My Dumb Quarter Century: In 1997, Nothing Rocked My World like Scharpling & Wurster's "Rock, Rot & Rule"
Welcome to the first entry in My Dumb Quarter Century. It’a column that will explore my twenty five years as a pop culture writer with a chronological series of essays about an important piece of entertainment from every year I’ve been a professional pop culture writer.
Twenty five years! A quarter century. That is a long time and I am fucking exhausted.
We begin at the beginning, in 1997, when I began freelancing for the entertainment section of a plucky satirical newspaper called The Onion. It was a magical time when everything was perfect and the future radiated infinite promise.
That’s probably reductive and at least a little bit inaccurate but I was twenty one years old, my rent was paid for by a generous scholarship from the good folks over at the Jewish Children’s Bureau, my tuition was covered by federal aid and I was collecting a check from my favorite publication in the world.
It was a goddamn utopia, is what it was, a golden age, a halcyon period for me as a person and our culture as a whole. I have tremendous nostalgia for those scruffy early days at The A.V. Club before anybody had any idea who we were or what we were doing.
This gave us a freedom that now seems perverse. At one time it was not unusual for us to run a 4000 word interview with the Unknown Comic in print. When I think back fondly, if fuzzily, to those days I often think about the central role Scharpling & Wurster played in defining the site’s aesthetic and sensibility and the magic of discovering “Rock, Rot & Rule.”
“Rock, Rot & Rule” was something you had to discover. Like The Onion itself, or Mr. Show, it still had that exhilarating underground feel of being out of the reach of the mainstream.
The call that would eventually take become the CD and album Rock, Rot & Rule was recorded on November 19th, 1997 for Tom Scharpling’s WFMU show.
The comedy team of writer, podcaster and radio host Tom Scharpling and superstar drummer Jon Wurster achieved perfection the very first time around. Everything that the duo would create and become over the ensuing decades, the vast universe that they would create together, is present in embryonic form in “Rock, Rot & Rule.”
The chemistry could not be stronger. They could not be more perfectly in sync. They were absolute beginners when it came to working together on the radio yet it felt as if they’d been collaborating all their lives, and past lives as well.
The brilliant, intricately layered premise of “Rock, Rot & Rule” is that Wurster is Ronald Thomas Clontle, the author of an upcoming book called Rock, Rot & Rule that separates musicians into the impossibly nebulous categories of either rocking, ruling, rotting or falling into the much smaller category of “none of the above.”
Clontle and his publisher Penguin call the book “the ultimate argument settler” yet its methodology seems designed to cause the kind of pointless arguments that are the essence of true rock fandom.
As Clontle relates with altogether too much pride, Rock, Rot & Rule is not a subjective or personal work but rather a collection of conclusive judgments about the ultimate worth of all music cobbled together from opinions gathered at his job at a Star Wars-themed coffee shop called Java the Hut, home of the Bottomless Wookie in Lawrence, Kansas, and a trip to visit family in Gainesville, Florida.
This uniquely inefficient means of rating musicians has led to a surreally random series of determinations. We learn, for example, that David Bowie rots because his music contains “too many changes” while The Beatles don’t get the top ranking because of “too many bad songs.”
Ronald Thomas Clontle represents a quintessentially American strain of buffoon: a stubbornly misguided maroon who is not only egregiously, hilariously wrong but defiant, defensive and arrogant in that wrongness.
Pretty much everything that the self-untaught musicologist says is spectacularly incorrect, often on multiple levels, but his absolute self-confidence never wavers. He is bulletproof in his cockiness. Nothing can get through to him.
This would become a Wurster speciality: horrible men whose unearned arrogance and entitlement are wedded to a complete lack of self-awareness. They have no idea how the world actually sees them, so they have no idea how insane and ridiculous they seem.
That’s another Wurster trademark: saying the most insane thing ever uttered as if it represents the unassailable height of sanity and anyone who thinks otherwise should be committed.
Ronald Thomas Clontle lies about the big things and the small things. He lies about Puff Daddy playing electric guitar AND about Madness inventing ska. But he lies with a sense of absolute certainty that’s both consistently guffaw-inducing and strangely hypnotic.
It’s American but it’s also very male to both be spectacularly wrong and pathologically unwilling to concede that you could ever be wrong, let alone wrong in that particular instance.
In that respect Contle is a proto-troll. He’s someone who gets off on enraging the world with insupportable, bonkers opinions presented as incontrovertible facts and then scuffling with apoplectic people who call him on his bullshit.
The soon to be author mentions early on that while the interview is taking place he’s watching the dramatic end of a basketball game he has a lot of money riding on. That could be the premise for an inspired Scharpling & Wurster bit in itself but here it’s merely integrated into the madness.
Scharpling would poke holes in Clontle’s arguments except that they are a series of holes so utterly vast that no logic or sanity can reach them.
Scharpling is, all things considered, relatively gentle with the man who would soon ostensibly give the world Rock, Rot & Rule. He’s aghast at his tactics as well as his conclusions but he’s also amused by him and his absolute faith in himself.
The same is true of callers who seem to sense, understandably, that a book this misconceived and worthless could not actually exist, let alone be published by someone like Penguin. Yet they do not call him on his bullshit because they don’t want to ruin the fun and because the fictional author is so firm in his delusional convictions that he almost makes the impossible possible through will alone.
“Rock, Rot & Rule” is an extended and inspired meditation the irresistible pointlessness of rating and ranking artists and albums, of acting as if the relative merits of different works of art are worth arguing about incessantly, in a variety of forms and mediums, until the end of time.
But it also speaks to how small, insignificant and irrelevant the vastness of great art makes fans, how our response to musicians transforming the messiness of life into transcendent art can run the gamut from, “That was okay” to “That’s not as good as their first EP.”
The more his insanity is exposed and gleefully mocked, the loftier Clontle’s rhetoric becomes. At one point he refers to the book’s absurdly random judgments as something that “should be thought of as coming from on high”, like the Ten Commandments.
For Scharpling & Wurster, Rock, Rot & Rule was only the beginning. Calls from Wurster as a variety of arrogant characters, many bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Ronald Thomas Clontle in terms of attitude and impregnable self-delusion, became a staple of Scharpling’s beloved independent radio institution The Best Show.
Sixteen years later I had the surreal honor of being on The Best Show to promote an implausible-seeming music book of my own called You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, a druggy treatise on how, actually, Insane Clown Posse and Phish are GREAT and you should be a HUGE fan of both, the way I am, named after a Buck Owens song.
I’m not sure that Scharpling was moved by my words or my arguments any more than listeners were by Clontle’s assertions but it was nevertheless one of the highlights of my career.
The Best Show is comfort food for me. It makes a sometimes vast and scary world feel a little more intimate and manageable and while I’ll sometimes go long stretches without listening, in part because episodes are three hour long, I always return and I’m always satisfied.
Listening to Rock, Rot & Rule in 2022 is a real time warp experience in that it takes me back to the giddy days of the Clinton era and a time when I still felt hope for the future while anticipating a toxic online culture of pointless argumentation and fiercely debated but ultimately meaningless ranking and rating.
More importantly, it is goddamn hilarious no matter how many times you’ve listened to it. It rules and rocks.
NEXT: 1998’s Now That's What I Call Music! Volume 1, followed by 1999’s Our Dumb Century
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