A Bucket of Suck
Everyone, please welcome our newest inductee to the Worst Bands Ever Hall of Fame: The Black-Eyed Peas!
This is an entry surrounded by much controversy, as few members of our distinguished panel would even recognize that the Peas are a “band” in the strictest sense. Ultimately, however, the unmitigated assness of both their music and the group’s image won out, earning them a place among such esteemed shit-factories as the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.
Primary among the band’s recomendations for this accolade are the fact that they’re a studio band. None of them play instruments — a team of studio engineers creates their music. One might think that, freed from the responsibilities of creating actual songs, the band might instead choose to focus on their lyrics. Not so. If it were actually possible to spend negative time creating lyrics, the Black Eyed Peas would seem to have done so, as their mind-numbing songs attest.
But what truly sends the Black Eyed Peas above and beyond? What elevates them to a state of worthlessness eclipsing similar no-talent acts like, say, C + C Music Factory or Hilary Duff? Sheer affect. The Peas are a complete label fabrication, a multicultural rainbow coalition bedecked in what appears to be “eccentric,” thrift-store, keep-it-real found-fashion but is actually assembled by a dedicated team of stylists. The band doesn’t really sing — it “raps.” Its members don’t really dance, they cavort like epileptics trying to hump a sack of greased light bulbs. They can’t keep any sense of rhythm, their vocal delivery is amateurish, and they’re so overexposed that even your mother is tired of seeing them. And yet they won’t go away. If the Village People all had retarded children, and those retarded children made up imaginary friends, the unremarkable lesser siblings of the Village People’s retarded children’s imaginary friends would be the Black Eyed Peas.
From the “edgy” cartoonishness of Stepin Fetchit front men will.i.am and apl.de.ap* to the vacuous, plastic “beauty” of Fergie to whatever that Pocahontas guy is supposed to be, the Black Eyed Peas represent a heretofore unplumbed depth in popular culture. Overproduced, under-developed and crassly commercialized at the expense of creative value, the Black Eyed Peas are the very definition of “sellout,” and that’s not a term the Worst Bands Ever approvals committee uses lightly. Welcome, you worthless hacks, to lifetime membership in the Worst Bands Ever Hall of Fame!
* Yow! Punctuation in your names! Rebellion against capitalization of proper nouns! How vibrant and individualistic! How daring! How… high school.
I chose to invent this new religion because I read in a magazine article that Tom Cruise (Scientology) is both converting Katie Holmes to his crazy religion and in a fight with Brooke Shields over his crazy religion (which is supposedly based on science but is against medical science, apparently). The crux of the Cruise-Shields argument is that Brooke Shields took antidepressants after her child was born. Tom Cruise is against this. This is a fight in which I cannot choose a side because I do indeed believe that Americans are overmedicated and that the pharmaceutical companies have made basic health care impossibly expensive, but I can’t side with the Scientologists because they believe that the way to proper health is to believe in alien space ships that adjust your mentals via invisible rays far beyond the borders of the earth (i.e. craziness). Also, why does Tom Cruise care about Brooke Shields’ antidepressant usage?
Back to Awesometology. Awesometology is the belief that in any situation, numerous outcomes exist that can resolve that situation. The outcome Awesometology seeks to advance is the most awesome one. Say, for instance, that you have two women who both claim to be the mother of a certain baby. Christianity teaches us that we should cut the baby in half and give each mother 1/2 baby. Islam teaches us that the baby should explode and both women must be stoned to death for promiscuity. Scientology teaches us that the baby is not a baby at all but a member of a subterranean progenitor race and that one of the women is a hologram of the other caused by a solar flare four galaxies over. Under the auspices of Awesometology, however, the baby grows up to be the quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, and both of the potential mothers receive nachos. Nachos with everything. Also, both of the potential mothers are very attractive.
