2010: The Year "Douchebag" Jumped the Shark

At least, going by this meandering piece in the Village Voice, which claims that Kanye West and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem won "one for the douchebags," whatever that might mean.

Their fantastic lives begot fantastic albums. MBDTF was a delirium of influence, a recombination of musical DNA as varied as gothic East Coast rap classicism, '70s prog rock, and winsome '90s electronic music. In doing so, West paid maximalist homage to his own best work: the sped-up soul sampling of his early productions, the glossy thump of Graduation, the ornate orchestration of Late Registration, the sad robot pulse of 808s and Heartbreak. And he rapped better, too—a necessity on an album that featured historically grand competition, from a bloodthirsty Nicki Minaj to Raekwon to Jay-Z himself (twice!), a hip-hop fantasy camp basically unparalleled, in part because any other artist would've been afraid to try. Murphy, for his part, boiled down a decade of sarcasm and ironic dance-floor excess into a plainspoken kiss-off to the career that had cost him everything external to the band he found himself trapped in.

So I guess that means...we like them? We don't like them? They're douchebags? What the hell does that even mean anymore? Did we ever know? The word "douche" suggests feminine hygiene, or other matter gynecological, and George Carlin testified to its use to insult women only, at least among NY Italians of the 1950's to 1970's. But by some kind of post-modern inversion, it's come to be applied as an all-purpose insult against hyper-masculine bro-types. Joel McHale can't get through a bit about Tool Academy without using it.

Their fingers smell delightful. Delightful.

Here's Andrew Earles, my muse, two years ahead of the curve: as usual:

“Douchebag” is perhaps the most overused slang in the parlance of the under-50 set. It’s so damn effective, and I love nothing more than to latch onto slang that’s either showing its expiration date or recently expired altogether.

That was in 2008. So now that it's ubiquity is secure, and it has passed from meaning whatever it meant to "something not desirable," I'm going to quietly retire "douchebag," and it's little bro, "d-bag" from my parlance. You may consider this official: