Snatchbags with guitars

Posted on | April 6, 2010 | Comments Off on Snatchbags with guitars

We need to create a new term.

For years, young men were the ones who picked up a guitar, learned three or four chords, and played bad, whiny music, preferably at parties or on the campus lawn, and preferably to get attention from females. The accepted term for these gentlemen is “douchebags with guitars”. But the more I look around at the local music scene (at least here in Boston) the more it feels like these amateur amateurs are women, not men. And they don’t always play guitars. Sometimes they play the piano. But they always sound the same, and we’re all supposed to pretend we care and think they’re all talented and pretty and shit, when in fact, they suck.

Women cannot be douchebags, however. That’s a term just for certain types of insecure men. To my knowledge, there is no equivalent term for young women brandishing their instrument (badly) and crooning (barely tolerably) in hopes of capturing attention.

We can, of course, feminize “douchebag” into “douchebaguette”, but it’s a slightly cumbersome word, and too long, and simply would never catch on as a real insult. “Douchebaguettes with pianos” just won’t cut it.

So my proposal is to call these young ladies “snatchbags with guitars” or alternatively, “snatchbags with keyboards”.

I do realize that this goes against my feminist ethic to deliberately slander women specifically. But there is also a musical ethic in there somewhere. And so many of these snatchbags, just like their douchebag brothers, need to put the guitar DOWN and find something else to do.