When I got hired as Jack Black’s assistant, I was stoked thinking it would be an easy gig of picking up lunches of gourmet Panda Express items, organizing his closets of brightly colored animal overprint t-shirts, and helping him decide between voicing Sans in a live action Undertale movie or taking 7 figure “recurring role” in a “University of Rock” Paramount Plus series. But when he overheard me listening to Braid my first week, he immediately started “Bun Namp na na na na na”ing along, following with a demand that I make him a mix of everything similarly Midwestern Emo I could find, and I am now one “raka doo dee dow” away from skadooshing myself.
I thought the guy who played a record store snob in High Fidelity would have already known about Midwestern Emo, but I guess just because the genre was started by bearded dad-looking Gen Xers, doesn’t mean they were all listening to it. At first, it was manageable when he was vocalizing one guitar part, but then he figured out how to simultaneously vocalize both guitars in “Never Meant” by doing the lead parts as “bang daka dang dang dang”s and the backing parts as “bew dern dern nern”s. I would be impressed if I didn’t have to stop him from doing it at his mother-in-law’s wake.
It’s been only two months since he started, and he’s already “bew bern bown do bew bew”d through Christie Front Drive’s discography, and he’s moved onto “bada baka da bada bow”ing into fourth-wave midwestern emo bands that were all from Philly like Snowing and Glocca Mora. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a meeting with Dreamworks for “Kung Fu Panda: A New Generation” or at an ad agency giving feedback on the creative direction of next year’s Tostadas SuperBowl commercial, if he starts hearing noodly twinkly guitars, he will accurately vocalize them with the energy he gave to classic rock riffs in the 2000’s.
If anyone has any ideas on how I can get him to stop, please let me know. The only thing that’s worked is when I play him Mathcore solos that exhaust him as he tries to keep up. I played him 43% Burnt two hours ago, and he hasn’t woken up from passing out after “bee dee doo doodly de de doo”ing. If I don’t get any help soon, he’ll start going backwards to Rites of Spring, which may kill him.