A Spirited Defense of an Utter Lack Of Skill...

In my normal Sunday morning trawl of the NYT (which differs from my daily trawl of the NYT inasmuch as I generally don’t read the op-ed shit on a weekday) I came across this amusing piece. In it, the author describes his participation in the Really Terrible Orchestra. While the concept is reasonably sound (paypal me $1 for that pun, please) I find their intrinsic realism about the whole thing quite refreshing. The founder is quoted, in Classical Music magazine, as saying “[w]e also discovered there’s a place in the market for a really bad amateur orchestra. After all who wants to go to a concert by a good amateur orchestra when you can hear a professional orchestra?”

This brings to mind an interesting point. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, even a tiny bit, it’s the incredibly earnest bar band. Bar bands are, by their very nature, amateur, and the people that play in them are never very relaxed because they don’t get on stage enough to treat it like the workmanlike entertainment job that it is. Thus, it’s an uncomfortable experience for both performers and audience. Now, if a bar band was named “We Fucking Suck” or something, (“slaughtering the classic rock hits since 1995!”) I’d have a whole different opinion of the matter, and could actually revel in the parts they got right.

Note to aspiring bar-band performers: take a page from the Really Terrible Orchestra’s songbook, and plainly wallow in the inherent humor of your position. It’ll make things much more pleasant, and you might even actually get somewhere with it. After all, look at Ween.