OK so let's talk about Primus, because if you've never spent time with this band you are genuinely missing out on one of music's strangest ongoing experiments and I need you to be prepared.

Primus is the band that sounds like your weird uncle's garage project from 1991, except they sold millions of records and played Woodstock '94 and somehow never stopped. The core of it has always been bassist and singer Les Claypool, whose bass playing sounds less like bass playing and more like a tap-dancing alien who learned funk from a broken radio. He thumps and slaps and warbles, and then he sings over it in a voice like no one else in rock, nasal and cartoony and weirdly perfect for the songs, and the whole thing shouldn't work and it absolutely does.

The Yahoo Entertainment piece rounding up their whole wild story gets into how much of their whole deal was deliberate weirdness from day one. Claypool auditioned for Metallica after Cliff Burton died, and they passed on him. That rejection might be the best thing that ever happened to rock, because instead of fitting into somebody else's band we got a guy who'd build an entire career out of sounding like no one else.

And the weirdness wasn't just the sound. The visuals! The videos! 'Jerry Was a Race Car Driver' and 'Tommy the Cat' hit MTV in the early 90s and looked like fever dreams, all warped clay and garish colors, and then there's the album covers, the pig faces, the whole Zappa-meets-Saturday-morning-cartoons aesthetic they never once apologized for. They made a song called 'My Name Is Mud' and albums called Sailing the Seas of Cheese and Pork Soda and nobody ever stopped them.

They also wrote the South Park theme, which means one of the most recognizable pieces of music in modern television is a Les Claypool bass rumble. A generation of kids knows their sound without knowing they know it. that's power.

What I love most about the Primus story, and what I keep coming back to, is the stubbornness of it. They got huge in the exact era when getting huge meant sounding like Pearl Jam or Nirvana, and they just... didn't. They leaned harder into the odd time signatures and the absurdist lyrics and the stage spectacle. Claypool's whole philosophy has always been that if you're bored, change something, and the band has cycled through drummers (Tim Alexander, Bryan Mantia, back to Tim again) and side projects and weird one-off shows without ever losing the plot, because the plot was never normal to begin with.

They covered the entire Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory soundtrack, in character, as Primus & the Chocolate Factory. They toured with TOOL. At some point you stop asking why and just accept you're on the ride.

Also, can we talk about 'Wynona's Big Brown Beaver'? A nonsense yokel fable that somehow became a genuine chart hit and got a Grammy nomination. The mid-90s were a strange time and Primus was the strangest thing in it.

Thirty-plus years in and they're still out there, still fronted by a guy making a bass sound like a carnival falling down stairs. The world did not ask for Primus and Primus did not care, and I think a band that weird and that persistent deserves the same documentation we give any other great American institution. Joy is worth it. So is a man slapping a bass like it owes him money.