While everybody else was either interning or traveling the world, I decided to take up a lucrative job in retail at a Kohl’s in Arizona.

There’s nothing wrong with working retail. Aside from the occasional asshole who decides to ask you when you’re “going back to Iraq” (because my Arab descent makes me look like a terrorist, you see), being a cashier at Kohl’s was fairly mundane. For the first few days, at least.

Yet, as I eased into month two at Kohl’s, I started to notice the music that piped through the speakers. This wasn’t the standard “muzak” that plays instrumental re-workings of famous songs. Kohl’s, instead, had actual music playing on what they call their soundtrack. This ran the gamut from syrupy pop ballads to awful covers of “Blue Monday” (as sung by She-Wishes-She-Was-Regina-Spektor) to Michael Bolton. Horrible, yes; but very harmless otherwise.

Except for “The Song.”

I called it that for a long time. The first time I heard it, I was busy helping a young girl check out. She was buying Candie’s, a clothing line that I’ve nicknamed My-Little-Hooker Wear. “The Song” pipes up with a wild strumming of an electric guitar before devolving into a scream-fest courtesy of a female singer shrieking about how everyone’s “a leader” and “a winner” and that this is “awesome.” Imagine Avril Lavigne walking down the street flashing gang signs at various people. Then I picture Avril Lavigne suddenly being attacked by ten raccoons who just happened to fall out of the sky (via divine intervention) and the screams poor Avril makes as a raccoon bites into her cooter. “The Song” is all that and a flat, warm six pack.

I thought nothing of it at first. Bad songs come and go. Yet, this one kept coming. It’d play a second time. Then it’d play a third time. Then a fourth. And a fifth.

I concluded that this was punishment from the boss who had it in for me because I wasn’t getting enough people to sign up for Kohl’s charge cards as they checked out.

I was obsessed with “The Song.” As much as I hated it, I had to know about its origins.
So a cursory Google search enlightened me with a name: The Dollyrots.

The Dollyrots are comprised of singer Kelly Ogden, guitarist Luis Cabezas, and drummer Chris Black. As Wikipedia tells me, The Dollyrots were originally formed “for fun” but decided to “go professional” after the 2000 US Presidential Election. As Ogden explains it:
“We were watching the 2000 presidential election results, and at four o’clock in the morning, when we found out that George W. Bush had won, Luis and I were like, ‘The world’s probably gonna end anyway, and I don’t want to go to med school,’ so we thought, ‘Let’s just do the band . . . So that’s when it happened. We had no future anyways, so let’s just be in a rock band!'”

It’s telling that they call themselves a “rock band” since The Dollyrots sound more like a “pop” band. “Because I’m Awesome,” the song I heard all this summer (and the Kohl’s corporate theme song), is syrupy without the sweet; a power ballad for the unappreciated. It’s a song tuned especially for those kids who don’t, like, conform, man. Either that or it’s tailored for teenagers who never shower.

The video for “Because I’m Awesome” reaffirms this sentiment. The low-budget video parodies every aspect of “American Idol.” The band sings while contestants of varying “hilarity” compete in front of judges who are obviously Randy, Paula, and Simon even though they’re not. The rejected are the unglamorous and untalented, while the pretty and vapid race on to Hollywood. The video wants you to hate the pretty and vapid, but I found this to be relatively hard when the underdogs looked like caricatures. The video culminates in The Dollyrots’ lead singer crashing the auditions and leading a throng of rejected singers into the audition room to overthrow the judges, all leading to a shot of a Ryan Seacrest clone peeing in his pants at the sight of so many ugly people.

Personally, despite the images of nonconformity presented throughout the video, I just found it sweaty. Everybody’s sweating in this video. I imagine that the director decided to dunk the band in chicken fat before shooting to make them look so edgy and countercultural. But really, it just makes me want to take a shower.

The video also confirms what I have been thinking about The Dollyrots all this time–they embrace shit music. Why are all those kids you made fun of during high school being rejected on American Idol? Because they can’t sing, and we like people that can sing–even if what they sing about is inherently shallow and vapid.

The Dollyrots, though? They’re really not “Awesome.”