My Sunday night at the High Noon Saloon was one of the strangest and cheesiest full-circle experiences of my life.
As a child, I would frequently watch a young Macaulay Culkin eat pizza and attempt to murder burglars in the “Home Alone” films. My five-year-old self thought the child actor’s reckless consumption of junk food in the absence of parental units was a rousing act of rebellion. In the mid-90s, Macaulay Culkin was an inspiration to me. He was a symbol of youthful vitality. He proved that children can overcome adult oppression simply by dropping bricks, power tools and large bags of cement mix onto the heads of their middle-aged oppressors.
It is now 2014. I am 21 years old. I haven’t thought of Macaulay Culkin in years. But Sunday night, I found myself watching a 34-year-old Culkin sing songs about pizza to a sold-out crowd at the High Noon Saloon. He had brought his band The Pizza Underground — a group that performs pizza-themed covers of Velvet Underground songs — to Madison for a nearly hour-long set dedicated to all things pizza. The band shared the headlining spot with Har Mar Superstar, but the weird vibes began with openers Tickle Torture and Candy Boys, who set the tone for the entire concert.
Tickle Torture made it quickly apparent that his goal as a musical artist is to be as sexual as possible. His sex-funk mixed Flea-like slap bass and primal screams, slathering them with lush, psychedelic synthesizers. It was an all-out sensory assault. Video projected behind the musicians literally featured “tickle torture.” Lead singer Elliott Kozel wore only a thong and mask, both gold-sequined. Six dancers covered in gold paint and wearing only underwear flanked Kozel, making out with him and grinding against him throughout. Lines like “Fuck me with the lights on” and “C’mon baby, take my advice / If you’re lonely let me fuck you twice” rang through the small venue as Kozel turned a fog machine into a phallic symbol. It was like watching some sort of strange erotica only found in the darkest bowels of the Internet: terrifying, titillating and impossible to look away from.
It was time for the second act. “The sweetest boy band ever — Candy Boys!” announced the group’s hypeman. Two men wearing tight-fitting green and yellow tank tops that read “CANDY” and “BOYS,” respectively, both took the stage and started singing, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Candy Boy?” Both men licked lollipops and handed out candy bars to the audience. Their backing instrumentals seemed to come from an iPod hooked up to an amplifier; at the end of every song, the group would press a button and the next cheesy instrumental would pound through the High Noon’s speakers. The group’s lyrics were of an almost transcendental literary quality: “There’s nothing that candy can’t fix,” “We love candy more than you” and “My sugar high’s high, my lows are rough.” It was awe-inspiring. It was art.
And then the guy who grew famous for slapping aftershave on his face took the stage. Macaulay Culkin wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, his long, blonde hair looking as greasy as the slices of Ian’s Pizza the band handed out to the crowd.
“You kids like pizza?” Culkin asked the crowd. “You like songs about pizza? ‘Cause the hamburger guys are across the street!” This was about as inspired as the banter would get.
The band launched right into its music — medleys of Velvet Underground/Lou Reed/Nico tunes replaced with pizza-themed lyrics. Songs included “Papa John Says,” “I’m Waiting for Delivery Man,” “All the Pizza Parties” and “Take a Bite of the Wild Slice.” The five-piece band brought a tender earnestness to the literally cheesy lyrics, especially on songs like “Cheese Days:” “I’ve been out walking / I don’t do too much toppings these days / Cheeeeeeeeese days…”
The band’s between-song banter was predictably awkward. In between sips of High Life, Culkin made quips about hepatitis (??) and about how “fucking awesome” pizza is. “Writing original music is for chumps!” one band member shouted. At one point, a band member said, “We’re using metaphors as a road to truth,” to which Culkin responded, “Is that what it is? I thought we were just singing about pizza.” The word “bizarre” does not do justice to the scene.
Har Mar Superstar hit the stage following The Pizza Underground. Compared with the previous acts, his music and stage presence seemed so…normal. His Jay Sherman-like appearance and lightweight R&B were just too straight-faced to excite the crowd that had been put through three of the strangest acts most of them had probably ever seen. Har Mar Superstar is known for his ability to get crowds dancing. In this regard, he failed miserably. At the end of the night, however, it wasn’t Har Mar Superstar who the crowd was talking about; it was Culkin and his pizza cronies.
Seeing a person who I grew up watching on TV singing about pizza in a bar in Wisconsin was plainly surreal. For the rest of his life, Culkin will never actually have to work. He’s rolling in money from the films that catapulted him to fame in the early 1990s. He comes from wealth, so he can do things like tour the country and half-assedly sing songs about pizza. My friend remarked to me during the show that The Pizza Underground should actually be called “White Privilege: The Band.” It was white privilege we were seeing, undoubtedly, but it was also celebrity privilege. The show was a testament to the power of money and fame: If you have enough of these things, you can really do whatever the hell you want, even if doing what you want means singing songs about pizza.
But the concert also showed that there’s a certain charm to being cheerfully obsessed with something so banal. For Culkin, that obsession is with pepperoni, triple cheese and no anchovies, please. There’s a long list of former child stars whose lives have spiraled into an orgy of drugs and alcohol — necessary byproducts of their wealth — so it’s nice to see Culkin putting his time and energy into something as harmless as pizza. It’s humbling that a celebrity can, just like us plebeians, get really, really excited about something as normal as a delicious slice of cheese pizza.
