“Sick Awesome Rad Dude” is a lampoon of the type of knee-jerk bare-bones criticism that a performing musician receives, often giving generously, gratuitously, by a drunken drugged up man boy in a shitty basement. Èlg’s recitation is laced with comedy and venom, spat at the audience from the artist. Return fire—warranted or not. After all, it is the artist not the audience who tends to criticism. The job calls for it.
Is “Sick Awesome Rad Dude” delivered from a better-than-thou vantage point that artists often take, is it a necessary post-social vent of frustration that emerges from an inability to communicate, is it a vocal exercise that sublimates vulgarity, through reorganization and repetition and tape tapping, into something more poetic, or is it a nice little laugh, a funny little track that would fit right in on, say, Adam Sandler’s debut full-length as another escapade of The Buffoon (“The Buffoon Goes To An Underground Opera In A Sandwich Shop”)? Well, I’m laughing. “When it’s good it’s good no?”