Someone Wanted To Kill Michael Azerrad Because They Liked The Sound Of His Name

Lucas Jensen | October 30, 2008 5:15 am

Big-time rock critic Michael Azerrad’s life took an unusual turn recently, when a proggy British emo band called Tubelord* wrote a song about killing him. The murderous ode to him, called “I Am Azerrad,” is their next single, and it features these lyrics:

“I see today, I see you, Azerrad / I’ve read the clues, they lead me to your head / I’ll kill today, I’ll kill you, Azerrad.”

That seems pretty conclusive to me! At least Azerrad got in some good lines about it when he wrote the incident up for Spin–he even tracked down the lead singer of the band, Joe Prendergrast, who acted all quiet and British-y about the whole thing, saying he picked Azerrad’s name because it had a “swing to it.” As Idolator pal Eric Harvey notes, Prendergrast’s defense is pretty flimsy.

“I’m really sorry about that, man. I didn’t want to freak you out. You were kind of an abstract concept — all I knew of you was your name, not as a flesh-and-blood being…[y]ou’re like an MP3 online…Anyone can do whatever they want with you. They can cut you up and make a little remix.”

Huh. Okay. That sounds all nice and Internet-y and stuff, but you are talking about murdering a guy who you don’t know and have no reason to dislike, let alone hate Eh, the guy seems fairly harmless, if a bit of a twit. Maybe it is because he’s in a proggy British emo band.

Elsewhere in the piece, Azerrad relates this story about Ira Robbins encountering guff from an unlikely source:

In 2000, twee poppers Tokidoki lashed out with “Ira Robbins,” possibly as revenge for a bad review Robbins gave their friends. Imagine getting hated on by a twee-pop band — is there anything more humiliating? “Oh, no, I felt immortalized,” Robbins says. “It was my song. Someone had picked me out of all the pile of journalists to point the finger at.” But, he adds, “It would have been different if it was some hardcore band screaming, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you!’ ”

It got me thinking: What kind of bands could threaten my life and actually scare me? Proggy British emo? Do you see that picture up there? What a bunch of losers! I would take down Banana Boy first and move along to Chin Hair there, saving Maybe A Girl for last, but not certainly not least. I have this all mapped out in my head, wherein I execute a series of moves that are a combination of Hulk Hogan and Yoda from Episode II. And if a twee pop band threatened me? Pshaw. If Bunnygrunt wrote a song called “Lucas Jensen’s Head On A Plate”, I’d probably just laugh in their barre chord-strumming faces.

Now, for example, if my foes were a beefy hardcore band from Cleveland or a Romanian black metal group or some tattooed Texas bar rockers with Harleys, yeah, I might worry. Someone affiliated with Suge Knight? Given past history, yes. But Tubelord? Heck, no.

What kind of musical artists would scare you if they started a beef?

Lyrical Assassin [SPIN; HT: Marathonpacks]

*Tubelord?! Is that what passes for a band name these days? Eesh.