let us dig up rock n' roll and pound it into dust

Have I mentioned that I fucking hate The Arctic Monkeys? "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" is the worst song in recorded music history. It's the sound of someone putting a shotgun to your ear and farting before pulling the trigger. It's everything that is inexcusably wrong with Western culture. It is big, dumb, absurd, simple, lumbering, rehashed, safe, and completely devoid of objective substance. It is what put Bush in the White House. It is what fuels Bill O'Reilly's popularity. It is the same sort of nebulous blandness that has carried a wholly unremarkable, yet simple-minded and didactic filmmaker like Steven Spielberg into the dubious annals of "cinematic greatness." It is what propelled Ashlee Simpson's career into the limelight. It is that nameless, shapeless force. It is not malevolence, but assuring and lukewarm. It is popular and sycophantic. It is mediocrity.

The first time I heard the song's opening riff I thought it was a Third Eye Blind b-side or perhaps a Stone Temple Pilots number I had blessedly managed to avoid in the band's heyday. Sadly, no. It's a "new" song by a horrid new band that no one will give two shits about exactly one year from now. Remember Jet? Not really? They were that shit band that more or less stole Iggy Pop's most mundane riffs and put 'em in a shit single that everyone lapped up. I used to think it couldn't get any worse than Jet and, Jesus MOTHERFUCKING Christ, was I ever wrong. The Arctic Monkeys, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bloc Party, The Like (like, the dumbest fucking band name ever, 4 realz), The Yeah Hot, The Yo Clap Unaboriginals, The Hot Shins, The Shills, The Sucka Yucka Low-Fi Monosyllabic Hunky Spunky Rock Explosion (With or Without Parenthetical Aside [Hello, McSweeneys]), The The The The The The Period, The Ohs, The Fucking Yeah Hot, The Sahara Hot Ligers, The Grandma's Broken Coccyxes, etc. are The Nickelbacks, Creeds, and Chicagos for The Cobra Snake set. That whole "three fucking chords, we're so like fucking like punk, man, shhhhhhit!" thing is like a paper cut on my scrotum. The whole thing just makes me wanna go all Tyler Durden. The quaint irony of all this safe rehashing of rock and roll's most tried n' true power chords is that if the first wave of rock and rollers like Chuck Berry or Little Richard just rode on the coattails of everyone who came before them, well, there'd be no fucking rock n' roll. Rock n' roll was interesting and exciting because it took things from the past and turned them into something new. Just like the blues and jazz and hip hop and electronica.

You can play three chords on yer crusty Strat and snarl into a microphone, wow, fucking swell, champ. So can Corky's kid sister. That's the easy part. The question is: do you have the set to say and do something new, live in the moment, and face the goddamned consequences? Good on you that you wanna be popular and "just get the music fucking out there, man." Yes, yes. Yawn, yawn. You and everyone else. Instead of pumping your fist into the air and rocking the fuck out on yer cool Jaguar, why don't you just stand there and stare the audience down for five minutes straight? Why don't you just be quiet for a moment instead of constantly being hot and entertaining? Why don't you aim a little lower? Fuck, why don't you fall flat on your face and fail? Failure is interesting. It's painful and it teaches you something about life. It's dangerous. And isn't rock n' roll supposed to be dangerous? Or are you all talk?