I was on the Internet the other day (because when you don’t have cable, video games or friends, life gets soul-crushingly lonely) and I happened to come across a random person’s “feelings-journal,” which are notorious for wasting bandwidth that could be better suited to games or things that only exist when you turn 18. What first caught my eye was this person’s obsession with the band Green Day, whom I have waged a private war against since I was 12 years old. Normally, I just smile to myself and think, “Well, a democracy protects everyone’s rights, no matter how wrong we think (know) they are, so I shouldn’t complain too much.” However, it got me to thinking, which is a rare occurrence in itself. How can some bands become so overrated or even “rated” in the first place that even their own foaming-at-the-mouth fans feel that they are excessively glorified? When I researched the bands further, I discovered that overrated bands have existed for far longer than I care to talk about. So now, with only some slight hesitation due to my need to work on schoolwork, I will carve into electronic stone a list of a few overrated artists/bands. Don’t be surprised if your favorite band is on here, because, after all, an overrated band is usually very popular. In the interest of maintaining a safe learning environment at GM, please just silently agree with me so that you don’t confront me in the halls, waving a rolling pin/frying pan like some cartoon character, which will force me to stuff some TNT down your throat, light a match, throw it in afterwards and run. I did that once, and I hope never to have to do it again.

1. Eric Clapton.

Eric Clapton, the king of overrated guitarists, is a sad story in music. As a kid, he was completely obsessed with the blues.  This did not change after he grew up. While a guitarist for the Yardbirds (which included, at different times, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck), he forced the band to be almost exclusively blues-based until he left the group and released his iron fist of terror. After he joined Cream, named so because the members considered themselves the “cream of the crop” of British musicians at the time, his credibility increased due to their psychedelic nature and the couple of good songs they put out. But he was still obsessed with the blues and could be considered an early Eminem, in the sense that he was white but secretly considered himself/wanted to be black. So he continued his reign of terror by stealing blues licks right and left, along with a Bob Marley song, “I Shot the Sheriff.” His nickname is “Slowhand,” which is meant to be ironic, but the fact of the matter is that it’s completely accurate. Even when he was in Cream, he was not as fast as a better guitarist in his position would have been. While speed may not be everything, it certainly does help keep your songs from feeling too slow, which is the whole idea. His playing is slower than molasses that has been injected inside the bloodstream of a dead man who is in some sort of enclosure with a temperature close to absolute-zero. It’s completely insane that his ego would be large enough to name his group after how good they thought they were, which reminds me of another story. Everyone in England was painting “Clapton is God” on buildings because they were under the impression that he was the best guitarist at the time. They were more wrong than I was that time I wore a Hawaiian shirt to school. In early 1966, Jimi Hendrix walked into a club where Cream was playing, asked to play with them (which the band was shocked at, because they considered themselves so holy that nobody would dare want to play with them) and demolished every fragment of skill Eric Clapton thought he might have had. Hendrix may be long dead, but the odds are that he is still a better guitarist than Clapton is right now. While Eric Clapton is a very good guitar player, saying that he is God goes way too far.  There are so many better musicians than old Slowhand, who will continue to play the blues thinking that he is a poor black man from the American South during the Depression unless somebody stops him. But I’ve got stuff that needs to be done, so I’ll let someone else stop this monster.

