In its proudest moments, White Noise slips the surly bonds of Chino Hills and wraps its fingers around the throat of some painfully funny universal truths. In “Pomp and Circumstance,” the Casio finds an umpteenth simple but catchy progression and sticks tenaciously to it, while Peter sings about graduating from high school with a venom you can not only hear but feel in your gut as the song veers suddenly but smoothly from this:
Here we are,
Four long years together
Now I’ll never see any one of you again
Here we are
Four long years are over
to this:
Now I’ll never have to see any one of you again
No I’ll never have to see you again
And I’ll never have to say “hi” to you again
And I’ll never have to be nice and pretend
That you’re my friend
to this:
So, oh! Don Lewell,
And the rest of D.A.L.,
As far as I’m concerned,
You can all go
Straight to fuckin’ hell
Yeah so long school
So long impromptus
And so long, cocksuckin’ Nazi lame-ass dicks
who don’t like blacks or Jews
...at which point, on the heels of his next “so long,” the singer unleashes a torrent of obscenity so floral in its happy unburdening of its bearer’s long-suppressed anger toward the people who made high school the unstinting sentence of low-level torture that it was for so many of us, and so quietly but giddily and rancorously content with its own foul-mouthedness, that to transcribe it here would do it ill justice, even if I were able to pick out all the individual abusive epithets from the storm of abuse, which I’m not.