The road from guitar god to second rate Ted Nugentesque celebrity troll is a long and winding one. No one knows this more than Dave Mustaine. There was a time when Mustaine was known primarily as the frontman for thrash titans, Megadeth (and for being the guy who got thrown out of Metallica for drinking too much). But, these days, Mustaine is known more for things like grumping at Men's Warehouse on Facebook and not understanding what the First Amendment is. Recently, Mustaine participated in an interview with Bob Nalbandian of the Shockwaves/HardRadio podcast (which has, thankfully, been partially transcribed by Blabbermouth) where he continues his journey even further down the troll hole.
A good portion of the interview predictably deals with the new album, Super Collider. And, in one particularly marvelous monologue, Mustaine demonstrates why he's a burgeoning master of troll-fu while explaining the story behind the new album's title:
"And there was a story in there about how they finally had identified the mass that goes around the molecules and stuff; it's called the Higgs Boson and we had done that with the Super Collider. And I thought, 'Wow, that's a really cool story."
Mustaine begins his rant by explaining that he read a story in USA Today about the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and how he thought it was a "really cool story". No problems there. Science is awesome and the discovery of the Higgs-Boson is a major scientific achievement. He then goes on to demonstrate why he's become heavy metal's answer to Grumpy Cat by calling a portion of his Twitter followers village idiots.
This behavior isn't out of the ordinary for Mustaine, who's persona has always been that of a crabby pants. But, after some more rambling about lyrical themes and reiterating how cool he thinks the Large Hadron Collider is, he drops this bomb:
"Science is really interesting. I mean, I don't believe in evolution, I believe in creation, so science only goes so far with me, but I really dig looking at that whole way that's set up with the tubing and the piping and the reactors and all the stuff that goes along with it."
It may not seem like it, but these two sentences are the very essence of trolling – the ability to deliver an off-hand remark that's smugly self-righteous and wrong at the same time. It's true that Dave Mustaine just came out as a Creationist, and this is probably going to be what the blogs ridicule him for. But the thing that's really obnoxious is that he did it while praising a scientific endeavor that's completely at odds with Creationism.
One of the purposes of the Large Hadron Collider is to try and recreate the conditions that existed immediately after the "Big Bang" that created the universe. This is completely and utterly incompatible with Creationism – the belief that the creation story in Genesis is literally true. How can you praise something and then completely disregard it by professing a belief in something else that's not only objectively wrong but also mutually exclusive? Dave Mustaine is either a super troll or an uninformed moron. Either way, he's good at what he does.
