What It Truly Means To Bash

The Lonely Island “Focus on the Game”

The vast majority of The Lonely Island’s comedy has been focused on goofing on masculinity, and as they progress through their career their delight in mocking the absurdity of machismo only seems to intensify. In this way, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is the pinnacle of their catalog to date – a rap opera visual album about famed steroid abusers José Canseco and Mark McGwire at the peak of their baseball careers in the late 80s. The record isn’t so much about the real life Canseco and McGwire as it is about how the pre-adolescent Lonely Island guys imagined them to be, a fantasy of hyper-masculine success built out of the images and messages they’d internalized from absorbing ’80s culture as children.

The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is hilarious; the only thing that’s been anywhere near as funny this year is the Lonely Island-produced I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. But it’s also incredibly sad in the way they explore their characters’ loneliness, paranoia, insecurity, and ‘roided-out rage. They’re just enormous two baby men obsessed with winning the love of their distant fathers, and oblivious to how other people are taking advantage of them. They love to objectify women and are obsessed with attaining their notion of male physical perfection, but chafe at being objectified by women.

“Focus on the Game” is the most melancholy song in Bash Brothers, and also probably the most lovely thing they’ve ever made in terms of pure melody. It’s a song about feeling lonely at the top – they’re both isolated and depressed, and terrified that their terrible secret about getting juiced up on steroids will come out and they’ll lose everything. The moment that kills me in this song is near the end where José and Mark’s perspectives overlap, and they address that they’re the only ones who truly understands the other. But this just pushes them apart, as they also realize that they’d be complicit in each other’s downfall. The phrase “you’re the only one who knows what it truly means to bash” shouldn’t be as poignant as it is in this song, but they made it work.

Buy it from Amazon.