YOU CAN'T SPELL 'ACERBIC' WITHOUT ERIC:

My Music Reality Show Idea

Tuned! Or Scored or F-Majored or whatever.

I have grown weary of television over the last few years. I’ve grown to despise the predictable, trite, formulaic crap the networks churn out. And I think I’ve never really been able to forgive television people for cancelling Firefly, so there’s a lot of television-directed anger swimming around in my amygdala. But, oddly, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Like, a LOT of cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, Chefs vs. City, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef: Masters… All these shows fascinate me. But the one I’ve been watching most of lately is called Chopped.

If you’re unfamiliar with this show, the premise is this: they get four chefs every week (something I’ve been wondering lately: what is the difference between an executive chef and a Master Chef? I can only imagine that they hold a secret tournament every year where executive chefs fight to the death with lime zesters and halibut de-scalers, and the one left standing is elevated to Master Chef status. Mario Batali must be a BADASS with a zester). They give them baskets containing odd ingredients, and they have to make food including those ingredients. For example, one round they might open their baskets to reveal polenta, starfruit, crab eyeballs, and the rare man-eating blood-saffron, and each one is given thirty minutes to incorporate those items into something delicious. There are three rounds–appetizer, entree, and dessert–and one chef is eliminated (“chopped,” if you hadn’t already guessed) after each round, leaving one victor with ten thousand dollars and all his or her limbs intact.

So I was watching this show, and I started thinking how great it would be to adapt it into a musical contest. I mean, let’s be as brutally metaphorical as possible: music-based reality shows are the oozing pus leaking out of the weeping sore infecting the malignant tumor of the wrinkled rectum of the television medium. There’s more to music than emotionally unstable attention whores singing pentatonic melismas to karaoke arrangements of “I Will Survive,” right?

RIGHT?

OK, I’m just going to move on, as I always do, with the assumption that I’m correct. There are lots of music programs on television, but none of them is really concerned with the creative element–only the most soul-destroying aspect of the performance element. So here’s my idea for a GOOD music show. I’ll call it, um, Tuned or Strung or some crap. That’s really more the concern of the PR department.

The show opens with four songwriters (maybe MASTER songwriters, if we can get enough regular songwriters to battle to the death, which we should probably do anyway. Thin out their ranks a little bit). They would open a guitar case, or maybe a piano lid, and inside would be a number of musical elements to be woven into a song. These could range from structures (verse-chorus-verse-bridge-whatever) to odd instruments that must be used in some way (how great would it be to see a guitar player trying to lay down an ocarina track?) to a chord that has to be used (Bb half-diminished 11, probably) to an idea that has to be incorporated into the lyrics (crab eyeballs, obviously). Each songwriter would have to write a song using these elements in, say, an hour and a half (songwriting is three times as hard as cooking). And then the judges would deliberate (ideally all the judges would be me) and decide who gets TUNED. Or STRUNG UP, or SCORED, or F-MAJORED, or whatever the crap name of the show is.

The songwriters will, of course, have access to a state-of-the-art recording studio. This will allow for the maximum amount of 1) creative innovation, and 2) product placement. Gotta pay for these things somehow, I guess, and that’s certainly how the cooking shows do it. The one thing that will under no circumstances be allowed in the recording studio is an auto-tune plug-in, because ya gotta have standards.

I know the TV people would probably want to choose the songwriters from a pool of super-famous, established album-sellers. Which would probably mean that each week would be a competition between Kanye West, Bono, and Dave Matthews. But I do not want to see that show. No, on my show, the songwriters will be my friends and people I admire. I’ve already got the first episode all thought out: it’ll be Sean Spillane, formerly of Arlo, Jon Rustad from Underwater City People, Mike Schnee of Pu$$y Cow and Wormstew fame, and Mac Dunlop of the Letter Openers. And I guess since I don’t want to see any real people suffer, after the participants have been F-Majored or whatever, they’ll just get to pummel an LA Weekly music writer until their arms are tired.

But here’s the twist: the pummelees are the LOSING contestants from my other music reality show, Ear Palate Beatdown. This one’s inspired by a segment on Hell’s Kitchen, wherein blindfolded contestants have to identify kinds of food solely by taste. My secondary show’s the same, only the contestants are rock writers, and they have to identify sounds. They’ll listen to all sorts of different basic musical elements–an oboe, a diminished chord, a melodic minor scale, a bass clarinet, et cetera–and when they miss three in a row (which they will), they’re sent to the other show to be savagely beaten. The point is the same as the Hell’s Kitchen bit: if you can’t identify the building blocks of food, you have no business being a chef, and if you can’t identify the basic components of music, you have no business writing about it.

Do you hear, me, rock writers? It’s not a cello. It’s not a violin. It’s not a fiddle. It’s a viola! A viola! IT’S A GOD-DAMNED VIOLA!