By Pat Bataillon
I was looking for some filler to pass the time between commercials while watching Mythbusters last night when I stumbled upon a little primetime gem called Rock Star: Supernova. Rock and roll may never die, but it just came awfully close.
I think that I have a decent ear for good music, and what I heard last night actually affected my hearing.
For the second time in the month I watched someone butcher “Baba O’Riley.” The last time was on America’s Got Talent, which is named more after a wish than a conclusion. That performance featured a girl and her violin.
This time it was a mallpunk with eye make-up, tight black jeans, bandanas and chains, and the all-to-familiar spiked Mohawk that has morphed from a cultural signpost of disaffected anarchists to the cute Message: I’m Dangerous!
I never did get this guy’s name, but he jumped into the crowd and really got the theatre of 300 or so innocent families vacationing Los Angeles and taking in a show going.
The next act was a girl named Storm Large. Storm took a different route in her destruction of a classic by performing “Helter Skelter.” I have never been a fan of anyone covering the Beatles because they rarely can be improved upon. Star declared Helter Skelter “the first punk song ever,” perhaps trying to one-up Mohawk Mallpunk, given that The Who has often been (just as wrongly) declared the first punk band ever.
Storm Large asked the crowd if they knew how mosh as I choked down the vomit that was making its way up my esophagus. I kept it down as she bounced around the room without any sense of rhythm whatsoever. Her finale was falling backward into the crowd as she, thankfully, finished the tune. If a genie would have appeared in my apartment last night to grant me just one wish, it would have been for the audience to get out of her way and let her plunge to the floor, and then set upon her with violence, kicking her in the stomach while demanding to know if she knew the meaning of talent.
The third and final act forced me to re-engaged the mute button. It was a painted and pierced girl taking on “Psycho Killer.” She had an uncanny ability to miss every note of the musical scale.
Seeing three songs of some musical importance getting thrown about in a blender made me wonder: Is this the death of popular culture? Are we just replacing old culture with refurbished retro culture and creating something merely pseudo-new and pseudo-hip?
For a long time now, the movie industry has feasted on taking good ol’ TV shows and ruining them in order to exploit our natural curiosity of these creations for a quick buck. See Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky & Hutch.
Now television is taking good ol’ classic rock songs and ruining them, without shame or apology. You couldn’t blame kids today seeing these facsimiles and wondering what made the Dukes or the Beatles so great to being with. That’s what’s so disturbing about the new refurbished pop culture; it’s destroying our historic and cultural integrity.
At least the judges on the Rockstar panel are legit: Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. Oh wait. That was in my mind. In reality, the distinguished panelists are Tommy Lee, Jason Newstead, and Gilby Clarke.
See what I mean?
Posted on August 31, 2006