You're Making Me Hate You (24 page)

Now for that “who wrote it” question. I’ve heard that six to ten people can be known to write for the likes of Katy Perry, Rihanna, or Miley Cyrus. That’s six to ten people sitting in a room, “brainstorming.” That’s three to five pairs of human
beings putting their heads together, going, “We need to recycle some of our crappiest hooks so they appear relevant!” I may be wrong, but these
might
be the same six to ten people who write for
all
of these sawed-off, hack-star, self-important pieces of shit, and
that
might be why EVERY SHITTY FuckING POP SONG THAT HAS COME OUT IN THE LAST SIX YEARS ALL SOUNDS LIKE THE SAME FuckING SONG OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND FuckING OVER OH MY GOD MY CAPS COME OFF SOMEONE HIT MY MEDIC-ALERT BUTTON THE DAMN CAPS COME OFF …

That’s better. Thank you.

Look at the number of people it takes to come up with those songs, and they’re not even in the band, if those tool bags have bands. It took six to ten people to write those songs? Are you kidding me? Guess what? I’m fairly certain Dave Grohl wrote “Everlong” by himself. I’m quite sure Ray Lamontagne wrote “Burn” by himself (although his newer stuff has gotten quite Coachella). I wrote “Through Glass” by myself. Freddie Mercury envisioned “Bohemian Rhapsody” on his own. Speaking from experience, I know there’s a wonderful dynamic that comes from writing in a group. But that dynamic specifically comes from writing as a group who
plays
together, who performs together, who runs the risks together. That’s how you write a song. That’s how you find a hit. That’s how you make real music … not crammed in someone’s conference room spit-balling buzzwords you feel the kids will gravitate toward “especially in the summer!” I swear, man. It’s enough to make me want to pull my own head off and kick it across the street.

This shit’s real to me. This isn’t funny anymore. Well, you may be laughing right
now
, but that’s because sometimes I’m hilarious when my temper’s up. That’s as may be, but I’m still upset. You see, music used to be the only real thing there was out
there to me. You had to be
good
at it to make it, or you had to at least
look
good sounding bad, which could be equally awesome. Now? It doesn’t matter. People are predisposed to an amount of success before they even hit the street, depending on how much money the labels sink into you. There are no real homegrown heroes anymore. There aren’t even any real overnight success stories anymore. Every unit is a calculation, and every release is a way to set up their next release. Everything in between is a fucking lie. Unless the Uppers have a monetary confidence in you, you could find yourself getting shelved in exchange for moving more backing for the next bout of One Direction pubescent crotch rot.

Honestly, I have to take that back. There’s been one breakout sensation in the last five years that took the entire world by storm. Anybody who says they never hummed “Gangnam Style” is a motherfucking liar. Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like Psy came out of nowhere and, through the power of YouTube, basically made everyone look like fucking tossers. Maybe it’s that fact that made me love that song … well, the first million times my son played it for me, anyway. After that, even I wanted that bastard to go away. But it
did
prove to me that the real spirit of musical discovery is still out there. YouTube and Spotify allow people to research the music without stealing it and robbing us tuneheads of careers. The Internet is the word on the street, the lights of the city, and the will of the people all blended together with pop-up porn and disabled cookies. Then again, until recently I had no idea who the fuck this Shawn Mendes kid is; now my niece and her friends won’t shut up about him. It makes me want to take tiny puppies to get their ears pierced. Honestly, I don’t know the kid, but if Beiber is any indication of what history has in store, I’m looking forward to hating his fucking guts in the future.

By the way …

Fall Out Boy Will Save Rock ’n’ Roll
.

Eat shit and fucking die, Fall Out Boy.

Folks, it’s really the commercials that are killing me.

I curse and flip off my TV more now than when I did when I was younger. If I had a cane, I’d be whipping it through the air like a polo player on PBR. As of this writing, there is a commercial that haunts me, taunts me, and flaunts itself in my own house (the house I PAY THE BILLS for … sorry, totally in character there …). I get up in the morning, and as soon as I mash the buttons on the remote control, within minutes I am assaulted by the banal bullets of its condescension. I’m starting to hear the fucking thing in my dreams—I swear I woke up and I’d dug my nails into my palms. It’s lower-case music for a higher clientele, seeing as weed is fast becoming fairly legal in this country. I get it: know your demographic, but holy mother of bastards, I hate it with a deep passion.

