Welcome to Loserville, by Son of Dork
Suggested by Daniel Lettin
Go take a look at this album’s cover.
Five quirky-haired “teens”, with textbook wackiness and boy band eyes. I hate them all. I want to punch every one of them in their exposed throats. I hate the word “dork”. I hate the word “loser”.
Things do not bode well for these guys.
The album starts with the anthemic Ticket Outta Loserville. It’s jolly but standard pop punk, with a bouncing rhythm and a nice build and release. It channels McFly and Busted, and a little Green Day, but that’s no surprise as Googling reveals that the main driver of the band is an ex-Busted guitarist.
The song is a story, the mirror of Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boi. It revolves around a nerdy schoolkid who asks a girl on a date as part of a Truth or Dare game, only for her to accept and provide his “ticket outta Loserville.” Goodbye, chess and Star Trek! Hello, hotties and popularity! Of course, the date is a dud, and the nerd gets back into his box.
I hate this song. I hate that it cynically mimics the American High School Experience, despite being played by English twenty-somethings. I hate that it gloms onto nerd chic in a superficial way, like the disquieting geek blackface of The Big Bang Theory. And I hate it because it’s still the standout from the album, because the rest are infinitely worse.
Every song on Welcome to Loserville targets a very singular demographic. It’s written for teenage outcast emo Incel male “nice guys” who actively and passively detest women on every level. If you’re not an Angry Young Man one grenade short of the next Columbine, or if, god forbid, you’re a woman, then you can go hang.
Let’s look at some songs. There’s Little Things, in which the protagonist is stalking an apparent crush, buying binoculars to watch her “playing badminton with all [her] slutty friends”. There’s Party’s Over, in which the protagonist is sad that his girlfriend has just been “laid on the sofa” at a party by some random guy, and he laments that he’s been “stranded at first base [and] never saw her naked”. There’s Holly… I’m the One, in which the protagonist laments helping his best friend land the girl he likes himself, claiming “it sucks that he won, ‘cos he’s a dick and you’re amazing.” There’s Sick, in which the protagonist is tailing his crush and her boyfriend in his car, to a make-out spot, where he considers running them down and ripping out their throats.
It’s everywhere. It’s every line, in every song. It’s so ridiculous, it has to be tongue-in-cheek, right? If so, then fair play, ya got me. If not… I’m speechless.
While I nodded my head and hummed along to the opening track, I found my jaw dropping and my patience thinning through every greasy and inappropriate minute. It’s a calculated, corporate, finger-buffet money-grubbing abomination, a polished and packaged manifesto of sexual entitlement, a call to arms for a disenfranchised generation of asshats who think women, and the world, owe them the bras off their back and their mindless devotion.
This album made me legitimately furious. It’s obnoxious, toxic, misogynistic, sleazy, hateful, soulless cookie-cutter sewage. Everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed. Welcome to Loserville gets 2/10, and it should be thankful for that.