Tenacious D as Metaphysical Poetry

Do you know Donne? John Donne, that is. The late 16th century poet is probably the most popular of what has been termed the “Metaphysical Poets.” These complex individuals wrote complex poetry dealing with the vagaries of life, love, and death, and did so through a conceit, or an “extended metaphor with a complex logic.” The most common example of the metaphysical conceit is in Donne’s poem “The Flea.” Donne uses the idea of a mosquito bites and sucking the blood of both him and his beloved as a way of explaining the deep connection between them.

So what does all this college English crap have to do with Jack Black and Kyle G’s comic rock group?

Tenacious D’s best song is, almost unreservedly, a track called “Tribute.” In this great track, the dynamic duo employ a conceit where the song they are singing is the “greatest song in the world,” but wait, no it’s not, “but this is just a tribute.” As Shakespeare would talk about the inability to quantify love and just as Colleridge would talk about the inability to really understand God’s mercy, Tenacious D is admitting to the inability to really craft the “greatest song in the world” — all attempts will really just end up being tributes. Who would have expected Plato’s myth of the cave coming from this pair of “devil’s rejects”?