First Published 3-7-11
18. KMFDM
Everyone’s favorite Ministry cover band is probably responsible for as many school shootings as poor parenting and bullying are. You can bet your ass that if a student came to shoot up your school, he’d be in a KMFDM shirt with a nonsense picture on the front and a single word representing an album beneath it. I know this because all KMFDM shirts are exactly the fucking same, showcasing that the band is not without a stunning lack of originality, if you couldn’t already tell because they really do sound exactly like Ministry. I suspect, like their German brethren Rammstein, that at least 1/3rd of their fan base likes them just because they are a German band, and Hitler is cool or something when you’re an angst ridden white kid with no hair and working class parents.
19. Kings of Leon
This blend of blues rock and bad haircuts inadvertently became a hallmark of the hipster subculture. Jay Leno keeps asking them to play live on his show, and every single time they have they sounded like a a bunch of rusty gears in a clock that counts down to the exact moment you die. Also, if your sex is on fire, I believe a shot of penicillin should be in your near future.
20. Crowbar
90s “Sludge” metal icons Crowbar have definitely carved a respectable niche for themselves in the twenty years of their existence. Since their first release, they have released 9 studio albums, a live album, and a DVD. Throughout all of this, the band has tried to prove one thing above all else: fat people can rock too. Seriously, the band’s lead singer is one of the fattest fucks I’ve ever seen on a stage this side of a Voodoo Glow Skulls concert. And while the rest of the lineup has changed over the years, it is often the case that several other members of the band were all meaty motherfuckers as well. At their point of peak popularity in 1993, the only skinny member of the band was the drummer. It’s a good thing the band made what money they did, it enabled them to afford to reinforce whatever stage they played on so these porker assholes didn’t fall through it.
Even the term of genre used to describe them implies fatness: “Sludge” metal. Sludge. What depictions do the term “sludge” conjure in your head? Sludge is liquid smelly garbage, often with a consistency thicker than water. Slow, ponderous, smelly, and revolting, that’s what sludge is. Now think of a big fat fuck. Think of the fattest person you know. Think of their thick, nasty gut attached to their slow, ponderous, smelly, revolting frame. Even the genre itself is ironically defined as “slow and heavy.” Taking that into consideration, it’s clear that the band’s genre was aptly defined. It’s almost as if the band was embracing the two decade long fat joke their existence was. At least they had a sense of humor about their approaching heart failures.
Now on to their music. This music itself is – guess what? Yeah, it’s definitely “angry music,” but I would be pretty angry too if I was a big fat fuck like these assholes. Beavis and Butthead once reviewed a Crowbar song during their show, and all Butthead had to say (all he needed to say really) was: “they’re always taking a dump” and more accurately: “This music is slow and fat.” The music is best described as slow, ponderous, and heavy. I’m not making this up, listen to it yourself. It’s all just too perfect. If I was Crowbar’s dad, I would kick my son’s ass for being so fat and slow and sludgy. If I were to mosh to Crowbar, it would be a slow and drawn out affair, which is a perfect pace for fat people. Even Crowbar’s fans are big, and the band acknowledges this by making music that is slow enough for fat people to mosh to, because we all know fat people can’t jump and run around like normal people in normal pits do.
It goes to show that a group of people will always take care of their own. Crowbar’s role in proving this theory? Fat music for fat people, by fat people.
21. Three Days Grace
Generic Canadian angst-rock band. All of the angry teenage clichés are present here: cutting yourself, bad breakups, depression, smoking and drinking, being a douche bag, DGAFing, etc. And if being woefully generic wasn’t enough, the lead single off of their 2012 album “Transit of Venus” was a direct rip off of a Five Finger Death Punch song. Whereas the song “Chalk Outline” states:
“You left me here like a chalk outline/on the sidewalk waiting for the rain/ to wash away/ to wash away.”
In 2008, four years prior, Five Finger Death Punch released the song “Never Enough,” with the passage as follows:
“In the end, we’re all just chalk lines on the concrete. Drawn only to be washed away.”
A shameless rip off from one of the most generic bands of our day.
22. Avenged Sevenfold
I detest using the term “mainstream” for a lot of things, partially on account of the note of “supar-schweet-rebeliousness” it portrays (implying that because it’s popular, it is stupid, but countercultural ideas are often as popular as the ideas they seek to replace, making it in the eyes of its believers “mainstream” and crushing the tiny nuts of anyone who follows such stupid mindsets in a vice of paradoxical anti-idiocy) but in some regards, using the term is inescapable. Earlier this year (as of this writing), Avenged Sevenfold was voted number 1 in Ultimate Guitar’s Band of the Decade list. Sometimes, if you want to know what things really suck, and what things really are decent, take the exact opposite of what certain “mainstream” publications tell you. I have seen time and again many “mainstream” publications laud praise upon bands like Avenged Sevenfold, new Weezer, and the Mars Volta when not one single shred of respect is deserved. It almost appears as though some publications subscribe to the idea of taking the worst shit available to them and seeing if they are influential enough to make morons like you believe that this crap passes for music. This, and only this, is the reason why Avenged Sevenfold never got laughed off any stage and became as popular as they are today.
First off, let me point out to you how screamingly queer the individual members of the band are: M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance, and Synyster Gates (His spelling, not mine.) Let’s be real here for a second. These are the corniest, lamest, most half-baked names I have ever heard of in my life. If they were members of Lordi it would make sense, that band is based on being fake and cornball. But because they consider themselves a serious musical group, those names have got to be the biggest loser-fest I have ever seen. Did they ask a bunch of angst-ridden middle school goth kids to write their names for them? Or were they themselves the angst-ridden middle school goth kids in question? The former fourth member of the group, the drummer, was named “The Rev.” Fortunately for us; he’s dead now, so his limp-ass name will no longer plague any form of media. The day I found out that “The Rev” died was one of the best days of my life. When I first found out I laughed until I shit my pants.
Despite their drummer’s timely death, Avenged Sevenfold still managed to pull their shit together to release an album entitled “Nightmare.” Originality runs strong in this group. The title track to the album, something you have undoubtedly been haunted by if you listen to any rock radio station, is so screamingly rebellious that the singer “M. Shadows” feels it necessary to shout “fucking” every opportunity he gets, if nothing else, to drive home the point that you are in your “fucking nightmare!” and communicate how insecure he feels about his hardcore image by having to compensate for being a fucking loser by fucking using the fucking word fuck every fucking chance he fucking gets to fucking look so fucking cool and fucking hardcore like a mother fuck. Now naturally, I haven’t even bothered to give the rest of the album a listen to, because by now I’ve heard enough of their shenanigans to know not to even bother with this crap.
When Guitar Hero 2 came out, everyone shit their pants because that song “Beast and the Harlot” was a part of the soundtrack. The song is a vague reference to the Book of Revelations, but the band states that they are likening Babylon to modern Hollywood in an effort to show how Hollywood leads people down a path to excess. This coming from a Huntington Beach band that made millions of dollars off of these impressionable children and is signed to Warner Brothers, a big Hollywood presence.
I caught an interview with Shadows on a local radio station once, and all he could talk about was how much he loved traveling around the world and “keeping the scene alive.” He snuck those four words into every single sentence he could in an attempt to hammer in how “relevant” his band is to the modern metal scene. He loves “keeping the scene alive,” his favorite thing about being in the band was being able to “keep the scene alive,” he has no regrets about “getting out there and keeping the scene alive,” give it a fucking rest man, we heard you the first time. Who are you trying to convince here? I’d rather listen to Dave Matthews Band while force-feeding hard boiled eggs to crocodiles than listen to this terrible fucking band.