To help celebrate the return of The Best Show, the Reader asked Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster to revisit their first collaboration, the famous “Rock, Rot & Rule” sketch, which predated the show by several years—and still stands as one of the great moments in the history of trolling. Wurster played fictional blowhard Ronald Thomas Clontle, whose opinions on music—who rocks, who rots, and who rules, according to his own impenetrable criteria—were engineered to confuse or enrage hapless listeners. A 1997 recording of Scharpling’s bogus promotional interview with Clontle (who was pushing an equally fictional book called Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler) is available on LP from Flannelgraph Records as well as via your local iTunes. Scharpling and Wurster were kind enough to channel Clontle again in order to weigh in on a revised list of artists:
Too many songs where one of the superheroes of Kiss is worried that his girlfriend might leave him.
CoCoComa: Rot
Any band that at one time had a member named Baird Figi achieves automatic rulership as far as I’m concerned.
Syl Johnson: Rule
They invented ska.
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