Your Band Blows

Ever since the first music journalist took coal to the wall of his clan’s cave to draw a crudely formed stick-figure Cro-Magnon banging two rocks together, people who study music have been trying to answer several questions. Some of these questions, like “how much side ass can I get from hanging around rock bands?” or “should I really use a blowjob reference in this piece about Yanni?” aren’t as applicable to the music, but are still very important to the function of the writer. There are, however, certain questions that frequently come up when appraising music that are ultimately important in evaluating an artist's value. Influences, writing process, life experience and memes can be brought out through pointed questions such as “how does your life experience influence your writing process, and the themes of your current album?” that can tell you a lot about whether or not the artist is making a relevant statement. It’s somewhat amazing to hear what goes on behind the scenes when someone is making music, and on occasion, such as when a band rents an 18th-century church and writes in it for three months while taking various and copious amounts of mind-twisting hallucinogens, it can result in an interesting story, and a greater understanding of the artist and their work.

I started researching Peaches because I’d of course heard her putrid, low-fidelity porno-electro in quite a few places and through various media outlets, and I was also trying to figure out if she was, in fact, a she. Peaches’ gender-bending persona and horse face had me scouring hi-res images for an adam’s apple. Seriously. But what really interested me about her, after I found some pretty compelling evidence that she is attached to a vagina, was finding out what kind of background would compel someone to make such blatantly erotic-for-shock-value-only pap.

It turns out that this is Peaches' second career - after spending some time as an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL MUSIC TEACHER. Really, I can't make this up. Can you imagine the girl who wrote “Fuck the Pain Away” teaching children? Picture the horrified look on a fresh first grader when he walks into his first music class and has a bearded lady wearing nothing but panties and black electrical tape tell him to shove a recorder in his mouth. That little guy is going to end up cutting up prostitutes and eating them when he gets older. Of course, it could explain a few things. Maybe the day-to-day stress of having to listen to the most inexperienced musicians of any caliber drove her to the point of insanity, where it makes sense to badly rap and wail blatantly out of tune over beats that sound like they were made with a mid-'90s cell phone, some dental tape and a hubcap from a Chevy Nova.

If you ever feel the need to cringe at a real travesty of human development I HIGHLY recommend that you watch Peaches' mini-documentary, which is conveniently located at her site on the interwebs. In it, she repeatedly states how she “doesn’t care what she looks like or how bad she smells” and tells the documentarian in several ways about how much of an individual she is.

Wow, congrats … you’re disgusting AND pretentious.

When asked about her writing process, she states that she has production equipment next to her bed and she will lie around smoking dope and masturbating for days on end. Somehow this inspires her. Not that I have anything against smoking dope and masturbating - I think they are both very worthwhile pursuits - but the fact that some nasty, high skank diddling herself and crapping out lines like “Eat a cookie/a big dick/everyday/what?” and “Suck/Suck it up/Suck it all, Suck and let go” is actually getting deep serious reviews proves once and for all that there is no God, and the human race is actually less evolved then rhesus monkeys. There is actually a review on a site I'll call Bitchspork that speaks grandly about her “fully formed, distinct aesthetic” and “expression of complicated, conflicted emotions.” Really? The bitch gets stoned and plays with herself. The only thing that she’s fully forming while writing music is what amounts to the indie equivalent of Riskay’s “Smell Yo’ Dick,” which in my opinion is a much more well-crafted song about catching your significant other cheating. At least Riskay is drawing from life experiences of conflicted emotions that aren’t deciding whether to get high and THEN play with your dildo, or the other way around.

So when it comes down to it, and you really want to see what kind of cred an artist should have, go to the source. Just because some trust-fund kid who had his parents pay for him to get a blog and a bloated writing education throws a bunch of $100 words at something doesn’t make it good. Take a look at the people behind the music and you'll know if you’re attaching yourself to something relevant or just falling into the hype machine built to draw attention and dollars to someone who can’t even get out of bed to have some experiences outside of cheap drugs and even cheaper orgasms.