“S, apostrophe, M-O-R-E … S’more for you and S’more for me …”

Those lyrics make me want to kill penguins in front of children.

Dairy Queen has lost my business for
life
all because of that bearded hippie and his frickin’ acoustic sing-along from hell. Not since “Kumbaya” and “The Hokey Pokey” has a song made my blood curdle and my veins scream for vengeance. I thought we’d crossed the threshold of common decency when the Honey Nut Cheerios bee started doing parodies of hip-hop songs (“Hey … Must be the
honey
!” Fuck my life …). But the hack in the DQ commercial that looks like a hipster lumberjack makes me ashamed to tell people I can play an acoustic guitar. The fact that there are children in that ad—CHILDREN, PEOPLE! REAL, IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN!—makes me want
to call DHS and report the director and all the people involved with R&D at that company for endangerment. Goddamnit, this is AMERICA! I want JUSTICE!

I really mean that. People in commercials should be chemically castrated.

Between Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen making a song together that is so sugary sweet your teeth fall out when you listen to it too often and the propensity for well-established bands to abandon their edgy rock roots in favor of music that might sell to the dilapidated masses temporarily obsessed with dance elements, you’ll understand my murderous rage at the moment. Things just aren’t looking better. Things don’t sound better. There are moments during the day when I have an uncontrollable urge to smash every instrument within arm’s reach, like Bluto in a toga hopped up on hops, barley, and indignation. If the world’s going to end someday, I was kind of hoping the soundtrack wouldn’t suck so fucking bad. But when the melodies are electronically corrected and the humanity has been sucked clean, it makes me beg for the apocalypse. It’s shit like this that makes me monitor my kids’ listening habits. It’s shit like this that makes me seriously consider early retirement.

But I have a better idea …

I’m going to start a new band.

We’re going to be called the Buseys. It’ll be me and four other people with huge necks. We’re going to dress in flannel shirts, corduroy pants, and workman’s boots. We’re going to grow our beards out to ridiculous proportions and weave glittery beads into our eyebrows. When we play live, we’ll wear helmets of all kinds: batting helmets, football helmets, motorcycle helmets—almost anything with a chinstrap. We’ll all have mouthpieces like boxers, and we won’t take them out for the entire show—we’ll sing through them, we’ll spit through them, we’ll talk to
the audience through them, and so forth. During songs we’ll head-butt each other furiously. Every song will be pissed off punk rock, started with a nearly unintelligible “1–2-3–4-1–2-3–4!” When we go into the studio, we’ll wear the helmets and use the mouthpieces. When we do photo shoots, we’ll use the helmets and wear the mouthpieces. We won’t sell T-shirts at our shows; we’ll only sell (wait for it …) helmets and mouthpieces.

It’ll be the most ludicrous idea the world has ever seen. But it’s
just dumb enough
that the Buseys will end up conquering the entire music industry. Our “albums”—incoherent garbles of noise because we record with the mouthpieces and head-butt while we’re tracking—will go triple-platinum in a world where the download is still king. Grammies will be laid at our doorsteps, mainly because the Grammy committees are too terrified to invite us to the ceremonies. We’ll provide songs for Bond movies, Marvel movies, Transformer movies, Cameron Diaz movies … The world will be our oyster and we’ll eat it with vinegar and salt. Just when we think we’ve gone as far as we possibly could go, we’ll record a covers EP on the space station, play a “one-night-only” gig on the moon … then slip back into the shadows like nothing ever happened.

At least one of the Buseys will marry a Kardashian—we can’t all be geniuses. Another will use his infamy to run for the US Senate. Still another will parlay the money he’s made into a pyramid scheme aimed directly at rich people, aggravating the world economy with a savage burn on the upper 1 percent’s infrastructure. One will die after a night spent doing tequila shots laced with blowfish poison. I will simply become a carney, pulling levers on rickety rides and challenging out-of-towners to “hit the bull’s eye and win the big-ass stuffed animal, cocksucker!” I’ll deny ever being in the band, and I’ll take to wearing an eye patch to avoid any and all conversations about my “former
group.” Then, in forty years, we’ll do a Buseys reunion, and one of us will have a stroke onstage in mid-head-butt during our hit single “NNNHHHNNNMMMET.” And that will mark the end of an idea I strictly put together as a joke to protest shitty music.