2. Green Day

Wow. Just…wow. It’s hard to know where to start with Green Day. Could it be the fact that the band seemed to start out as a rebellious anti-establishment punk band but ended up becoming a political machine for things that they know very little about? Is it possible that only one of the members has graduated from high school and it definitely shows? Whatever the reason, there are a lot to list, so I’d better get started. Green Day is one of those stories that will cause someone to question their deity’s mental health. How could a band made up of snot-nosed rejects from California become an international supergroup? Well, if I can answer that question with another question, why is Jerry Lewis so popular with the French citizens (whom they watch after a long day of torching cars or being pompous towards the country that saved them twice from Germany)? There’s no legitimate reason to explain why they are so popular, but there are enough disillusioned young children who feel that the members of Green Day understand their (imaginary) pain, because millionaires who grew up poor and overcompensate for it when they finally get money always understand exactly how you feel. I don’t care that they may have suffered from poverty in the past -- enough money can make you forget anything. Unlike Eric Clapton, Green Day plays loud, fast punk, but their singing recalls to mind a young Wookie that has been shot in both kneecaps and the instrument playing itself is very boring. Incidentally, “very boring” is the technical term, not just my term that I use out of bitter hatred/contempt/spite. They also have a sappy funeral/graduation/whatever-stupid-excuse-you-want ballad that’s usually known as “Time of Your Life,” although the actual title is “Good Riddance.” When I hear the opening bars of this song, I get so angry that if I were the president of this great country, I would have launched every single missile/bullet/rock/hard-piece-of-fruitcake that we have in our vast arsenal at every country due to my extreme rage. Immediately afterwards, I would have run down (at illegal speeds) to Florida just so I could grab an alligator and choke it to death with my bare hands before feasting on its flesh while it was still twitching. As you can see, it’s a good thing that I am not the leader of the free world. I hate that song almost as much as I hate this overrated insult to punk that only a deaf man would call “music.” And another thing: when I want someone to shove useless political commentary down my throat, I’ll go listen to Michael Savage. Man alive, I have anger problems!

3. Death Cab For Cutie

{This is Eamonn’s muscular father typing this section. Eamonn got so mad when thinking about Death Cab For Cutie that he somehow decapitated himself out of pure spite. However, he was so mad that his blood turned into acid very similar to the blood of the aliens from “Aliens” and he ended up burning a hole through the house, falling through the floor and needing to be rushed to the hospital. He will write about the band as soon as we can patch him up and calm him down using the best tranquilizers available.}

Oh man, that was a close one. Now for my actual purpose for writing -- I really hate Death Cab. I really, truly, honestly, utterly, absolutely hate Death Cab. You might be wondering why I would call them overrated if I simply hate them. Well, I’ve never been one to use things like facts, logical structuring and not-being-a-really-big-hypocrite. Anyway, Death Cab falls under the Target/”The O.C.”/just-plain-annoying brand of emo, which is bad enough to begin with. However, the band is the darling of critics who drink too much hipster liquor and college students who should be learning how not to be failures instead of throwing away their time listening to bands that will just break up after a crying session anyway. All the kids these days want to be indie and say they were the first to listen to DCFC, or the emo-by-association band, the Postal Service. However, since they’re a commercial band that goes through drummers like I go through insulin, (that is to say, incredibly fast) they can’t be classified as indie anymore. And what in the name of Gregori “The Mad Monk” Rasputin is “indie” anyway? Is it a type of sound, or is a band “indie” simply because they are not signed to a major label? If the latter is the case, there are a million indie bands that you don’t know about, nor will anybody ever know about. So the quest to find the most indie band is pointless because there will always be some band that never gets heard and that you will never be able to listen to while being a smug and pretentious latte-drinking, Volvo/Volkswagen-driving ogre whose head is just begging to be placed on my wall. Don’t think for a second that I don’t have a space saved. Death Cab is basically one man’s maniacal drive to sound like a pretentious dork with thick glasses (I’m not kidding, go to their pure volume site and read the bio while looking at the picture) while getting kids to listen to his music while writing in their blogs about feelings (because I never do that. Um, yeah, of course not. *shifts eyes, cough.*) Death Cab for Cutie should meet their maker, preferably in a hilarious or gruesome way. I’ll call my good friend Quentin Tarantino, because he and I are like this *cross fingers,* and see what we can arrange. If we show the footage on Pay-Per-View, we’ll both get rich and save America’s youth simultaneously. God bless America.

4. My Chemical Romance/Coheed and Cambria

………..Hear that silence? That’s the sound that is produced when I get so mad that words escape me and my body begins to self-combust from holding in the raw hatred, like a black hole that comes from absolute loathing rather than a star 15 times larger than the sun collapsing. It’s bad enough that I have to be subjected to one whiny prog-emo band in my lifetime before I become deaf from listening to too much loud REAL Rock n’ Roll, but two of them? The only possible explanation is that I was both Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler in past lives and I am now being punished in one of the cruelest and most unusual ways. If this is the kind of treatment I’m getting now, I’d hate to know what the future holds. Why people love these bands is beyond me, but I am not one of those people. If I was that kind of person or became one due to various health factors, I look forward to someone having the wisdom to get rid of me in a vicious manner. Let me try to start on one band at a time.

