Ever since I was a teenager, I have wanted to play a part in shooting a man into space. Oh, sure, I’d love to work for NASA, but that’s a different fantasy. This one doesn’t require so much math ability that I don’t have, or working for a government agency, or anything like that. I just want to strap Jimmy Buffett to a rocket and watch his asphyxiated corpse burn in the cleansing fire of the sun. I want it SO BAD.

The Dark One rides in on a wave of mediocrity.

For those of you who aren’t aware of his work, Jimmy Buffett is the antichrist. That’s really all you need to know about him. In the late seventies and early 80′s he toured nonstop and released a number of successful albums including his greatest hit, 77′s “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude” which contained his unavoidable single “Margaritaville”. Buffett has maintained an image of beach-bum chic, an association with island escapism, tropical drinks and the like that means you can’t go into a tiki bar without hearing some of his songs. This is only one of the many reasons I hate the monster so thoroughly, as I love tiki bars and tropical escapism. But I hate Jimmy Buffett. He is the Antichrist.

I was first exposed to the work of The Man of Sin in high school, when my “chemistry for dumb kids” teacher who sold snacks and sodas out of his room would pipe these sounds of damnation in to “help us” study. Perhaps it was some kind of scientific experiment, to see if the average young person could concentrate on their work while the sounds of unbearable torture were being blasted at them. I failed this test, as most of my time in that course was spent imagining different scenarios where Buffett was being eviscerated by gardening tools. Really, I knew I was being punished. I should’ve studied harder in the smart kid science classes, then I would avoided that pit. I never worked harder than I worked to get out of there, so maybe Mr. Orton was on to something. But the price… oh the price.

Because I hate Jimmy Buffett so, so much, I thought today I’d review his first greatest hits album, 1985′s “Songs You Know By Heart”. It contains the “big 8″, which are the “fan favorite” songs he still plays at every concert and has for thirty years like the teetering, talentless drunk phony he is. If we’re to understand my hate, this compilation is a great place to start.

“Songs You Know By Heart” starts, like most other cases of  rape, with the false security of familiarity. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is a song you’ve probably heard on one of those “classic” radio stations as you ride in your uncle’s car. This is the only way to really hear Jimmy Buffett anymore, in the company of his only fans: sad uncles. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is a monotonous, nonsensical (but not in the charming way), repetitive little dirge that must be heard coming out of the wood paneled dashboard of an RV, or in a dive bar with piles of dead silverfish in each corner, to be fully appreciated. Anywhere that hope has no place to take root, that’s the place you’ll hear it. The album follows up with “He Went to Paris”, “Son of a Son of a Sailor”, and a few other songs that are less known in the mainstream yet equally insipid, before it gets to the inevitable black hole of “Margaritaville”. You know it, admit it. “Wasted away again in Margaritaville” it starts, and if there’s a shred of decency left in your being then you jump out of your moving car and pray for sweet sweet death. “Searching for my lost shaker of salt” it goes on, hopefully to an empty car that’s careening through traffic before crumpling into a fireball on the highway margin. Otherwise, you’ll envy the dead.

Oh, so you think I’m being over-dramatic, huh? You think Jimmy Buffett’s not so bad, that he’s kinda folksy, a slacker idol of sorts? Fuck you. Fuck you with knives, the rest of “Songs You Know By Heart” starts at the dangerous depths of atrocity that are the “classics” and just keeps digging. Songs like “Pencil Thin Mustache” and “Grapefruit- Juicy Fruit” carry within them something truly magical, some indescribable force that boils unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs and leaves only little dried apple dolls with their fingers in their ears and their eyes clamped shut in a grimace. “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” is a song so bad that the dead cry blood when it’s played. Every single song on this album is a capital crime.

I would put a few samples from this album in this article, but really that would just make me part of the problem. You can look them up if you want, but I’m warning you, reader. Every time a Jimmy Buffet song is played, dark gods rip more from the Earth’s collective life force. Every customer that enters his theme restaurants is sustaining the father of all lies, every case of his atrocious “Land Shark” beer that’s sold is another sign of the apocalypse. “Songs You Know By Heart” is, admittedly, a good best-of album in that it encapsulates the artist’s style very well. Simplistic little guitar riffs that an autistic person with clubbed hands could play, maybe some background instrumentals by studio musicians who’ve sold their souls for the right to feed at the filth trough, and little “flourishes” in the lyrics sung by a man with the vocal range of Stephen Hawking. If you’re a fan of this bile, then all the following apply to you:

You were hewn from the purest kind of failure, Jimmy Buffett fan.

1- You don’t just have no taste, you have the opposite of taste. Your choices of what to listen to are little gouges in good taste, they take away from the ability for anything to ever be good again.

2- You have never heard actual music. “Music” is understood to you the same way “emotions” are understood by sociopaths, as a foreign concept they’ve correlated a separated familiarity with due to context. You can’t feel, you’re not actually a human being.

3- You are divorced, several times over probably. Nobody can love you, and this is a saving grace of man. If you somehow still have a lover in any capacity, then it’s a ruse. They’re going to kill you and take all the money you made at that baby-aspirin factory or whatever other crushingly depressing job has warped you out of a once viable mind.

4- You should be required by the state to tell your neighbors about your perversion when you move to a new place. Go door to door and tell them you like Jimmy Buffet so they can keep their children away from you and spray paint hate messages on your door. You deserve it, you husk.

The list goes on and on. If you like Jimmy Buffett, then you are a lizard person who stumbled into some human clothes and has deluded itself into believing the cheap mockery. Scramble back into the bog you belong in.

Of course the fans aren’t where the blame should really lie. No, Jimmy Buffet himself is the badly aging, bleach-blonde concentration of shame that holds the real guilt of his career. After listening to the entirety of “Songs You Know By Heart” all I can think of is the great connundrum: what punishment could possibly match these crimes? What sentence short of the Norse Gods lashing him to a rock in the center of the Earth as poison drips into his wounds would fit? Can “Margaritaville” truly be accounted for with just one pathetic old man’s remaining lifetime spent being battered with hammers as he’s dragged from a helicopter through a field of landmines filled with pig offal? Would filling his eyeballs with chlorine via syringes clenched in rabid bulls’ anuses every day until our machines can no longer artificially support his failing corpse be enough? Probably not. But a man can dream, goddammit. A man can dream of scalping Jimmy Buffett with a broken bottle, running his brain through a cheesegrater and gouging all his hairs out with fireplace-tending tools as he’s forced to watch footage of children telling him what a failure he is in super slow-motion. CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE DEMANDS NOTHING LESS OF A PUNISHMENT. I WILL NOT REST UNTIL JIMMY BUFFET IS A PILE OF ASHES STILL HOLDING THE FORM OF A MAN BEGGING FOR MERCY BEFORE THE WIND BLOWS IT AND ALL COPIES OF HIS MUSIC INTO THE CALDERA WHERE TIMBERWOLVES WILL SNAP AT THE TINY SPECKS OF MEAT THAT SURVIVED. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE.

Pant, pant… oh man, I gotta go… gotta go vent doing something constructive. Here, here’s a new desktop. Wow, my head hurts…