Jack Black names his favourite punk bands: “I geeked out in the wings”
Everybody knows that Jack Black is one of Hollywood’s biggest rockers, but that doesn’t mean the actor and musician has put on the blinders and committed himself to one genre at the expense of the rest.
That’s been made clear by his own discography as an artist, with Tenacious D veering between folksy acoustic numbers and stadium-sized rock anthems. Never mind his solo tracks and collaborations with other performers, which range from his cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Baby One More Time’ to the doom-laden hidden song ‘I Am the Warlock’ for Dave Grohl’s short-lived side project Probot.
Of course, if there was one type of music Black would choose to listen to for the rest of his days, then classic rock would be at the very top of the list. After all, he’s known to be a massive fan of Led Zeppelin, the only band in history he thinks is better than The Beatles.
However, when he was casting his eye across the soundwaves in an interview with Hey U Guys, the three-time Golden Globe nominee threw a curveball into the mix when he outlined his fondness for punk, singling out several acts for specific praise, even if one of them continues to generate debate decades down the line over that exact categorisation.
“I like old punk rock,” he admitted. “There’s this band called Off! that has an original member of Black Flag in it. And if you think about it, Black Flag was named for an insect poison. Black Flag: you would spray it on the bugs, and it would kill them. And Off! is an insect repellant, so it’s kind of like the sequel. And they were amazing, and I geeked out in the wings definitely.”
Off! was more of a supergroup than a Black Flag spinoff, to be fair, but Black’s other cherished punk band are much harder to define, musically and stylistically. “I’ve seen the Pixies a tonne of times. That’s probably my favourite band,” he admitted. “That Frank Black, he’s a hero.”
He’s so much of a hero, in fact, that Black compared the man born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV to one of his own characters. “He’s like the Kung Fu Panda of rock,” the star explained. “He’s big and fat, but he’s very relaxed and he’s very talented. He writes some amazing music. Beautiful music, but hard rocking.”
The fact that Black’s list of favourite punk bands extends to precisely two groups underlines that he doesn’t quite love the genre as much as he does good old-fashioned rock and roll, but Off! and Pixies clearly made a huge impression on the infectiously exuberant funnyman if they were deemed worthy of a special mention.
Whether or not the Pixies frontman would be thrilled to discover he’d been dubbed the Kung Fu Panda of rock by the guy who voiced the titular high-kicking mammal remains up for debate, but it came straight from the heart.
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