“We’re upfront that most rock music is pony. But science now shows that it’s not directly to do with how groups sound or look. Those clever people at the Centre For Understanding New Things have been looking into this and it turns out there is a mathematical formula for calculating the rubbishness of music groups.
The 5 key variables
- Tunelessness: The less tuneful your act is, the greater the chance that it’s duff (we’ll make an allowance for Derek Bailey). Choooooons is why, say, The Carpenters are legends and Shed Seven are not. However: being able to sing well in a technical sense is not the same thing as ‘being tuneful’. If you can sing the glossolalia bit like Mariah Carey, well done, but it still doesn’t make you any good. Singing technically well on TV without the aid of autotune is the musical equivalent of doing a solid bit of tiling in your bathroom or changing a tyre like a one-handed mechanic. Job done, nothing more. You’ve got a 4-octave range? So did Beefheart and he sounds like a walrus gargling iron filings.
- Over-confidence: Bands rarely get better over time, because the more records they sell, the more overconfident they become. Whoever heard of buying the fifth Oasis album? James Blunt calculated that he could offset his punchability by being self- deprecating on Twitter, and whilst it was brilliantly inspired the first time, by repeating the trick indefinitely it has in itself become another form of over-confidence and has now backfired: “that knobhead….with his fake self-deprecation….looking down on everyone”. Over-confidence is also why all bands with members who have been to private school are terrible. Note to aspiring acts: if you have rich parents, get them to send you to a religious or military boarding school. You’ll still be as puffed up as a randy adder, but you’re highly likely to be emotionally unstable as well, which is artistic gold dust.
- F* giving: Bands are meant to be emotionally shallow narcissists. The more your band gives a f*, the worse they will become. No words make the heart sink more than ‘it’s basically a political album’. Doing a charity single? Now hold up there. That Christmas Sausage Roll thing is offensive on so many levels, it’s gone meta- offensive. See also excessive mixing, re-recording or any show of perfectionism.
- Degree of self-loathing: The degree of self-loathing is proportionate to being good. The higher the level of internalised disgust the better the band. Nirvana? Fantastic. Foo Fighters? Absolute poop. Pro tip: new bands generally haven’t had much time to build up a good amount of self-hatred, and this is why all bands under 30 are unlistenable, and is one of the many, many reasons that The Rolling Stones are a great act and (<name deleted on legal advice>) aren’t.
- Batshitness: Bonkersness offers some protection from being rubbish. In the same way that if you see someone wearing medals pinned to their tracksuit shouting about Hitler, your natural reaction is to cross the road, crazy groups cannot suck arse by default. When did you ever hear someone say: “The Residents? Now that is lame”? U2 are in interesting case in that their decades of excessive campaigning automatically should mean they’re execrable. However, Bono’s phone contact book reads: Eno, Edge, Obama, Mum, The Pope. That is pretty mad. So there they are peering over the edge of rubbishness but somehow not falling in.
Is your band pants? Try out the equation for yourself.
(t x oc) + fg
dosl + bc