Critical Fatwa: The Germs

All hail X, the band that has somehow remained unembarrassing as it ages, a most difficult task for punk-rockers. Just look to its contemporaries, the Germs, to witness how sad punk rock has become. Despite the 1980 death of singer Darby Crash, the band's surviving members want their glory back and are regrouping, using pretty-boy actor Shane West (who is playing Crash in a biopic) as a fill-in for the late vocalist. For reuniting in a manner that might shame INXS, we deliver a most stinging fatwa to the Germs.

The Germs were always the Doors of punk rock, with Crash their Jim Morrison: charismatic, but also a self-obsessed terminal junkie who brutally used those he hoodwinked, burning them with cigarettes and ruling their lives. If Crash had been ugly, then you wouldn't know the words to "Lexicon Devil" -- but Crash proved for the punks (as Morrison proved for the hippies) that they could be as beauty-obsessed as the teenyboppers they mocked.

Fatwa! For continuing this foul cult, for inspiring yet another generation of teens to stencil Germs logos on their jackets, for inviting a cast member of ER to join the pantheon of punk, you have earned the wrath of rock! In the rock afterlife, may Darby Crash be your overseer.

It is written.