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.
