Ya know, I was gonna try to be nice to the laughably untalented altar boys of ironic Internet sensation Final Placement, but then they had to go be jerk wads and force Youtube to remove the smorgasbord of videos the online community painstakingly recorded in tribute to the band's tone-deaf song "Shine". Yeah, I was prepared to dismiss their out-of-tune guitars, complete inability to keep time with one another, puberty-tastic vocals and horrible, horrible lyrics as par for the course where Christian rock is concerned. But oh no, Final Placement had to be dicks about it, so I'm not going to be decent. Of course, it's likely that none of this stuff is real, so I'll try to channel my indignation into a wave of skepticism instead.

It seems that no amount of Cease and Desist orders can keep the unconscionably cruel community of the Internet from voicing their opinions about Final Placement and their terrible excuse for music. Every time the band tries to remove their video for "Shine" or one of the many mash-ups, parodies or responses, somebody re-posts it with an even more insulting title. This is the very definition of viral video, but something just doesn't smell right about the sudden ubiquity of "Shine" and the massive, predictable response to its awfulness.

If Final Placement wasn't supposed to be a Christian rock band, I'd call this one clearly staged and be done with it. But there's this nagging question of whether or not "Shine" is too crappy to even join the peerlessly crappy ranks of Jesus pop. It's confounding how close to the edge of believability this video is. While the incompetent production seems too bad to be genuine, Youtube is chock full of people who are utterly oblivious to their own lack of talent. But then the painfully stupid kick line starting at 1:12 further confuses the issue. There is only one kind of person in this world who would record a video of himself doing that dance move unironically and it's the thoroughly uncool church kid.

In the wake of all the venom being spewed in Final Placement's direction, a guy claiming to be the band's studio guitarist hopped onto the Dangerous Minds forum to defend himself and the drummer. Taking the moniker "Setting The Record Straight", he attempted to explain that Final Placement is really just the singer and the bassist, that everyone else was just hired on or doing these guys a favor by playing their terrible song according to their hopeless directions. Maybe this is an embarrassed guy telling the truth or maybe it's a full-time band member trying to distance himself from a musical train wreck. Or maybe, because this is the Internet, it's a clever troll or even somebody who was never involved with the band in the first place.

The layers of potential fiction in the case of Final Placement is mind-boggling. It's part of the magic and the mayhem of the Internet that it's so easy for people to convincingly masquerade as whatever they want others to believe they are. I'm not sure which reality I want more: One in which Final Placement is a real band or one in which this whole thing is a labyrinthine mess orchestrated by savvy trolls. The strangest part is that there's no guarantee that we'll ever find out. The Internet doesn't always answer the questions it raises.