A note from ACW: If you’re sensitive about your shitty taste in music, you may want to skip this post. Thanks and smooches,
ACW
Last night I had the dubious distinction to participate in an ear-raping, most unfortunately on the receiving end. I know what you’re all thinking, but no, Common Wombat was nowhere to be found. (He was probably too busy trying to figure out how he could sodomize himself while documenting his daily posterior evacuation(s).) I actually volunteered to have my ears assaulted with some of the worst music that the Devil himself couldn’t have trumpeted out of his own fang-rimmed asshole. Let me start from the beginning.
A few weeks ago I got a call from a focus group company asking me to participate in a study about music. They asked me some preliminary questions about my listening habits, and as I’m wont to do when signing up for these surveys, I proceeded to lie my ass off. When asked about my favorite radio station, I said DC 101, when in reality, I haven’t listened to the radio in about 4 years. Don’t paint me as a snob quite yet. I haven’t listened to the radio only because my car and accompanying radio are so shitty that I even have trouble getting the AM stations. Though, now that I think about it, I never have trouble getting the bible-banging preachers with the mariachi music and accordions in the background. They must have a 1.21 jiggawatt antenna in every county in the contiguous United States.
But I digress. When they asked how much I listened to the radio each day, I said that I usually listened between 6 and 8 hours a day, a fabrication approaching a separate order of magnitude. This pleased them immensely, and I was quickly invited to the survey.
Weeks passed and last night I ventured to the survey location. Upon arrival I was given an envelope full of fairly standard Scantron forms, two tapes, and a Walkman. Then I was sat in a room with a few other test takers who were well underway. I popped in the first tape which was marked “Instructions” and within moments my brain was melting.
“Hello, and thank you for participating in our music survey, please follow all instructions closely as I read them aloud to you. When marking the form in front of you, be sure to use a number 2 pencil. Do not use a pen, marker, or your own feces. Don’t put the pencil in your nose or anus, or it may become lodged and irretrievable. Now look at the form. If you can’t identify the little squiggles beneath the empty dots, those are numbers. Welcome to counting!” Et cetera.
Essentially we were to listen to short audio clips of songs and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 whether we hated them or loved them. We could mark U if we were unfamiliar with the song, or T if we were tired of hearing it being played on the radio. So, for example, every time I heard a Pearl Jam song I marked a 1 and a T, because I fucking hate Pearl Jam, and even though I haven’t listened to the radio in 4 years, I still know that shitty band gets overplayed. Fucking hippies. You can take your goddamned Last fucking Kiss and drive off a cliff and die in a fire, Eddie Vedder. Yes, I’m talking DIRECTLY TO YOU.
The first few songs set my hopes unreasonably high. U2 kicked off the set, followed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and then followed by Sublime. I thought to myself, “Self, this isn’t going to be so bad after all.” Then the shit started flowing out of the headphones. You might think that’s a metaphor, but it’s not. The bands that were played were so bad that the audiowaves actually turned into some form of physical mammalian excretion and plopped out onto the desk in front of me. Three-hundred and fifty songs later, and it hadn’t really gotten any better, plus, I suspected I was only halfway through the survey. I was subjected to all of the bands below, multiple times, and I could feel my brain turning to mush. My only recourse was to give them all a 1 and a T. Even if I had never heard the song before, if I got tired of it in the less than five seconds that it played, it got a T.
Nickelback
Saliva
Three Doors Down
Creed
Buckcherry
Linkin Park
Deftones
Staind
Disturbed
Godsmack
Alice in Chains
Korn
Papa Roach
Fuel
Mudvayne
Seether
Drowning Pool
Slipknot
Chevelle
Days of the New
Limp Bizkit
As you can see, no one would have blamed me for killing myself. In fact, I probably would have been posthumously awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for lasting so long. The “artists” above (and I say “artist” in a way which categorizes the above bands with the likes of monkeys finger-painting and a fat guy leaving Cheeto skid-marks on the hallway to his fridge when his hands brush up against the walls) would of course be heaped with Grammys for their effort.
This is turning into a really long post, so I guess you’re going to have to wait until later for me to type the rest. If you don’t feel like waiting you can do two things. 1) You can throw a fit, and by the time you’re done the post should be up here. 2) You can build a time-machine (check with the bible-bangers for what appears to be an effective power source, fueled entirely by guilt and rage) and travel into the future to read the post right away. Whatever you do, I don’t care. And don’t try to defend the shitty aforementioned bands, because they’re shitty and you know it. It’s all the whine of emo with all the self-importance and pedantry of metal. Bravo.
