If you’re a regular reader of MOJO (or this very blog for that matter) or if you are a former/current record store employee, then you will laugh your ass off at Rock, Rot & Rule, Scharpling & Wurster‘s infamous and hilarious reverse-engineered prank call cum classic comedic roasting of rock snobs. It’s heavy meta fun and has probably been played literally millions of times in vans stinking of skunky weed (and feet) by touring rock groups.

Tom Scharpling is the longtime host of “The Best Show” on WFMU. Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster—the two met at a My Bloody Valentine show—would call in to Scharpling’s show and pretend to be an annoying asshole, impervious to how oblivious he’s being long enough for the audience to become enraged and start calling in to debate him.

These two can hit it out of the ballpark. Their most famous creation is Rock, Rot & Rule where Wurster’s character, an infuriatingly dense, musically ignorant moron named “Ronald Thomas Clontle” promotes his upcoming book “Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler” on Scharpling’s show.

“Clontle” feigns being distracted by TV basketball when the call comes from Scharpling, who is live on WFMU (“Orlando and Cleveland and I’ve got a lot of money riding on it and it’s not going my way. Wilkins just got hurt…”).

As Clontle reveals, the “scientific method” used to compile his 98 page “ultimate argument settler”—basically a list dividing all of popular music history into three categories: “rock,” “rot,” and “rule”—was simply to ask approximately 100 patrons of “Java The Hut,” the Lawrence, KS coffee shop (“Home of the bottomless Wookie”) he worked at to rank musical acts according to the preposterous criteria he devised. People were also canvassed at a record store near his grandmother’s home in Florida. He tells Scharpling, “I’m not a critic, I’m more a compiler of opinions.”

The Beatles merely “rock” but do not “rule” because, as Clontle says matter of factly, “they wrote a lot of bad songs.” Stereolab rots (sucks) “because they don’t use guitars.” (It’s not possible to “rock” unless you do. “Bruce Hornsby rules, but he doesn’t rock because he doesn’t play guitar.”)

Aerosmith, The Who and The Rolling Stones all “rule.” Dread Zeppeln rocks, Led Zeppelin rules. P. Diddy—then still known as “Puff Daddy”—“rules” and therefore rates more highly than David Bowie (who rots due to “too many changes”) or Neil Young who gets dinged for Trans and Landing on Water simply because Clontle has never heard any of his other albums..

Madonna rules. Supertramp rock. Kiss rule. Madness rule “because they started ska.” XTC rot. Yes rule, but not they do not rock. Emerson Lake and Palmer—as well as most, but not all, bands with prominent keyboards—definitely rot. Ween rule. Chilliwack gets weighted into “rulership” due to being Canadian (had they been America, they would merely rock, but it’s harder for Canadian groups to break out).

Frank Zappa rots because “humor has no place in music.” Kraftwerk rots. “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow rules, but the band itself, well they rot. The Beach Boys (who had “some stinkers”) fall into the rarer “none of the above” category along with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Queen rules the most, AC/DC rocks the most and Billy Joel is the most rotten of them all.

You get the picture. After fifteen or so minutes of this torture, Scharpling starts taking some calls from enraged (or merely perplexed) listeners. One guy gets so angry and worked up that he never picks up on the joke and calls in to the switchboard THREE TIMES.

Jon Wurster is unflappable, a genius at playing clueless idiots right up there with Fred Willard. Presented with all manner of input from the callers, he merely “reports” what his surveys have found, no matter how inconsistent or completely idiotic what he is saying is.

It’s one of the all time classic radio pranks and right where you are sitting now, you can click here to listen on Spotify or listen on Grooveshark below:
 

 
The deaths of celebrities have become predictably ghoulish spectacles, not only in the media (which is to be expected) but also in the misplaced “grief” and “deep love” that the public feels anew for the freshly deceased, as can be tallied up in the number of frantic Facebook wall and Twitter over-posting “tributes” that happen whenever someone famous dies. There’s a whole “firstism” tackiness to it all that makes me feel uncomfortable. And it’s so ritualized and dumbly Pavolian. I just don’t get it.

But something else I don’t get is how the occasion of Whitney Houston’s passing became such an excuse/empowerment for the worst racist trolling that I’ve seen in some time on the Fox News website, much that mentions President Obama, of course.

The Fox News website is always a hotbed of feverish racism and low IQ buffoonery, but usually they can’t be bothered to scrub their forums of it (there would be little else left) and so stuff like this tends to linger for a while. In this instance though, several hundred of the most egregious comments have already removed due to a public shaming by lefty websites. Comments that often had numerous “likes,” I should add.

Little Green Footballs cataloged some of them before they were deleted. Note how good the Fox New-watching trolls are at misspelling certain words so the filters won’t catch them (Actually they seem pretty good at misspelling almost anything, what am I saying?).

Hold your nose and take an “anthropological” look at what conservatives say to each other when they think no one else is paying attention [TO BE CLEAR: I removed spaces between the comments so this post wasn’t a mile long, but each paragraph here was from a different poster, this is not one long rant, as it might appear to be]:

A tragedy is when someones passes away from a terminal disease or something else that no one saw coming.Whitney is just an inferior lo w life ni gg er that needed to go,no tragedy,no loss.

