The Fine Line Between JB and the D: Why Tenacious D’s hiatus doesn’t hurt

Have you ever encountered Tenacious D? You may know them as Jack Black, who surprisingly has an extensive music career, and Kyle Gass (alternatively, the other guy who isn’t quite as famous as Jack Black). You may know them as a leading comedy “mock rock” act, with a catalogue spanning two and a half decades across four albums. You may also know them as currently, and indefinitely, on hiatus. 

Tenacious D’s recent decision to pause all artistic endeavours and performances comes in the wake of a joke Gass made onstage about July’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump; more rather, about how much he would have preferred its success. This stirred some controversy despite comments made by both members against the candidate in the past, culminating in Jack Black denouncing political violence and announcing that he “no longer [felt] it [was] appropriate to continue the Tenacious D tour,” and that “all future creative plans are on hold.” The inciting incident for this dissolve is perhaps more surprising than the dissolve itself; ultimately, this feels overdue. 

To understand the piecemeal, gradual dissolution of Tenacious D, we must look to the time at which they released their debut, self-titled album. While the band formally established itself in 1994, with Black and Gass having known one another for eight years beforehand and bonding over mutual musical interests, their debut was released in 2001. Stoner and slacker comedy was an inescapable zeitgeist; Scary Movie 2, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Wet Hot American Summer all releasing that year. 

Tenacious D were indisputably part of this cultural moment. Both members are advocates for the legalisation of marijuana in the United States, but truly ingratiated the band into the stoner comedy genre in portraying caricatures of themselves. Their album featured skits as interludes, featuring the petty squabbles of the fictionalised Jack and Kyle, (“JB” and “KG”, or the phonetic “Kage”, as they are dubbed) lyrics about their squalor and laddish sentiment, and some compositionally stellar instrumentalism (Wonderboy is an emphatic, triumphant prog-rock song in all but its length).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the band’s 2006 feature musical, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. The plot sees the jobless new flatmates JB and Kage journeying to steal the titular guitar pick, made of a tooth of the devil himself, from a rock ‘n’ roll museum, that will help them achieve gratuitous heavy metal royalty. Our lead characters are sincerely invested in metal and their belief in their own musical prowess, but in every instance wherein they play their music, they’re mocked at worst and tolerated at best for its ineffectuality, save for in fantastical dream sequences. JB and Kage are modern Falstaffs, showing how the archaic Shakespearean archetype’s legacy lasts in stoner comedy characters; lazy, loutish, libidinous, spinning yarns about their mythical adventures (listen to the soundtrack album’s History). But the earnest musical prowess is still present, a fissile energy poking holes in the mock rock bubble. 

The Pick of Destiny received some critical backlash and underperformed at the box office, but Black and Gass had been planning on taking career breaks; thus, the album was the last Tenacious D project for a score six years until Rize of the Fenix released in 2012. The opening and title track of the album acknowledges the response to The Pick of Destiny and the band’s hiatus. This is a character break. JB and Kage are instead Black and Gass or, as aforementioned, Black and the other guy who isn’t quite as famous as Jack Black.  

The early- and mid- 2010s saw Jack Black’s stardom in movies epitomised, as he was a darling of Hollywood and family comedy. The character he was commonly typecast as was not far from JB as preestablished. Crucially, however, it existed without the satirising intentions of Tenacious D, resulting in the over-excitable manchild audiences are, surprisingly, seeming to just become sick of (“this is a crafting table!”). Tenacious D was inevitably affected and, from this point onward, was handled critically differently. It no longer had the comedic conceit of its two band members playing fictionalisations of themselves, instead it seemed to become an asterisk in the career notes of its more recognisable, marketable member. 

Rise of the Fenix is, admittedly, a compositionally astonishing album, accompanied by an equally impassioned tour, but then we reached the next album after another six-year break, Post-Apocalypto; an album which comedically hinged on an apparent lack of investment in its presentation and not a single track reaching a mere three minutes. In the additional crawling, piecemeal six years since, we can see clearer than ever that Tenacious D’s new cultural purpose is simply to serve the trivia question, “did you know that Jack Black makes music?”. Their output of catchy, but ceaselessly repetitive covers in their final years are only distinguished stylistically by the tacky bravado and bellows of Black’s vocals, up to their most recent, and potentially final, project; a cover of Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time for the end credits of Kung-Fu Panda 4. 

With this final stamp, Tenacious D feels like it exited with a fizzle, instead of the perhaps misinformed but stellar grandeur the band initially deserved. It suits Black, and the Hollywood personality that became omnipresent, but JB and Kage are owed more.