Sum 41 Members Now Slightly More Relevant Than They Were Last Week

Canadian pop-punk outfit Sum 41 (whosit forty what now?) has found a way to snazzify the four-chord progression they’ve been banking for the last decade: Start writing songs about presidential assassination! The group’s new single, “March Of The Dogs,” contains the lines “And now the president’s dead/because they blew off his head/no more neck to be red/I guess to heaven he fled.” As MTV notes:

…when we reached out to [Sum singer Deryck Whibley] for comment about the song’s incendiary lyrics, he responded with a written statement:

“That line is a metaphor for how Bush is so ineffectual and incompetent as a president,” Whibley wrote, in reference to the song’s opening line. “It’s the worst way I could think of to describe how bad he is as a leader.”

Cue right-wing outrage. And, rather surprisingly, a fair amount of message-board outrage as well. When a link to Sum’s MySpace page appeared on the punk news site AbsolutePunk.net, reaction was varied — although more members than you might think took the band to task for the lyrics, which some saw as irresponsible, and others saw as the work of a group of outsiders (Sum are, of course, Canadian) who don’t have the right to criticize Bush.

The you-can’t-criticize-us-because-you’re-not-from-here argument, of course, is a knee-jerk response that–thanks to our ever-growing global marketplace–is more out-of-date than ever. It’s 2007, people, and whether you’re Canadian, American or Micronesian, we can all agree on one thing: Sum 41 remains a bunch of third-rate Fat Wreck-wannabes whose newfound political stance feels like a last-ditch cred-stab. Plus, Whibley clearly doesn’t know the definition of “metaphor.”

Sum 41 – March of the Dogs [YouTube]
Sum 41 Kills President In New Song — Deryck Whibley Says It’s ‘A Metaphor’ [MTV.com]