Stranger things have happened.

Hollywood Undead started out as a couple of guys messing around on MySpace. They’re huge now. SOD began as a one-off; now they’re revered across the metal landscape. If you think the Buseys couldn’t take the world by its scrotum and tear it off while screaming in its big dumb face, you have no real clue as to what this planet finds fascinating at times. From the Gorillas to Death Klok, sometimes crazy is ingenious. Sometimes it takes something so left of center to kick the culture right in its “pop.” It doesn’t matter whether the band is a figment of someone’s deranged imagination, not even human, or literally two-dimensional; if the people get their energies out for it, you can bet it’ll be an overnight sensation. Just look at Babymetal. If it weren’t so cute and catchy, I’d be scared to death.

The fact of the matter is that it really doesn’t matter whether your music is shit (which it is). It simply doesn’t matter whether the artists you worship are fucking numb in the skull (which they are). It doesn’t matter that the people you put on pedestals—musical, political, pop star, rock star, movie star, or otherwise—aren’t worth the prestige they’re printed on most of the time (ditto totes). Kill squads are capital, black bags bulging with secret pockets perpetually empty … and all we’re doing is humming along, too distracted by the pretty colors to shut our eyes because if we did, we’d realize none of the music is in tune or on key. We’d realize our background noise is a fucking thunderous fart with a funky beat. James Brown is rolling over in his grave, and he ain’t feeling good about it.

How do you explain to a kid that a band isn’t one dude with a
laptop and an external aux cord? Where do you possibly begin to try to fan out the facts for a child who has seen nothing but
Yo Gabba Gabba
and
Fresh Beat Bands
flailing around in major keys, singing about the most inane shit ever. Yes, yes, I know: nice melodies and simple messages help children learn to love music. And yet those responsible for the din start “real” bands, bands that are five fucking minutes old, with essentially the same children’s garbage tunage, and they win a Grammy for Best Rock Album—that would be the band Fun again. That’s just no fun at all.

My biggest fear is that this isn’t a passing fad; it’s just the beginning. Someday, when I’m even older than I am now (shut it …), I’ll be putting on work slacks to go out and water my petunias in the afternoon when suddenly a car full of young ruffians will roll by, with windows tinted too dark and the bass pumped too loud, playing noise that is passing for popular exciting music. I’ll listen for a second, and with my uncanny ability to pick shit apart at a moment’s notice, I’ll realize with real panic that what I’m hearing is several layers of auto-tuned farts, backed by a collage of tubas, mouth harps, and jazz guitars. When the farts aren’t enough, 808s will blow the Brown Sound into my neighborhood with such violence that the people next door will spontaneously combust in an explosion of diarrhea and polyester pantsuits. As the crap rolls out of earshot, I’ll lean against my Tempur-Pedic adjustable bed and stare out the window, wondering what in the sheer silky fuck has happened to the population’s hearing. I’ll put on my cowhide gloves, head into the garden, and begin my work, only to find myself humming that fart song without even knowing it. The lesson here is simple: catchy is catchy, but there’s still no accounting for taste. It’s always the songs you hate the most that get stuck in your head all the damn time, which sucks because the only way to get
it out is to listen to it, and that ain’t fucking happening. You just have to grit your teeth and get through it.

Music, TV, movies, Internet, books (those are what you download on your Kindle Fires, kids)—everywhere you look it’s like entertainment is falling down under the weight of its own trash. I’ll paraphrase Michael Bay, who summed it up best when he told his critics he didn’t give a shit what they thought of his latest
Transformers
installment because, “You’re all going to see it anyway.” He was right; it was the first film of 2014 to cross the $100 million mark in its first weekend in the United States. Bay could keep making these fucking flicks until he has his body frozen to outlive the future. It won’t make any difference. The lemmings are going to head for the cliff with nothing on their minds other than feeling the whoosh of the wind cross their fuzzy faces as they plummet toward the canyon floor. That’s us: we’re the lemmings. Depending on how you look at it, our sense of entertainment is either the wind in our faces or the ground pushing our faces back through our skulls. Either way, we’re really fucked.