Steel Panther, The Greatest Band Ever
Bumped From Friday

Iowahawk mentioned on Twitter that he was ready to do some headbanging at a "Steel Panther" show.

I accused him of making it up. No heavy metal band would be so stupid to call themselves Steel Panther. It's just too dumb. Even for metal.

He told me to google it, so I did. At which point I suggested there was an elaborate hoax afoot, most likely some viral marketing for an energy drink or something. No one poses like that anymore. No one was even that cheesy in the 80s.

Well, they're real. They actually do shows and stuff.

The idea of the band seems to be to take Spinal Tap and Tenacious D and turn them to 11 -- and by the way, don't even bother with cheesy sexual metaphors; just write songs explicitly about "boners" and "boobs" -- and make it real.

I'm linking some of their best (and I use this word advisedly) stuff below. It's all very NSFW. Maybe for later.

"Fat Girl (Thar She Blows)"

Yes, that's a whale joke. And that's one of the more elevated jokes.

"Death To All But Metal"

This rips off like five different songs.

Every metal band released a hard-rocking single first, then followed it up with a romantic power ballad, for the girls. It was always this second single that shot the band to the top of the charts; it became completely obligatory.

Anyway, Steel Panther isn't all about metal and boobs and sex. They also have a romantic side. As exemplified here, in

"Weenie Ride"

One of their cleverest songs is "Tomorrow Night," about the greatest party in the century, with naked people and Charlie Sheen, but it's going down, unfortunately, tomorrow night. Tonight, on the other hand, is kind of lame.

How perfect is that album cover? Incredible. Their previous album had a title nearly as good: Feel the Steel.

For this one I think they just went over their old WASP albums and thought, "What's the stupidest possible song we could write about Hell?" And they came up with

"Hell's On Fire"

Why yes. Yes, Hell is on fire. Good call.

Oh I could go on all day. In terms of increasing offensiveness, you can also check out "It Won't Suck Itself," "Eatin' Ain't Cheatin'," "The Shocker" and "Critter."

That's right, It Won't Suck Itself is the least offensive on the list. Because that, at least, is an attempt at an extremely thinly disguised metaphor for sex. (See, he gets bitten on his penis by a rattlensake, and you, the hot chick, has to suck out the venom. Later he gets stung by a scorpion in the same exact place. And he keeps getting bitten on his penis while he's banging you.)

But that's them working at a very high level, attempting metaphor and such. Most of the time they can't be bothered with pretentious devices like that, so they just sing, flatly, about vaginas and boners and dongs and big boobs. And The Shocker.

Oh: In case you were saying, "I dig the stupidity, pro-drug messaging, misogyny, homophobia, and nonstop degrading sexual material, but where's the racial offensiveness?," they cover that too, with the very subtle "Asian Hooker."

posted by Ace at 05:22 PM

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