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Black Sky Thinking

Dumbfuckingstan vs. British Art School Rock - It's No Contest Says Swells
Steven Wells , August 4th, 2008 13:45

American rockers adapt to the soul-destroying nightmare of bashing out the same turgid muzak to wildly appreciative audiences of incredibly badly dressed white retards by becoming the nightmare. They survive by ritually and joylessly humiliating every woman they meet. Most US band tour buses keep a "slut book" in which photos of abused and degraded females are lovingly placed in a album that the drugfucked scum haul out for violent on-bus circle jerks. It's no life for a sensitive English poet.

Let's make this clear— Middle America's incredibly badly dressed white retards are no worse dressed, whiter or retarder than their equally inbred suburban English cousins, but they are legion. There are millions of them—vast hordes of lighter waving, tit-exposing, drooling, overweight and corn syrup addled human dung beetles eating up the shit thrown at them by the rock music industry with a gusto that borders on the disgusting, marches across that border, colonises disgusting and claims it as a colony of the United States of Dumbfuckistan. Imagine if Slough was a country. Now imagine if it was an entire continent. Now imagine you lived there 4 months of the year. Would you become a heroin addict? Yes you fucking would.

European bands go mad. The good ones, anyway. Really groovy British groups are destroyed by the vast gaping cultural chasm that is Middle America, while lowest-common-denominator wank peddling shit monkeys like U2 thrive. You want to know why the Cure and Siouxie and the Banshees never broke the US? Because it was like asking brittle boned show ponies to trot across a desert carrying stupendously fat cunts on their oh-so-snappable backs. Dumbfuckistan is one huge suburb. A Batley. A Penge. A Scunthorpe with square dancing. Neasden with cowboy hats, Slough with mutant banjo players.

In the UK the highly-strung art school prima donna is never more than a few hours drive from civilization. In the US the groovy college towns are few and far between and in those vast, cavernous spaces the scream of a bored shitless failed frock designer peddling esoteric neo-romantic synth noodlings to audiences of flannel shirted wrestling fans who just wanna fuckin' rock can echo for ever for ever. "Dude, like why is that limey dude like crying?" "Who gives a fuck dude? Let's fuckin' rock!" Touring flyover country is like starring in a never-ending I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here with cunts you've never heard off in places that Sir John Fucking Betjeman would nuke to radioactive slag in an instant if he knew if their existence and wasn't, like, dead.

In his book 'Save Me From Myself', Brian "Head" Welch, guitarist for lowest-common denominator shit-metallers Korn, talks about watching a roadie pissing on "some girl". And it's ho-hum. Being in an American touring band is like being an anal-rape stunt double in the animal porn industry; soon it takes being forcibly fucked in every orifice by a multi-phallused space god to turn you on. And that's what happened to Brian 'Head" Welch. He gave up the crystal meth for Jesus. He made a living preaching dumbed-down existentialism to the children of people who say grace before they eat pizza at the mall and guess what? God got him. The baby Jesus injected him with spiritual crystal meth in both fucking eyeballs and his brain exploded. This is not a good way to go.

What he doesn't know is that Jesus will not save him. I just spent 10 days on the road with a Christian band who—after day 9—confessed that in the recent past they have engaged in on-road warfare with other Christian bands involving:

• Biblically plaguing a tour bus with locusts, mice and fish bought from a pet store.

• The flinging of menstrual piss.

• Shitting in a pizza box

• Hiding a punctured can of tuna on a tour bus and (my favourite)

• Nearly causing a multi-car fireball/pile-up by flinging a lighter-fuel drenched and flaming dead squirrel from the door of one speeding Christian tour bus onto the hood of another.

This is what Dumbfuckistan does to nice Christians. Now imagine what it does to like rilly cool Briddish types. The drugs aren't an indulgence; they're a fucking necessity. Sid killed Nancy and then himself because the existential dread that is life on a tour bus stuck in a truck stop exactly equidistant between a Kum and Go and an Arbys in deepest, dullest, dimmest Kansas was whispering in his ear "Ahm gonna get you, boy." All your anglo-insouciance, all your groovy Brit flibbertygibbetty art school cool will wither and die in the chemical toilet scented wind that blows from Texarkana.

I have in front of me a bag of crisps that reads "Southern Home Potato Chips with Coach's Low Country Boil Seasoning". Do you know how long that is amusing for? About 8 seconds. And then it becomes terrifying. You are among inbred assholes who think that Coldplay don't suck, that Obama is an Al Qaeda sleeper, that the troops are protecting our freedom and that Kum and Go is a fucking great name for a chain aimed at families.

You will never wake up with the tour bus in a circle of flame of and chanting Satanists. It never gets that exciting.

Middle America is death incarnate for British rock bands. Take a look at what America did to the Bromley contingent—the gang at the heart of British punk. Siouxie and the Banshees took one sniff and ran screaming back to Croydon. Sid did himself in. And Billy Idol—the pretty boy dimbo blessed with the spiritual depth, artistic ability and intellectual capacity of a banana—survived and flourished in the spiritually neutron-bombed wastelands like a leather trousered peroxide cockroach.

What does not destroy us makes us dumber. Only the Billyidolist survive.