Reader Charles Schneider sent me a link with a handful of “Worst Band Performances Ever.”

I hate to disagree with my readers. I’m constantly doing it, though, and it brings me nothing but grief. But how can I sit still, and allow the South Bay Surfers (on MySpace, natch) to be lumped in there with all that execrable stuff? This aggression must not stand, man. They’re not “bad.” They’re not “the worst.” They are sublime. We must take a minute to consider the sublime when we encounter it.
 

There’s plenty of bad stuff on that webpage, don’t get me wrong. But YouTube is a cornucopia of bad stuff. It is the Miss America Pageant of Meh and the Nobel Prize Committee of STFU. You’re going to have to be a lot worse than that to get a rise out of me.

But even YouTube isn’t big enough to hold every abominable noise, every obnoxious attitude, every atrocious waste of time, every repellent theme, every nauseating worldview — each and every aspect of the self-absorbed caterwauling that the American garage, filled with the fetid and festering innards of a disemboweled Guitar Center and engorged with wannabe rock stars, can produce. It exceeds the Gross National Product of Perdition. It’s too vast to get a handle on, although you’d like to get a shovel handle on it, wouldn’t you?

Out of that morass, out of that septic tank of pre-adolescent hopes and dreams, washed up like dead things on the shore of no talent, hard by the smoldering caldera of suck, a champion can appear. One that has bathed so fully in the fetid essence of insipid rock music that they have become immune to it; they ride it like a hobbled stallion, a gelded centaur with emphysema; surfing it like a slow roller in a sewage treatment plant.

Beelzebub shat a Faberge egg. Attention must be paid.