"Hollywood Undead" are actually worse than "Good Charlotte..."
[Disclaimer: As with pretty much everything else on this website, this has nothing whatsoever to do with professional wrestling]
There are times in life when you think you’ve got everything figured out, and you feel like you’ve really got a handle on the way the world works…and then something comes along that totally blindsides you, and leaves you shaken and unsure.
Case in point: A band called “Hollywood Undead.” I’ve only very recently come to be aware of them, as I try to remain as untouched by the world of pop culture as humanly possible. Living as a recluse in my self-imposed exile here in the arctic tundra of Wisconsin, I do all that I can to limit my knowledge of ‘what the kids are up to these days.’ Frankly, I just don’t want to know. Based on the glimpses of youth culture I observe when I go to check my mail or drive down the street, I’m going to assume it’s probably sodomy. Less said the better. Sadly, as hard as I try, it’s impossible to live completely in my blissful ignorance with regard to the ‘MySpace generation,’ given my financial limitations. I don’t have the money to hire anyone to go run errands and get groceries for me, so every once in a while, I’m grudgingly forced to go out into the world and try to tiptoe through the minefield of douchebaggery without becoming a casualty. Unfortunately, as I’ve noticed in recent years, the world seems to be more and more intent on bombarding you with its omni-present plague of godawful music and smug celebrity idol-worship. You can’t even stand at a gas pump anymore without ‘Hit Radio’ blaring over the loudspeaker, and the other day at my favorite liquor store, the East Asian owner had switched the channel from his usual diet of Bollywood musicals to Celebrity Rehab. Ugh.
Anyway, I was driving uptown on one of my forced outings the other day, and as I was switching the CD out, I was bombarded by an auditory assault of pure drivel the likes of which I could never have imagined. As I hastily attempted to insert a new album, the worst possible thing happened…like going into shock when staring at the gruesome sight of a loved one’s brutal murder scene (I like this analogy because we can all relate to it), I became hypnotized by how offensively terrible this ‘music’ was. I was unable to do anything but recoil in horror, mouth agape, at the fact that a radio station would actually play such trash. Mercifully, the ‘song’ ended, and the horrible dullard of a disc jockey informed me that I had just listened to “‘No. 5, the hit single by MySpace sensation, ‘The Hollywood Undead!’”
I had to pull over. I couldn’t breathe. I nearly careened into one of the many glaciers that tower above the roadside here like frozen canyon walls. Could this be? Was there actually a band out there who had achieved success that was this awful? I had felt so sure in my firmly-held belief that ‘Good Charlotte’ was the lowest that the music industry could sink…My world was turned upside-down. Downing a tall boy of Old Style to steady my nerves, I pulled back onto the roadway to finish my errands. When I returned home, I immediately locked all of my doors and checked to see that my windows were closed tightly, attempting to avoid any further contamination by the horrors of the modern world. I then huddled under a blanket and turned up Tom Waits so loud that I couldn’t hear the neighbors pounding on the walls and demanding I keep it down, lest they call the cops.
After a few days of much-needed recovery for my psyche, I decided to confront this head-on. Surely I must have been in an over-sensitive mood at the time…They’d never let something this utterly crap on the radio, would they? I’ve never been one to overestimate the lowest common denominator, but this just seemed too far. I had to know. I made a bold move: turning on the internet, I navigated to that marvel of modern over-sharing, YouTube, and typed in ‘Hollywood Undead.’
I couldn’t believe what horrors lay in store. Not only did this band have one terrible song (which was actually worse than I remembered, upon closer inspection), but it seemed they had a whole slew of shockingly-bad emo-rap-douchebag-poseury. Let’s examine a sample lyric from their brilliant anthem, “Everywhere I go”:
Everywhere I Go, Bitches always know That Charlie Scene has got a weenie that he loves to show(bitch) Everywhere I Go, Bitches always know That Charlie Scene has got a weenie that he loves to show
[So good, it had to be repeated, apparently…]
Wake up Grab beer Grab rear Shave beard Put on some scene gear Gotta get drunk before my mom wakes up Break-up with my girlfriend so I can bang sluts I'm undead, unfed Been sleeping on bunk beds Since ten So if I don't booze it, I'm gonna lose it Everybody get to it, do it, get ruined
GODFUCKINGDAMN. That is some deep shit. And such clever rhymes.
Listen, I don’t think I’m much of a music snob. I have, over the years, enjoyed some really terrible stuff…I own “Totally Krossed Out,” and I’ve been known to rock some “Welcome To the Real World” from time-to-time…but this just goes too far.
It’s not that I’m offended by any of the content, I’m just offended by the blatant stupidity of the content, and more so the practitioners. Firstly, the masks bother me, in that they’ll inevitably draw comparisons to Slipknot. Now, the ‘gimmick’ aspect of Slipknot—while effective in initially drawing attention to the band—has long been my least favorite aspect of them. They make quality music, and I feel that the masks/jumpsuits business detracts from that, and pushes them much further toward the ‘guilty pleasure’ category than they have any need to be from a musical standpoint.
That aside, the pompous, swaggering, take-themselves-far-too-seriously cunts in “Hollywood Undead” walk around sporting some of the most abrasive frat-boy braggadocio, white trash wiggardliness (in the vein of Motocross bikers), and absolutely some of the worst SoCal suburban street trash “bro-core” lyrics I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life. And apparently one of them screwed my mom. How wonderfully original.
It’s like someone took the Kottonmouth Kings, stripped away all of the [absolutely essential] self-deprecating silliness of their shtick, and combined them with the terrible-and-all-too-prevalent myth that in the world of today’s youth culture, the tatted-up, broad-brim-hatted skater kids are legitimate tough guys. It’s just not true. They are the wiggers of the new age, and that is all. They run around thinking that because they have the “balls” to pull off minor pranks and “fly the finger in the face of authority” by skating around in public parking lots, they’re some kind of rebels against conformity. All that makes them is the equivalent of pigeons (or seagulls, depending on what analogy is more geographically-pertinent for you). They annoy people who have things to do and get in the way of your car. If our new President would pass some legislation making it legal to run over skater twats if they’re in the way of your car in public car parks, I’d consider voting in the next election.
I’m a little off-track, and you probably haven’t read this far. That’s okay.
To summarize: Skateboarding, in-and-of itself, is fine. Dorky, but fine. Today’s youth, particularly the skating-around-parking lots-kind, raised on a steady diet of reality TV exploitation, Celebrity-worship, and MySpace-fueled vanity, are a bunch of fucking idiots. And Hollywood Undead is the worst band I’ve ever heard. Yes,worse than Good Charlotte.
Editors Note: This does not make listening to Good Charlotte acceptable.
