Tuesday, November 08, 2005

I'm actually not sure who the jerk here is, oh well. I hate indie kids.

Real fast, as I have to get back to work, but my band, Darth Vato, just received its first two pieces of hate mail, which I pasted below, followed by my response.

Dylan S., probably from Saddle Creek, NE writes:

you dudes totally look like a bunch of losers who listen to sugar ray, and
sublime. perhaps your name which abounds in originality was thought up listening to one of the afformentioned bands whilst smoking some form of illicit drug. i am sorry for not speaking
monosyllabically for you guys to understand, but i just thought i would say you suck...

and then:

i just downloaded one of your many songs, and realized you guys sound like 311, which is worse that i previously imagined. that skeleton with the sword is like a harbinger of death to you guys, seeing as how im going to steal the cutlass he is holding and cut off all of your fingers, so as to save the world from the hell that is darth vato. you guys would probably have been better in naming yourselves "going nowhere cause we are frathouse wankers". oh sorry for being a bit "rude", but bands like you give the world of music a bad name. just thought i would give you guys a word of encouragement by saying "quit now". by the way 311 sucks, but not as much as you guys. oh yeah you guys should return that year prescription of rohypnol you got from your buddy at the pharmacy, because dosing chicks at your venues is sooooo last year.

Oh! Well allow me to retort!

Dear Dylan,

Wow. You are the first person in three years to directly express antipathy for Darth Vato. We assume that people make fun of us behind our backs, but no one has ever made his or her loathing as explicit as you have. For your honest opinion, we thank you.

I do take issue with a few items in your emails, however. Though I applaud you for checking your spelling, grammar and punctuation (are you a journalism major, perhaps? Are you using your reporting class as a podium by which to disparage your town's music scene?), I am puzzled as to why, in your second email, you chose to enclose the word rude in quotation marks. Did you mean something other than the definition of rude that is commonly agreed upon by nearly everyone who competently understands the English language? Because otherwise, I can only assume that you were trying to emphasize your point that we are frathouse morons. I suppose you drove that point home sufficiently; in the event that you were trying to be funny, I am sorry to say you failed.

Furthermore, in the first email you accuse us of emulating Sublime and Sugar Ray and in the second, 311. I would like to clear up any misconceptions you might have about our musical tastes. Kerry (the bearded guy who plays guitar) and I (the sometimes-bearded guy who plays bass) both love Sublime. Though we both like many other types music (Kerry is really into jazz; I am all over the place), Sublime was common to both of us when we met in college, and our band largely sprang from jamming on Sublime songs (oops--sorry, jamming is a gerund probably too fratty and stupid to use with you). I will also begrudgingly cop to liking a couple Sugar Ray songs. For good or for ill, Mark McGrath (or whoever writes them) crafts sickeningly good hooks. That's partly why he doesn't have to have a day job beyond appearing on television and singing at state fairs. He is likely a millionaire, and if you are accusing me of aspiring to be one of those, I can only plead guilty. As for 311, our drummer likes 311, and we ridicule him mercilously and ceaselessly. We hate 311, despite what it says on our Myspace page. Bad Brains are awesome, however.

Finally, my last issue with your emails involves your contention that we give music a bad name. We have no pretensions about being a type of band different than the one we are, but I think you are thinking of The Bravery. The bass player should have stuck it out in whatever ska band he was in.

As for you as a person, we sincerely appreciate your honest feedback. It would have been better if you had articulated your enmity without using verbiage such as "abounds," because in total, your emails lead me to believe that you are, in fact, an eigth grader who has recently discovered what pressing the shift and F7 keys does on your keyboard (which opens Microsoft Word's thesaurus, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about). But really, I know you even less than you know me. I might, for example, guess that you are some burgeoning indie snob, who after purchasing Good News for People Who Love Bad News became a Modest Mouse authority, especially after you found out they made albums prior to getting Top 40 spins. If I were to make these types of assumptions, (which I'm not, of course), I might suggest that you take your devastatingly original, ironically-worn, size-too-small "Virginia is for lovers" t-shirt and use it for wadding when you cram that unopened Yo La Tengo album you bought two months ago up your ass. Or, I could assume that your email address pays homage to that underground hip-hop guy, which means you are light years beyond us in terms of indie cool and therefore intelligence and overall human merit. Either that, or you are a Dragonball fan, which confirms my suspicions about your being in eighth grade.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. See you at the Warped Tour!

Steve

p.s.

I'm not sure how to get rohypnol, but if I do, the first girl who is going to get it is your grandma, so I can take the ten dollars out of her purse she intends to put in your birthday card.

7 comments:

Getting rid of my beer gut said...

Yeah, well when we played in SoCal in the summer of '04, we "got" to play the Viper Room (which really means that we paid $250 to do it), and I felt pretty much the same way. Our show in Hermosa and Long Beach had way cooler vibes. And fuck those stupid assymetrical shotgun blast haircuts. That hipster bullshit has become the new millenium cock-rock.

Fabs said...

Laughing my ass off! Please tell me you actually sent that.

Glazy Bear said...

hilarious! i wish there was more!

Josh said...

Thanks for that F7 tip. Some people are just jerks and thrive on being so. This guy is definitely one of those people and possibly a small penis too. Nice job Robo.

flippinwatermom said...

You make me laugh out loud! Thanks for putting the hilarity in an otherwise mundae evening.

andrew m. said...

snot, literal snot, was coming out of my nose when i read that.

sorry, i've got a bad cold, but even through the haze of clogged sinuses i laughed my ass off at this one.

what a freakin' shit clown! i've never understood these "hip" cats who walk around all sulky and irony-filled, making fun of anything that doesn't fit neatly into their hyper-narrow definition of "cool." what a bunch of jerks.

these lame-ass hustlers have literally overrun my fair philadelphia and have made doing the things i love seem less than enjoyable at times. going to gigs, record shopping, or even kicking back at a tavern to savor an afternoon brew has all too many times been sapped of it's pleasure by these clods and their faux-boho, smirking smug self-satsifaction.

and i'm not talking about all cats in this crowd, just the douches. and it's not like i run into them too often, but i've been smirked at more than once by the hipsters for wearing a sweet vintage AC/DC shirt at an "indie" venue. fuck them! so i like AC/DC, so what? i apologize to the high court of hipness-itude for digging one of THE most hilarious and entertaining bands in the history of rock! i guess it doesn't give me any street cred that i also dig the big boys, dead moon, six finger sattellite, and like a gazillion other out of the spotlight acts, my love of AC/DC makes me unworthy.

anyway, time to end this jumbled rant. we'll sum it up by saying i agree with you 110% and that people who waste their time and effort to go out of their way to tell folks they suck, fucking suck. one of our local papers did a cover story on how damn annoying the indie cats in our town have gotten. it's was pretty ok, although i've always considered the cats who write for that paper to be shit babies birthed by the same turd mother. i'll post it over on SHEEPSHANK for you if you wanna check it out.

P.S. - i've always said that the mark of someone truly original and true to themeselves is the ability to state their affinity for things the "hip" crowd view accepted by a large crowd of the "non hip." i give you BIG props for not only digging what you do, but for the unabashed way in which you let the "too cool for, well... anything" crowd know it. you didn't run from this idiot's taunts, but addressed them head on and that gets mucho respect from me. bravo! oh, and i LOVE springsteen and ain't afraid to admit it!

stashdauber said...

who has time to electronically bait mbrs of bands they don't like?!?!?