Any death is a tragedy you heartless bástard.

not nignogs their death is a plus

SHe couldn’t even sell issues of “the national enquirer” anymore. Everyone was tired of the TNB. Niqqer flaps her lips and screeches, niqqer becomes rich. Niqqer ends up nearly broke after spending all of her money. Niqqer in constant fights and drug binges. Niqqer ODs when she learns she’s nearly broke and she is so wasted physically she can’t make another album. Niqqer hit the end of the road, niqqer thinking and niqqer behavior led her to where she had nothing. She couldn’t face life without the “bling bling”, she knew she would never have any more “kaching kaching”

[...]

I am now patiently waiting for the grand messiah Obama to have a blk fundraiser in honor of Whitley with Kevin Costner as guest of honor with all the Hollywood elites invited along with Alan Colmes, Al Sharpton, Jeremia Wright, Charles Rangel, etc. with a menu featuring blk eyed peas, grits, Imported Kobe steak, Dom Perignon, sweet potato pie and a mus lll im scarf as a momento of this great occasion.

Of course the door prize will be an all expense paid trip to Kenya to visit the Obama tribe and birthplace of his ancestors while the American people still look for this imposter’s birth certificate in Hawaii !!!

[...]

This is typical of the blk gene pool; it happens all the time. They cannot handle fame and fortune whether it’s derived from music, acting, sports or just plain entertainment. Too much fame and too much money at one time will ki ll ll you.

How many blk people have died from drugs including alcohol that have been in the sports and the entertainment industry or screwed up their married lives like Tiger Woods or worse, OJ Simpson !!!

This is the same disease that got Obama voted into the White House.

[...]

i don’t even consider them to be included in the human race let alone on a pedistal. the people that do are a bunch of loosers.

Story goes Obama sh0ved to much cr@ck up the wh0res @zz when he was going to sniiff it…

Obvious the use of to much hair strengthener did her in.That s__t will peel paint!

unfortunately like most nignog crack hoes she was able to apply her trade on “da streets”

Another nignog off the public social rolls

BIack females are the fattest segment of the population. BIack males are the most murderousss segment of the population. Africans have the lowest IQ of all people.

Like most of her species, she suffered from chronic stupidity.

tough break niqqer.

Nothing wrong with Coors, what is good about it most_n i g g e r s_ don’t like it

oh niqqa please,nigga please.

one of the only b l a c k chics i would have ever banged…..once you go c r ack er…..you dont do cr a c k

Woo Hoo One less obama voter

Whitney who?!? some /\/iggress music artist that had a couple of hits in the early 90’s. She’s since been forgotten and now she’s dead.. Who cares..

Africans love their drugs.

Jungle Buggie ??

This is a good lesson for all of you God loving Christian girls out there, stay away from “Jungle Love.”

One less bIack crack addict in the world today. Not such a big loss.

We Whiteys dont care about some monkey crackhead, change the headline!

How funny would it be if they fuckedup the tombstone. WHITEY HOUSTON

Their are B L A C K S and their are N i G G A S, which class do you put her mentor Bobby Brown into??? Whitney chose ???

Who cares? Black_trash gone is enough.

She is just like any other gh e tto queen.I hope the rest of these worthless piles in the inner cities follow her act .

What a waste of a good slit.

HER REAL NAME SHOULD BE KUNTA KINTI OR MOGUBA MAGABA, WHY AFRO-AMERICANS ARE USING ENGLISH NAMES AND LAST NAMES?….SHAME ON THEM!!

You know what you call Whitney Houston in a bathtub? A dead n i g g a h

Another buckwheat supporter bites the dust, oh well.

hatesandniqqers 3 hours ago

phuk you w hore,,,,,,,,,

Buckwheat is ne gro trash!

Bammy should not have given her crack from his personal stash!

B l a c k s have little to brag about about so they strut and crow about anything. The politically correct whites whine and cringe and try to be b l a c k themselves and identify with their “brothers”. Great singer but as stupid as her pal, the malignancy in the white house

she still be voting for the head niggg this nov

To bad it wasnt the monkey in the White House

If you’ve been thinking for some time that we’re living in an Idiocracy, these comments from the Fox News website will do nothing but strongly confirm that notion…

UPDATE: Fox News yanked ALL of the comments in that thread.

Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information (AlterNet)

When the Daily Mail calls rightwingers stupid, the result is dumbogeddon (The Guardian)
 

 
Like every blog, Dangerous Minds has had our fair share of trolls, and I’ve always been curious as to what these anonymous dickheads look like, where they live, what sort of abuse they suffered in childhood and all that…

But did the BBC take it too far by tracking down this disagreeable gentleman and publicly outing him? You guys weigh in the comments.
 

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Over on Oli Beale’s website there’s an amusing post about he how he tortures his friend James on Facebook. Oli explains: “I like going on my friend’s Facebook page, taking photos of him, changing his face slightly then putting them back up on Facebook. He doesn’t like me doing this.”

The results are pretty freakin’ funny. For a good laugh, go to OLI + ALEX to see more ‘shopped images of James. 

(via TDW and reddit )