REVIEW: Tenacious D gets a C minus in Edmonton

As a rock star, Jack Black makes a pretty good actor – and that’s exactly what he’s doing in his band Tenacious D. He’s pretending to be a rock star.

He’s as believable on a concert stage as he is in his movies, which are all exactly the same: Rollicking wholesome family blockbusters where the unlikely wise-cracking action hero prevails against ninja tigers/monsters/giant apes/evil clocks – and we all learn something in the end. We all remember the 2003 feature School of Rock, where he plays the role of a rocker pretending to be a teacher who winds up teaching kids how to rock and prevailing against the stuck-up headmistress. Very meta.

Black had rocking experience before the movie. Almost a decade earlier in Los Angeles, he and fellow up-and-coming actor Kyle Gass teamed up to write novelty songs as “Tenacious D” – and the rest is history. And you can bet they wouldn’t have drawn 5,000 fans to the Shaw Conference Centre on Tuesday night if it weren’t for Jack Black’s fame. Nice they kept the band together all this time. At this point, it’s clear they just indulge themselves by doing whatever the hell they want. There’s your problem.

The show turned out to be more like R-rated rock ‘n’ roll musical theatre than a proper rock band.

The first part was interesting enough. Bonus points for confounding the people with a bizarre 45-minute audio-visual presentation of their new album Post-Apocalypto – with a semi-transparent skrim in front of the stage on which were projected crude cartoons, some of them depicting graphic sex. Narration and lyrics fell in line with the imagery. Sample: “You motherfuckin’ dog, you motherfuckin’ mutt. I’m gonna drink your gravy. You shit a fuckin’ log, I bust a fuckin’ nut, I’ll fuckin’ plow your daisy.”

The story seemed to have something to do with Jack and Kyle surviving the Apocalypse, battling female warriors and giant vagina monsters, getting shot into space, and then, with the aid of a helpful horny Terminator from the future, retrieving a magic orb from the White House and stopping the Earth from blowing up. Or maybe it blew up after all. The final chorus before the scrim came up and Jack and Kyle took their bows, was “Save the Earth.” See? It was an R-rated rock ‘n’ roll musical with a message. We all learned something in the end.

The issue with this band is that an irony-deficient person might have trouble deciding if it’s novelty or the real deal. Maybe the guys themselves aren’t sure. Even Black’s approach to metal was theatrical. “What is the most powerful form of rock?!” he asked the crowd at one point. “RARRGHH!” came the answer. “That is correct,” said Professor Rock. “Metal!” Cue The Metal. Ozzy is turning over in his grave. He’d been killed by Post-Apocalypto.

Breaking it down: as novelty, Tenacious D is OK. They’re no Weird Al. No Dr. Demento. Not quite as good as Spinal Tap. But they’re just weird enough, though the songs often go on too long. Consider the Irony Event Horizon: The longer one does something as a joke, the more real it becomes until not even comedy can escape the massive gravitational pull of its influence.

So what if they are the real deal, musicians who put their hearts and souls into their art and would die if they couldn’t make music? This is a serious question because the band actually won the Grammy Award in 2015 for “Best Metal Performance” – against Slayer, no less. It’s not their fault Grammy voters are idiots.

The truth is that Tenacious D is just not that good a band. Sure, these two guys make up in pure balls and acting talent what they lack in vocal skill and musicianship, but most critically, the songs and the songwriting don’t measure up – novelty or no novelty. Few of these three-minute musical meta-jokes were memorable. They were maybe fun and shocking and entertaining while they lasted, and forgotten a moment later. A lot of it was about itself: Rock ‘n’ roll songs about rock ‘n’ roll – and we have enough of those.

Most artists are serious about their art, even with comedy. You get the feeling that the guys in Tenacious D don’t even take their comedy seriously, that they’re just fooling around, on vacation from acting. This is normally a good thing. Here, they have nothing to lose, and something – at least in Black’s case – to fall back on if the rock ‘n’ roll shtick doesn’t work out.

#TenaciousD

5 Responses to REVIEW: Tenacious D gets a C minus in Edmonton