Coheed and Cambria are along the same lines as super-lame bands such as Styx and Yes. They were part of a movement in the 1980s known as “prog-rock,” which the members of C&C are trying to bring back. Never in my life have I hoped something would fail as much as I do now, not even more than the time that I was hoping my plan of getting kidnapped and sold to Taiwanese merchants who would harvest my supple organs would fail. The lead singer’s voice sounds almost exactly like the lead singer of Styx’s voice, but he is a fat emo man, while the leader of Styx was a skinny guy who might have lost all his weight and money due to nose-candy. So it’s essentially a guy singing in a very high-pitched voice with some lame distortion in the background and lots of lyrics about how sad he/his character is. That sounds to me like a case of human rights abuses, and if/when I graduate, I’m taking my case straight to The Hague. For some reason, people can’t get enough of this prog-emo band. I’ll say this once so that everyone can be clear on the issue. Prog is dead, grunge is dead (thank Mr. Cobain for that), boy bands are temporarily dead, punk is pretty dead, rock is hanging on by life support and intelligent rap/hip-hop is looking pretty frail, although Kanye West did give it a good health boost. There’s no place in America for prog rock, and there never should have been in the first place.

If you give a mouse a cookie, you’ll end up with an awful emo band that makes a kid crying in the corner seem like Kurt Russell in “The Thing” (for those who have not seen it, I command you to rent that fine piece of cinematic excellence and see what manliness is like in its pure form.) My Chemical Romance is what happens when you don’t lock up any potentially devastating diseases. To music, MCR is airborne Hepatitis C mixed in with a particularly powerful strain of the Hanta Virus. It’s more than just the emo aspect that those crimes against nature have committed, it’s the makeup mixed with the attempts at being hardcore. Gerard Way, lead singer/girly man, adopted a fad of putting a line of dark color around his eyes and the rest of his face, like a horizontal bar code. Then he had the brilliant idea of putting on a bullet-proof vest to show that his hometown in New Jersey was a dangerous place. If I could, I would turn all my knowledge of the Simpsons (estimated at 6 trillion US dollars if converted) into money and place a bet that Gerard, if put in a place of any actual danger (Compton, Iraq, my house, etc.) would get demolished the minute he stepped out of his tour bus. If he somehow survived the brutal onslaught, he would at least be crying out like Bjork caught in a rusty-but-effective bear trap, which is not something you want to hear even once in your lifetime. I’m not necessarily advocating for violence against him, I just don’t want him or his lackeys to continue making the sort of ear-diseases that they call music.

Some folks are going to yell at me, arguing that I shouldn’t make assumptions about bands that I haven’t listened to. For the record, I have unwillingly listened to each one of these bands. “A-HA!” you’ll scream out in ecstasy. “You weren’t listening to the bands with an open mind and had already judged these bands based on things you might have heard about them before, so you didn’t give them a decent chance! Try weaseling your way out of that one, you fashion reject!” In my defense, I wasn’t trying to seek or avoid any information about these bands when I listened to them, so I couldn’t really make up my mind until I had finished listening to a song, unless I had known who was playing the song, which you don’t usually find out about on the radio until after the song is over. Don’t even think about pulling a double standard, seeing as how some of you have judged this rant based on previous articles I have written, which I would also do if I was in your place. How do you know I wasn’t joking the entire time and that I secretly love these bands? Well, I don’t love them, so that loose end is tied up right now. If these bands were great, there would be no argument. But alas, they are not, or if they are, they are not nearly as great as everyone makes them out to be. If you feel I am wrong about any of the aforementioned bands, then keep you mouth shut and let the anger boil inside of you until you release it upon somebody else, preferably someone who deserves it.