Worst of the 2000s: The Complete and Utter Goddamnable Castration of Mainstream Rock Music

Our ongoing look back at this dying decade’s dankest of dire nadirs.

Time was, when you added cellos, French horns, woodwinds and such to rock music, per se, you got In the Court of the Crimson King, Days of Future Passed, “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict“, and Rick Wakeman’s monstrous, uttterly mind-roasting King Arthur on Ice at Wembley Stadium thing.

Giants roamed the earth and stormed countless stages in those days. Giants with tubas and bassoons and, above all, engorged genitals aching to concoct racous reveries.

Then came the ’80s, when the presence of orchestral instruments produced Bourgeois fucking Tagg (two g’s, I made sure).

Hang on to you colostomy apparati and watch this video.

Seriously. Click play on that video. Watch the Bourgois Tagg. You’ve got to do it.

Then come back here and read more.

Homicidally nihilism-igniting and just plain old stinky, ain’t it?

Now I want you to open your iTunes and check for any of the following “artist” names: Andrew Bird, Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Spoon, Vampire Weekend, Sufjan Stevens, The Sea and Cake and, in fact, absolutely any other name that incorpates the word “sea”. Plus any others with any variation on the word “wolf” (except for the mighty Wolf Eyes, you know).

In your heart of hearts, you know that they—and ALL the other nattering nabobs of out-and-proud gonadlessness that you and David Cross stake your fancy-eyeglasses-wearing identity upon—are all Bourgeois Tagg.

One of my personal “Where were you when JFK got killed (the first time)?” moments was being at my parents’ house in 1988 when that Bourgeois Tagg video came whimpering onto MTV (why I wasn’t sticking strictly to Headbanger’s Ball and The Young Ones at the time, I don’t know).

But there it was: the ultimate grotesque desexualization of rock music.

The complete crotch-level Barbification of what were once fondly known as “ya-ya’s”, which could be gotten out to serve the purpose of getting off and which, via whatever penis-and-vagina-hating vortex into which Bourgeois Tagg had tapped, were simply gone-gone.

And now here we are. Bourgeois Tagg is all there is.

Now, by “all there is”, I mean in the mainstream sense.

I mean Bourgeois Tagg is what, if you are interested in rock music, you get relentlessly unwillingly prescribed and force-administered everywhere you attempt to go for a simple fix.

I mean that at the end of the ’70s, punk and New Wave momentarily took center-stage in the popular rock consciousness and at the end of the (wretched) ’80s, grunge loomed, and come the turn of the century, the hardcore propulsion and metallic kapow of Nirvana still resonated enough so that you could leave a local FM station on and sort of live with it for a while.

But who the fucking fuck is hearing The Walkmen or Animal Collective or The Ponys and feeling like, “Ah! This is what it means to be alive and have fists and lungs and guts to puke out and active gender-representational organs to engage! This… ROCKS!”?

“But, McBeardo,” comes the dribbling of some Pitchfork sympathizer who is unworthy to read this site, “I don’t hear Radiohead or TV on the Radio on the radio. Panda Bear and Grizzly Bear videos don’t get put into MTV rotation. So what are you foaming about?”

The answer is: I have no idea. I just run my mouth. Or, in this case, my fingers on a keyboardie.

I do know, however, that while waiting for the “Poker Face” video every morning on
VH1 for a while, I’d see “Sometime Around Midnight” by The Toxic Airborne Event and I psychotically detested it so much that, naturally, I researched every possible iota of information I could on the band, the song, and all the heinousness each hellaciously embodies.

Their moniker comes from some crime-against-human-eyes by professional human-eyeball-despiser Don DeLillo. For that alone, the entire human race should be sterilized.

And then hearing the croaking ersatz passion of the singer and the clutching, cloying ersatz intensity of the viola-players or what have you, and it becomes clear: rock is sunk. Forever.

NPR/Fine Wines/WholeFoods/Daily Show Nation really does run the show. Especially the musical portions of the proceedings.

And, yes, I am asserting that The Toxic Airborne Event is Iron and Wine is LCD Sound System is Modest Mouse is The Postal Service is Phoenix is The Shins is that Peter, Bjorn, and John abortion (especially that whistling part).

And it is ALL Bourgeois Tagg.

And if you do not live in fiery, all-encompassing, round-the-clock hatred of such abominableness, then I assert that you is my enemy.

So as The Manson Family, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the pre-“Pepper” Butthole Surfers, David Koresh, and the Sawyer clan in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre demonstrated with such spectacular results, the only sane response to unreasonable, untenable, and inescapable wrongness is secession.

Leave. Rock-qua-rock is uninhabitable. Leave. Anything supported by a puddle of nothingness called The Weakerthans simply can not stand.

(The irony is that just as capitol-R Rock has bifurcated its hormones, the girliest of Top 40 pop has erupted with mucho muscles and hyper-potent ass-stomping power unheard since the early ’70s. Pink, Avril, Katy, and the afore-worshipped Gaga, are the true—and sole—heiresses of Sweet, Badfinger, and The Raspberries.

What limp-loins among Morning Edition’s PSA-bumpers could lay claim to nearly so noble, so vital, so simply existent a title?)

So if you seek electric guitar salvation, come. Join us here in 21st Century Doomsville and Stoner Rock Canyon, where grunge continues to shed its punk DNA and evolve deeper and darker into pure pitch-black (Sabbath) glory.

The Devil’s Blood, Black Mountain, Jex Thoth, Dark Castle, Witchcraft, and Jucifer represent just the most recently canonized doom royalty.

Things are grand here in the spookhouse that Pentagram and Sleep and Electric Wizard and High on Fire and Jinx Dawson of Coven built.

NOT all are welcome. But if you’re this deep into McBeardo nonsense, you are.

So come already.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rectally assault a few Sleater-Kinney-nostalgists-turned-Fleet-Foxes-fabulists on the way out.

In fact, please do. Now. And hard. And permanently.

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• « Worst of the 2000s: Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS
• » The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81

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