I don't care about much these days--I'll walk around in public with my hood up and not feel like a geek, and I might even wear sweatpants to the grocery store. I've decided that everyone is entitled to my opinion, and not just in print, and I've also come to realize that I don't give a rat's ass who thinks I'm an ignoramus for speaking my mind when it comes to classic punk rock. I say: It sucks. Specifically, all of it. It's annoying and base and hairy-knuckled and smells bad--it's written for idiots by idiots who can't string three words together without using the word "fuck" twice. The worst offenders? THE EXPLOITED. Utterly charmless and stupid, claiming "Punk's Not Dead" and thereby sinking a corroded ax into its underdeveloped cerebrum. The most annoying? THE MISFITS, hands down.

Witness: I'm sitting at the Cha-Cha Lounge the other night; the bartender slips Misfits into the sound system. Suddenly, Pine Street between Belmont and Summit becomes some Northwest version of the Rikers Island holding tank. Shabby, tattooed, smelly boy-men begin sloshing and shoving, singing badly and refusing to step aside no matter how desperately I launch myself toward the door. A bunch of meatheads mouthing along with another bunch of meatheads, a generation between them, yet a mindset in common, completely unchanged by the years.

Among all living music makers and songwriters, Misfits singer Glenn Danzig is the preeminent moron--a misogynistic, homophobic, hyper-violent, sawed-off little shit who wrote, without a doubt, the most juvenile lyrics in the history of rock and roll. How's this for a love song? "Well I got something to say/I raped your mother today/And it doesn't matter much to me/As long as she spread" ("Last Caress," covered by Metallica, don't get me started...); or, "Little Angelfuck, I see you going down on a fireplug" ("Angelfuck"). He's probably the only guy in the world born before 1975 who has issues with Marilyn Monroe: "Rotted corpse, sex decay/Breasts all full of slugs/No answer for the accident/Her cunt has all dried up, you see" ("Who Killed Marilyn Monroe"). Danzig also managed to come up with the most retarded song title that sounds like a Lifetime made-for-TV movie with "Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?" And yes, let us not forget, that dumb-ass fathead Henry Rollins sang on the band's 1982 EP Evilive.

I could go on and on about dum-dum Danzig and his stoopid belief that he's actually a goddamn wolf, but frankly, I've got other punk icons to ridicule. There's THE CLASH, who sounded like a bunch of hippies every time they trotted out their lame, embarrassing attempts at reggae. BLACK FLAG, tongue-in-cheek? My ass.

As I wind down this liberating spew, I want to propose a public throttling of these bands for the unforgivable crime of giving rise to the notion that any adolescent asshole with a shitty voice and the ability to hock a loogy could start a "punk" band, beginning with THE BEASTIE BOYS' awful Polly Wog Stew and continuing today with all the crap-ass bands filling out RKCNDY's last gasps as an all-ages punk venue.

As far as I'm concerned, that wrecking ball can't swing soon enough.