PAPA ROACH

Cut my life into pieces
This is my last resort

Ever get so mad you feel like the only way to deal is to shred an abstract concept? Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix can relate.

Suffocation
No breathing
Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding

Ever get so confused about the verb “cut” you need to first define “suffocation” and then declare your nonchalance about the entire scenario? He can relate to that, too. Heck, look at the guy’s motivation.

When Papa Roach first got way more famous than they ever deserved with that song, Last Resort, and its accompanying album Infest, Mr Shaddix was using a different name. He called himself Coby Dick, and he claimed it was because he was a distant relative of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.

If that story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s how the King of Yuppie Electronica, AKA Richard Melville Hall, AKA Moby explains his moniker. Same story, but earlier. Which means dude got beaten to the punch by MOBY. It should be no surprise he had such a grudge against the world. Also, his name was Coby Fucking Dick.

Coby Dick, courtesy of AwkwardBoners.com

Still, there’s one thing Papa Roach got right in their abomination of a career. Like so few of their peers in nu-metal, they recognized it was a genre on the way out. 2002’s Lovehatetragedy, the follow-up to the monstrously successful Infest, featured only one track with rapping, and by the time album number three rolled around it was hammy, melodramatic singing all the way.

Time and Time Again was the lead single from 2004’s Getting Away With Murder, an album that the NME noted had probably been written in “purple ink in diaries with little locks on”. PRO TIP: that track is notable for the fact that if you take away all of the lyrical clichés and ProTools overproduction, you’re left with an acoustic recording of a young woman singing Kumbaya.

At the time, fans of the band criticized the album for its comparatively soft sound, which apparently wasn’t enough to stop them from buying 1.2 million fucking copies of the record and saving Coby Dick from the welfare queue for a little longer.

LOL.

As with so many other shit-average FM rock bands the US has churned out in recent years, Papa Roach’s career after their one big hit is kind of a mystery to us in Australia. Natch, this doesn’t mean they weren’t able to find plenty of suckers to buy their shit: in fact, after Getting Away With Murder went platinum, Papa Roach released The Paramour Sessions, which was recorded in a rural Californian mansion on Slipknot’s suggestion and sold nearly half a million copies. They toured with Guns ‘n Roses and Motley Crue, and were the subject of a string quartet tribute album called Perfect Murder: Strung Out on Papa Roach.

A string quartet album? What the fuck is the target market there, right? Actually, I’m not sure. But if you’re wondering where the hair-metal connection is, why, it’s with the misogynistic bombast on this track, Hollywood Whore, from their freshly-minted Metamorphosis album:

Without wanting to get all sanctimonious on you: it is a fucking travesty that that song is from an album that came out only three months ago. I’ll save you the pain of having to watch the whole thing yourself: it’s about a young woman of loose morals. She’s got no soul, she’s a white trash queen with a plastic smile, and Coby Dick would like to “kick her teeth in”. The track ends with Dick telling her “Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya, honey”.

There’s a lot of terrible bands on this blog, but not many of them are anything more than musically offensive. Papa Roach are, and they’re also the band who are the most successful post one-hit-wonder. So, if there’s one heavy-handed fucking moral those genre-bending, sexist jerks Papa Roach can teach us, it’s that musical trends will come and go, but foul-mouthed arseholes degrading women are forever.