and a plea for bras that garnered a barrage of polka-dotted tops, singer Jonathan Cook proudly preened around the stage with his blinged-out FTSK-emblazoned microphone stand during hyped songs like "Whoa Oh! (Me vs. Everyone)" and their signature tune, "She's a Lady."

Among the Warped veterans along for the ride again were ominous Tampa punk metalers Underoath, who drew a huge throng of onstage musical admirers as they pummeled the crowd in the main pavilion with fist-pumpers like "Drowning in My Sleep." Another old skull act — making their sixth tour of duty — was political thrashers Bad Religion, who busted out nuggets like the galloping "I Want to Conquer the World" to a weary late-afternoon crowd.

Unlike last summer, when now-mega Katy Perry and ex-boyfriend Travis McCoy of the Gym Class Heroes brought some pop smarts to the tour, the head-bobbing was a bit harder to find this time around. There was the ska bop of Big D and the Kids Table, complete with two shimmying backup singers and a three-piece horn section, and the straight-ahead Abercrombie & Fitch pop-punk of All Time Low. The Maryland quartet drew the biggest crowd of the day in the main pavilion, which was packed 6,000-strong, as the floorboards up front literally bounced up and down during sugary, pogoing shout-alongs like "Lost in Stereo." Elsewhere, the White Tie Affair mixed in some vocoder effects on "Take It Home," the Dirty Heads paid tribute to the white-guy stoner reggae of Sublime, and Utah group Meg & Dia, one of the only female-fronted acts on the day's roster, mellowed things out with some sensitive pop.

There were a few musical palette cleansers among the 60-band onslaught of mostly aggro vocalists playing to the near sell-out crowd of 12,000-plus, including second-generation country outlaw Shooter Jennings. The son of Waylon started off by kicking it "Sweet Home Alabama"-style on straw-chawin' opener "Gone to Carolina." While his laid-back good ol' boy country/ metal mash-up didn't quite fit the mix on the Skullcandy stage — where legendary Fishbone frontman Angelo Moore served as the MC and lent a sax solo to "Radio Goes Dead" — it's hard to argue with a dude who has a revolver tattooed on his forearm and an accompanying bullet on the web of his hand.

Another guy who seemed wrong to mess with was Gallows lead singer Frank Carter, who played his English old-school hardcore band's entire set in the middle of a giant circle pit. As the skies cracked open and rain flooded the parking lot, Carter and guitarist Stephen Carter stood their ground despite microphone shorts and gigantic lightning flashes, screaming the lyrics along with drenched, body-slapping, slipping-down fans.

Oh, right, and there was the crunkcore. It's easy to poke fun at Albuquerque's brokeNCYDE and their punk-hop mash-ups, which is why so many people do. With strip-club-flossin' songs like "Freaxx," "Schizophrenia" and "Get Crunk!," their mix of suburban mall-rat rap and gangsta goofiness has led to questions about whether their four MCs and a click-track shtick even belongs on the tour. But here are two things: a) they drew a gigantic crowd to the smallest stage on the concourse, b) when I heard that throng shouting the refrain from the song "Sex Toyz," I knew it was time to go home.

• Warped Tour 2009 In Cincinnati

• All Time Low
• 3Oh!3
• Underoath
• Forever The Sickest Kids

Photo: Getty Images/ Bryan Bedder

Less than three weeks after Gym Class Heroes frontman Travis McCoy battled a fan at a Warped Tour stop in Missouri, video of another ugly incident — this one involving a security guard and two female fans in Detroit that took place on Friday — has surfaced, leaving another mark on what has certainly been a trying summer for the long-running punk fest.

In the video, which was shot by Forever the Sickest Kids frontman Jonathan Cook, a security guard at Detroit's Comerica Park is seen tussling with a pair of female Warped attendees, one of whom is shoved to the ground. Soon, additional security guards converge on the scene and restrain one of the females, while the one who was shoved to the ground gets back up and begins hitting the security guard. The guard responds by hitting her several times in the face.

Cook posted the video on YouTube the following day, and it's been viewed more than 19,000 times since, drawing strong reactions from horrified Warped fans. Cook also wrote a blog about the incident on his MySpace page, explaining that what is shown in the clip is only a small part of what really happened during the fight.

"I was walking with my [tour manager] after playing in Detroit, and I saw this security guard with two handfuls of this girl's hair, dragging her out and through a break in the fence no wider than a foot and a half, so I wanted to get that on video," Cook wrote. "Well, that's when he stood her up and pushed her out and her friend lunged at him and he hit her. Well, he hit her so hard her eye swelled shut and the Detroit Tigers' paramedics came and got all three of them.

"The security guard that hit the girl and pulled the other one out told me these girls were in the front row waiting for a band to come onstage, and one of the girls elbowed a chick in the face. ... Security asked her to leave, and when she wouldn't, three female security guards had to escort her out, but she was being violent with them. That's when the males stepped in," the post continued. "The male security guard then grabbed her by her hair and drug her out across concrete then threw her out literally. I didn't see the first part of this story and I am only relaying what the security guard told me. I started filming because of the hair-pulling. It was so brutal to watch. The video does not do justice to how hard this girl was hit."

Cook went on to write that "the girl got off [scot-free] and the security guard was since arrested." (A spokesperson for Forever the Sickest Kids' label, Universal, told MTV News that Cook was "unavailable" for further comment on the video or the incident.)

According to Warped Tour organizer Kevin Lyman, that wasn't the case. "The incident you're referring to involved venue security. The tape was delivered to the police, and the girl's mother did not press charges. This is a local security company and police issue at this point," he wrote in an e-mail to MTV News. "The issue in [Missouri] was between a Gym Class Heroes security guard and a heckling fan. The GCH security guard was dismissed immediately by Crush Management and sent home the next day. We travel with three full-time security staffers who coordinate with the local security companies."

Calls to Comerica Park's director of security were not returned, and the head of the park's event operations office told MTV News that she would not be able to comment on the Warped incident. Calls to the Detroit Police Department's public information officer also went unanswered.

• Forever The Sickest Kids