SILVER SPRING, Md. — Local punk band The Cancelled realized they made an awful mistake last night within seconds of starting to cover the Dead Kennedys’ classic song, “Holiday in Cambodia,” still mortified sources confirmed.
“Oh, fuck! What the fuck?! Did he just say what I think he said?” drummer Nick “Fills” Phillips blurted mid-song in a panic. “Holy shit — how have we not noticed? Has he been saying it at practice this whole time? Should I still even be playing? Why does everybody but our singer look worried about this? I’m going to ask my girlfriend to draft an apology letter for us as soon as the show is over… but hell, she might dump me.”
Members of the audience were visibly uncomfortable by the inclusion of the lyric.
“I can’t lie: when I heard that bass line start, I got really pumped,” said showgoer Dylan Cervantes. “But I figured he would just skip over the part where Jello says… um… that… word. Most reasonable people wouldn’t include it, especially in this part of town. Sure, if he were black it wouldn’t be an issue… but he’s not. I don’t think this is going to end well for the band. They should have just played ‘California Uber Alles’ or something.”
As the mob of irate audience members crowded the entryway to the green room, the band’s controversial frontman escaped to the bathroom, disguised in sunglasses and a scarf.
“I wanted to stay true to the song. I don’t know when everyone in the punk scene got so sensitive,” said Jeff Crumm, the visibly shaken singer. “It’s not like I just blurted the word out for no reason. I’m not a racist! All I did was sing it like everyone does alone in their car. That song has been around for decades, and I’ve never heard anybody make a stink about it before. How was I supposed to know everybody was gonna get mad? Nobody even seems to care that I said it with the ‘A’ at the end, so it wasn’t even the bad kind of n-word.”
At press time, Crumm issued an “apology” by posting an acoustic cover of Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” to The Cancelled’s YouTube channel.