(above : popular recording artist Zac Brown)

Hey, at least someone’s getting Chris Guccione off the hook! The Guardian’s Dave Bry admits he’s thoroughly entertained by the dramatic events taking place during the MLB Division Series’, but pleads for someone (anyone!) to locate the residence of the person responsible for baseball’s postseason intro/outro theme tunage and “find his music collection (I imagine it will be on CD), pour gasoline all over it and set it afire.” Bry’s specific axe to grind is with MLB’s excessive use of “Heavy In The Head”, a collaboration between the Zac Brown Band and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, which the author protests is, “an astoundingly dumb song”.

Are you familiar with the Zac Brown Band? They’re pretty much the same as Mouse Rat, the fictional rock band led by dimwitted bohunk Andy Dwyer (played by Chris Pratt) on the popular TV show Parks & Recreation. Mouse Rat songs borrow heavily from the trembly-voiced, excruciatingly sincere music you would have heard at a frat party in the 1990s – Pearl Jam, Candlebox and Hootie & the Blowfish come to mind. They are funny because they’re so bad on purpose.

But the Zac Brown Band is not funny – they’re not trying to be bad on purpose. And they still end up sounding like a paint-by-numbers spoof of lug-headed meat-rock. Here are the lyrics to the opening verse of Heavy Is the Head:

Night falls
Smoke on the water
Darkness closes in
Cold white hand
In the deep
Will drown you for your sins

Christ. If only.

While I share (to some extent) Bry’s frustrations, it comes as news to me (and perhaps most of you) that Pearl Jam were a knowing self-parody.