I was promised a war in the Kokomo comments and it did not deliver.

Lorde just made it a hot ass summer

I’ve fully stayed away from all this stan army shit over the last few years (don’t really spend much time on Twitter or otherwise engage with the capital-P-Pop side of the aisle), and have just read things here and there about how they tend to engage online.

But holy shit to see even just a tiny little bit of it happen in that thread this week (and Tom’s Twitter replies), I was gobsmacked! Like, hey, you all need to calm the f down! It’s nothing! You’re arguing about nothing!

It’s one thing for a kid (I sure hope they were all kids) to be passionate about a pop star or something, but what really bothered me was the extent to which they all seemed to deeply, deeply internalize all of it. AND beyond that, the extent to which so many of them were using very similar talking-points style arguments, many I would say were very bad-faith and even potentially harmful (i.e. Tom is a racist white westerner trying to keep all Asian people from being successful). Granted their arguments are for something completely silly and ultimately pointless—the success of a pop group—but a lot of it seemed to fall right in line with the type of hive-mind, talking-point nonsense we’ve been hearing from the MAGA and Q crowd for the last number of years. Not to say at all that a bunch of teenage BTS fans are fucking right-wing extremists or anything at all like that, but it’s genuinely disturbing to see how hordes of comfortably anonymous people operating in a echo chamber can just go off whenever they get the itch. And extra disturbing to see literal children seemingly learning how to do it and deciding it’s okay.

Weird, man.

Having glimpsed what TNOCS is going to look like when Tom’s column arrives at the artists of today, I would like to beg the current TNOCS to please, for the love of God, stay and protect us.

Wild how the BTS stan army reaction to Tom’s article proved a number of points the article was making. Miffed at the reaction there. Some writer is critical of the system your favorite group operates in (not even critical of the group!) – why care that much?? I swear BTS does not need you to defend them they are doing just fine.

BTS And Their Fan Army Are Rendering The Shut Up Dude Charts Useless

No disrespect to Tom, but the premise that people might actively hate this song based on their dislike of Mike Love is incorrect, and I am Exhibit A.

I have loathed it from the first time I heard it, well before I was fully aware of Mike Love’s terminal assholism. Living in Florida, my repulsion was magnified by the number of times I had to hear the damn thing, because it dwells in the same family of musical abominations as Escape (The Pina Colada Song) and the entire Jimmy Buffet catalog. For decades now, it rears its ugly head wherever tourists dwell. Go for a drink almost anywhere near the beach during season and it will eventually creep up on you like a grinning, razor-toothed monster of musical death, intent on stealing the last vestiges of joy from your soul.

So here’s my Kokomo story.

I got married about a year and a half after this godawful song became number 1. Even though I do have functioning ovaries, I also hate wedding planning and so I tried to avoid that as much as I could, leaving the more excruciating details to my sister and mother. A band was hired. I did not care.

Until the reception, when I was being frogmarched around in a 90 pound gown in the middle of the freaking Florida summer by a photographer, to get the best outdoor shots before we lost the light (and got too drunk). As I am standing by the giant fountain, posing like a pissed off Macy’s mannequin, I hear the band start a new tune through the open doors of the venue…KOKOMO.

I was livid, friends. LIVID. I immediately made a beeline for the bandstand yelling, “No Kokomo! No Kokomo!” The singer looked at me for a minute, still singing, to see if I was having some sort of episode that required medical attention. When I and my huge foofy dress finally made it up to her, I looked her dead in the eye and said, “This song stops now. No Kokomo!” Not today!” She waved the band to stop playing, looking quite unnerved, and the venue full of family and friends was also pretty weirded out – except for my sister, who was laughing maniacally in the corner, having engineered this song on the set list because she knew how I hated it to my very bones. While it was enraging in the moment, I must tip my hat. Well played, Sis. Very well played.

Somewhere in my mother’s attic, there is a box from the photographer with unused proofs from the wedding shoot. And in those proofs is a shot of a beautiful fountain amd a handsome kilted man, obscured somewhat by a blur of fabric and permed hair that is about to vent the anger of a thousand suns at an unsuspecting wedding band singer.

So, I hate Mike Love now too, but I hate Kokomo on a molecular level, and I always have, trust and believe.

I hope that one, just one, BTS stan accidentally stumbled on the month in metal and had a life changing listen.

It can’t really be said enough just how spectacular Pyramid Dong is. My love for Radiohead has dwindled over the last decade and I’m rarely in the mood to listen to them any more, but Pyramid Song is eternal

The Army response was over the top. Obviously we knew we would get ratio’d, but it went way beyond that. They launched a DDOS that made the site inaccessible, signed up for our newsletter just to report it to our provider, flagged our tweets as abuse to Twitter, and posted pictures of Tom’s family while accusing him of racism. Plus many emails and tweets telling me to fire him lol. In the past 10 years Tom has written more articles championing K-pop groups than any other rock critic! It’s not BTS’ fault that the chart system is fucked, and their Army are certainly not the first problematic stans — maybe I could’ve edited to make that clearer. But they are still cyberbullies.

With that single artwork, it sure seems like she’s working hard to one up Billie now that she’s taken her throne.

If you like Lorde, you like shite music. Fact.

Imagine joking about any other religion’s main good guy this way.

do people actually like this artist? has there ever been one good song? this is utter dross

WE LIVE IN CITIIIIESSS
WHERE LORDE’S CHEEKS ARE ON SCREEN
NOT VERY PRETTY BUT
I GUESS SHE HAS A BUTT NOW

Longtime ‘Gum reader here (shoutouts Gabe, shoutouts Topher Grace), but I had to finally make an account to tell you all about the time I went to see David J, the bassist for Bauhaus, at a small cabaret-type venue in New York. There were probably seven people in the audience and David kept pausing his set (notably including a bossanova version of Bela Lugosi’s Dead???) because he thought my friends and I were heckling him, even though we were talking intermittently at a p respectfully quiet volume, so I guess he thought we were like, heckling him under our breath? I think at one point he literally said “is there something you’d like to share with the rest of the class?” Just an unbelievably insecure dude and one of the most uncomfortable shows I’ve ever been to. Anyway, I’m definitely getting tickets to this, gonna be weird as hell.