If you really want to know who whips ass, look no further than the guardians of pure metal: the writers of The Economist. Their review for the new Tenacious D webseries, Post-Apocalypto, calls into question whether we even need the D in this age of cerebral metal. “Few are given the chance to be unfunny across multiple disciplines; in that respect, if no other, Tenacious D are remarkable,” writes the Economist’s spookiest critic, Prospero. “When they sing, on ‘Making Love’, ‘It’s important that we fuck right now / So let your penis explore’, it is worth remembering that Mr Black is 49 and Mr Gass is 58.”
Prospero (who has taken his pen name from a Shakespearian wizard) posits that metal has outgrown Tenacious D’s parody: “Regardless of the fact that the genre has evolved enormously since then—its experimental underground produces music that bears no relation at all to The Darkness or Steel Panther—common perceptions of metal remain. It is seen as a rather silly sideshow, one not really worth serious consideration. In short, it is something to be laughed at.” Yes, who could possibly find risible material in underground or experimental metal like Excrementory Grindfuckers, or the man so satanic that he makes his lowercase t’s into upside-down crosses? Or perhaps poking fun at the sillier parts of a genre goes hand-in-hand with critiquing it artistically? We won’t know until Le Monde weighs in.
