Monster Mash

According to Blabbermouth.net, a new feud is brewing between the world's premeir pair of latex-costumed monster-impersonating metal bands. GWAR, a thrash-punk crossover spectacle from Richmond, began regaling audiences with sensitive singer-songwriter fare like "Meat Sandwich" and "Fuckin' an Animal" in 1985. The band has carved out a seemingly unkillable niche and an army of dedicated GWARriors by sticking to its gimmick: Gigantic, cartoonish monster costumes and stage props, (including the above-pictured yard-long prosthetic penis known as the "cuttlefish of Cthulu" that earned the band's singer, "Oderus Urungus" an overnight stint in a North Carolina jail cell) as well as a feverish dedication to showering its fans in a lovingly concocted mixture of faux blood, semen, and pus. GWAR is possibly the only metal band in the world to screen-print its tour designs onto white t-shirts, which enable its ardent supporters to emerge from the pit sporting an unholy tie-dye of facsimile bodily fluid.

The band's costumed counterpart, Lordi, rose to fame in 2006 after winning the Eurovision song contest, which I'm assuming ranks only third behind the World Cup and "a vast history of internecine warfare" in the European National Pride Litmi Compendium. Lordi somehow managed to wow the judges and the voters with their devastatingly original admixture of monster costumes, ham-handed hard-rock songwriting, and the brandishing of cartoonishly oversized medieval weaponry. Sound familiar?

The band's founder, "Mr. Lordi" (what a badass metal moniker! Oderus Urungus, take note) has protested that he had never heard of GWAR until he had already come up with the brilliant idea of wearing foam-latex monster costumes on stage and playing shock rock all on his own--in fact, just read the description from the Lordi Wikipedia, its a treat: "After 'Inferno' [an early Lordi album], Putaansuu had a dream. In the dream he was at a concert and there was a skeleton on stage playing. When he woke up, he knew that Lordi should be a band full of monsters. The monster in the dream would eventually become the bassist Kalma."

GWAR, understandably, is a little pissed that someone sky-rocketed to the top of the European charts and the Ozzfest main stage by shamelessly ripping off their act, the Finns' denials notwithstanding. This from Blabbermouth's account, which ends the description with commendable pith:

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"After GWAR's opening song, Oderus asks the crowd, "Oh, were you expecting LORDI?" and proceeds to take a replica of Mr. Lordi's head out on a stick. As expected, the crowd then gets covered in blood."
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As far as HornyHornyHippos is concerned, GWAR is pretty much the only way we can satisfy our all-consuming desire to see fake-blood-soaked men on stage in thongs, fishnets, and 6-inch-high cloven-hoof platform boots (and theref0re rules), and Lordi is a bunch of eurotrash plagiarists, bowdlerizing the mighty GWAR to turn shock into shlock and sell it to the masses. But there's a fascinating irony here. GWAR has always been about over-the-top, tongue in cheek performance art. The fans have been in on the joke, from the beginning. Lordi, on the other hand, has couched their shtick in terms of utter early-Kiss-like seriousness; Mr. Lordi has berated European tabloids who ran photos of him without his costume on for attempting to destroy his "monster image." There's something eminently fucked up about the fact that the band thats just really good at joking around about being monsters has been confined to the fringe for more than two decades (where they presumably like it, to be fair), whereas a band that is more or less dead serious about being monsters rocketed to the top of a European pop song competition, and consequently the European charts.

And now, a pictorial comparison between the two bands.
Gwar:

Lordi:

Wow, its almost as if the band on the botom is a shitty, less-awesome version of the band on the top. Oh wait...