Every Time Your Band Does An Encore, A Puppy Dies

See this puppy? His name is Buttons and he’s adorable. He likes taking naps in the laundry basket and staring out the window at passing cars. Sometimes he barks when he sees other dogs on TV. His favorite show is New Girl. He’s very cute and loveable and if your band does an encore ever again, I will murder him.

“What is the point of killing the puppy?” you may ask. I don’t know, what is the point of doing an encore? There is none. Killing puppies and doing encores are equal on the scale of pointlessness in my mind. So why is your band doing it? Wait, sorry, you can’t hear me because you’re standing two inches behind a curtain like a total doofus, waiting to come back on stage. I’ll tell you: You’re doing it because you think it’s a rockstar power move. But in reality, encores are pretty much the lamest thing a band can do aside from reunion tours or putting out a Christmas album.

Really, take a step back and look at what an encore is.

By doing an encore, what you’re saying is, “I have more songs to sing and enough time in which to sing them, but I will only perform them if I am adequately heaped praise upon by my adoring fans. Then, and only then, shall I grace them with the remainder of my genius performance.” What kind of spoiled-ass rockstar bullshit is that? Pretty bold move for a person who woke up in a van and cleaned his or her genitals in a Burger King sink that morning. Name another job where that kind of prima donna garbage flies. Do firefighters extinguish all but one floor of a house fire until the residents applaud them to their liking? (Although if they did, the whole holding up lighters thing would actually seem appropriate.) Does your dentist fill most of your cavities but await your novocained chants of “One more tooth! One more tooth!” No, because they are professionals who do the job they’re paid to do.

Maybe you’re thinking, “But musicians are entertainers and therefore, better than the rest of the society. Certainly there are special rules that apply only to them.” Well, the New York Knicks are entertainers too but they don’t refuse to play an overtime period until they get a metaphorical tugjob from fans. (Plus, they’ll just get the real thing in their hotel rooms after the game, anyway.) Vince Gilligan is an entertainer but he didn’t stop the Breaking Bad finale right when [spoiler alert here, but c’mon, watch the frigging finale already] Walt pulls the car up to the house. “Sorry, fans. Lavish me with praise if you want to see a Nazi gang get blown away by a remote-controlled trunk machine gun.”

Also, not sure who you think you’re fooling while behind that curtain but believe it or not, most music fans are slightly less gullible than an infant playing peek-a-boo. If the lights are still off, the house music hasn’t come on, and you haven’t played your hit song yet, no one is going to be blown away when you come back on stage to play more songs. Just once, I’d like for no one to clap and for you come back on stage to an empty venue. Just a janitor sweeping up beer cans because everyone else realized they had better things to do than stand around waiting for a bunch of self-important jackoffs looking to have their egos petted.

Get back out there, you entitled dildos.

Get out of your own ass and put yourself in your fans’ shoes for two seconds. First, they had their credit cards anally pounded with service charges, “convenience” fees, taxes, and whatever other wonderfully exploitative charges the venue/ticketing service decided to heap upon the already high ticket prices. Then they had to drink a bunch of $9 beers to make the crappy opening bands’ sets go down easier. After waiting through another 40 minutes of set up time, they had to stand among a bunch of drunken assholes singing the wrong lyrics, shouting requests two songs into the set, and screaming obnoxiously cliché shit like, “FREEEEEEBIRD!” Do you really think they feel like hanging around for another 10 minutes while you take a pre-encore breather?

Also, not to tear down the rockstar illusion here, but at most medium-sized venues, the bands don’t walk off stage to a lineup of awaiting thong-clad strippers and a mountain of drugs. There are no special message chairs and hot tubs full of groupies that fit back there. Most of the time, they’re just cramped into a hallway or dingy little room where the venue keeps its wet-dry vac, waiting in silence to go back on.

So back to Buttons. I don’t want to kill the puppy. Really, I don’t. But I need to prove to you how stupid it is when a band does an encore. Maybe I will leave him in a car on a hot summer day. Maybe I’ll poison his Purina. Or maybe I’ll just go for the ol’ drowning in a river. But either way, if your band comes out to do an encore, he is dead.

Dan Ozzi is an editor at Noisey and will only finish this sentence if you clap awkardly for him. Follow him on Twitter @danozzi