Heavy rock: Music made by the intellectually challenged for 13-year-olds. To be sung as if your nads are in the process of dropping. It’s funny: finally people have realised this, chuckling ‘ironically’ as they buy Darkness records and now enjoy the broad comic strokes of School Of Rock, which is directed by the highly unlikely figure of Richard Linklater. It’s set alight, however, by the highly broad figure of Jack Black, a man who can’t help but be funny in everything he does. Someone’s evidently decided that his sidebar in the High Fidelity movie as a gurning air guitarist should be extended into a feature and, drawing on experiences and expertise gathered from his own rock/comedy offshoot Tenacious D, he launches a headbanging assault on good taste.
Try describing this album without saying: “It rocks.” Even Led Zeppelin, not known for flinging their classics at movie producers more than once a decade, have allowed?after a special filmed appeal from Black?the use of “Immigrant Song”. There are hoary old chestnuts aplenty: The Who’s “Substitute”, Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love”, The Doors’ “Touch Me”. Stevie Nicks’ “Edge Of Seventeen” reminds you where the intro to Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” came from, and The Darkness inevitably chime in with “Growing On Me”. Garage blues revivalists The Black Keys represent ‘modern’ times; The Ramones reckon “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down”. Less exuberant are the karaoke versions of “TV Eye” by Wylde Rattz (originally from Velvet Goldmine) and of AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way To The Top” by Black and the cast. These merely serve to advertise the fact that the originals weren’t for whoring. As for ‘dialogue excerpts’: who needs ’em?
Still, any record featuring T. Rex’s “Ballrooms Of Mars” undoubtedly has its lizard-leather boots on and its diamond hands stacked with roses when the moon sings. Now that’s an education.