Could Josh Homme’s ego possibly be more bloated at this point? “This is a song about fuckin’,” he says with a satisfied chuckle, surely attempting to rile up a crowd who’d no doubt been bored stiff by the unintelligible mess Mastodon made of their set. Well yukety fucking yuk, Josh, but the joke’s on you because you’re a white trash pile of dusty, desert-mongering rattlesnake shit, you swollen-headed twat. For starters, the Nokia Theater seats about 7,000 people. Sure, it was a Monday night and tickets were forty fudge-packing dollars, but there must’ve been a good 5,000 heads milling around by the time Queens came on. Now if they gave two shits about their unfortunate fans, they would’ve charged half the price, played the entirety of Songs for the Deaf, closed with a cover of Alan’s Wrench, and promptly hung themselves backstage. But because we know Josh is a smug, self-indulgent rockstar, they labored through most of the new gibberish which half a liter of whiskey can’t even make interesting. It also appears that the band just doesn’t care about playing live anymore because they’ve got absolutely no stage presence. They looked tired, and so did the crowd. My brother actually fell asleep.

But who can blame Queens for sucking? The acoustics at the Nokia make the Whisky a Go-Go sound like the fucking Walt Disney Concert Hall. Don’t even get me started on the outdoor bar/Wolfgang Puck pizza tent, where a plastic sippy-cup of Jack n’ Coke was going for eight dollars. Inflated prices and underwhelming performances aside, the most infuriating part of going to shows in Los Angeles is the hipster factor. They stream down from the surrounding Los Feliz/Hollywood hillsides with the fury of a Wendol fireworm, making obnoxious everything in their path. Half of the people at the show were there to be seen rather than to see the show. Many of them mingled in the lobby with cocktails held at a precise tilt, pinky fingers extended to the most annoying degree. Mastodon, bless them, brought in enough scum to partially combat the scenester influx. Unfortunately, they pulled just as many lanky hardcore kooks in stupid Halloween costumes who’d never heard of the band before Blood Mountain.

Speaking of Mastodon, they were sincerely dreadful. Their set was a long, muddled string of racket; I could hardly decipher one song from the other. They tend to put on pretty good shows so I can only come back to blaming the Nokia—it might be comfortable, clean, spacious, and wonderfully lit, but fuck me if I haven’t heard more clarity at a high school talent show. Masters of molten metal my ass! Now that they’re flourishing with big-dollar backing and Hommeian endorsement, it remains to be seen whether or not they’ll turn to complete shit. I hope not. What surprised me the most was the predominant lack of groupie sluts. No whores at a Queens show?? I’m sure there were gaggles waiting back stage on all fours, lubed asses at the ready for Josh and his posse of idle drones, but the only strumpets I saw were the requisite Halloween nurses. Sadly, they were the only people worth seeing that night because Queens blew. Josh once said, “we want sex to bleed into the music.” That’s great, bud, especially when you’re the president of a 5,000 man sausage union for the night. You should be stripped, bound, and mercilessly flogged with the limb of a Joshua tree.