The 2001 song Jack Black called his greatest work: “Our Mona Lisa”
It’s hard to really tell when Jack Black is being sincere when it comes to rock and roll.
He very well may have been yanking all of our chains when talking about some of his favourite artists of all time, but if there’s one thing that we know for certain, it’s that the man has clearly done his homework when it comes to some of the greatest bands that have come out of rock and roll. I would expect nothing less from someone whose greatest film was about teaching children how to rock, but he felt that there was a lot more ground to cover when he got a microphone in his hand with Tenacious D.
But to call Black a guitarist isn’t really doing justice to what he does. He’s definitely an all-star frontman and would be the star of the show in any decent heavy metal cover band, but the art of him playing acoustic is what makes the whole thing funny. Tenacious D are the last duo that you would expect to be playing some of the heaviest tunes anyone has ever heard, so how the hell were they able to get some of the biggest names in music to work with them on some of their material?
Because their roster makes a lot less sense the more you start thinking about it. The Pick of Destiny is still one of the greatest rock and roll comedies of all time, but the idea of getting everyone from Dave Grohl to Meat Loaf to Ronnie James Dio to play on an album strictly designed not to be taken seriously is almost impossible. Anyone else would have been privileged to even have half of what ‘The D’ had, but they did manage to get a lot of great songs together on their own.
Grohl may have been on hand to play drums on many of their records, but Black and Kyle Gass were still trying to make epic rock and roll tunes from scratch. It wasn’t always easy, and there were more than a few times where they blatantly ripped off people like Eddie Money when coming up with the riff to ‘Wonderboy’, but the fact that ‘Tribute’ could stand on its own as a great rock and roll song was the moment where they seemed to do the impossible.
There’s no way of listening to the song without thinking of them listening to tunes like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ one too many times, but Black’s vocal performance and sheer charm every time he sings the song put it in a different league than everything else. No one was going to sincerely listen to a tune like ‘Rock Your Socks’ or ‘Fuck Her Gently’, thinking that they were listening to real professionals, but ‘Tribute’ was the first time many rock fans could almost trick themselves into thinking that they weren’t listening to a comedy song.
And if ‘The D’ could pull the wool over people’s eyes for the length of that song, Black felt like they had gone far beyond anything that they had done before, saying, “The idea of ‘the greatest song’ was so absurd that it’s sort of in line with my obsession with the limits of universal laws. These absolutes and how absurd they all are. In a way, ‘Tribute’ was our Mona Lisa. We had to work on it all throughout the 90s.”
The tone is still pretty funny if you’re paying attention, but the one thing that the song emphasises the most is how unironically great Black is at singing. No one would have thought that he had those chops, but a lot of the energy that he brought to every song he sang was the same kind of focus that he brought to every single one of his comedy bits.
He had the same kind of massive charisma that you’d expect out of someone like Chris Farley, and whereas Farley used his talents to put his body through as much as it could endure, Black was willing to put every ounce of energy into being his own version of a rock star. People are still going to remember him more for stuff like School of Rock and Kung Fu Panda, but the fact that he could walk away with one of the legitimate classics of 2000s rock is the real achievement here.
