“Josh Homme’s Restraining Order Drama is the Best Movie to Come out of Hollywood Since Whip it.”

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NME reports that Camille Homme, daughter of Queens of the Stone Age lead singer/Eagles of Death Metal drummer Josh Homme, has been granted a “temporary restraining order” against the singer. Of course, this comes as very sad news to me as I am a huge Queens of the Stone Age fan and have to admit I at least find Eagles of Death Metal funny, in a making-everybody-uncomfortable, L.A. sort of way. 

Well, making people uncomfortable, Homme certainly has been, if the report holds — physical and verbal abuse, to both Camille and her two brothers, and sexual abuse reported of the brothers, in specific. Actually, reading the report made me feel a little bit better about the whole situation because it makes it seem less like Homme is painfully in love with his daughter, which I’d assumed from initially seeing the news. Instead, it reads as kind of like the Marilyn Manson case without the sex, although in this instance no lawsuit has been filed yet, as 15-year-old Camille is still perhaps too guileless to think litigiously and to automatically extol the entity of money when something happens to her. 

Give her credit, though, for getting this done against her dad, who, from the way it sounds, has been a terror for her and her siblings, and for being articulate in her adorable rage to the press: “‘My DVRO isn’t fake and was NOT written by my Mom!’” This last “mom” anecdote, according to NME, comes as a reference to a claim by Homme’s lawyer, Susan E. Wiesner, that the restraining order from Camille was “‘prepared by (Camille’s mother) Brody (Dalle), in her handwriting on the forms, (and) was filed in retaliation for Josh obtaining a TRO against Brody for her physical abuse of Josh, among other things involving the children.’”

I mean, I’ve never seen a more hilarious sequence of attempted and executed restraining orders in my life — it’s like an episode of The Eminem Show with more L.A. fakeness and gender swapping. Like, what’s up with home boy groping his sons and not his daughter, and getting abused by his wife? It plays out like an urban American rendition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and all its cross-dressing deception and androgyny, and it also of course, at least theoretically, unfurls a decent discussion on that “Defund the Police” movement that sort of half-started a couple years ago. That is, everybody involved in this Homme home fiasco seems to have the police on speed dial, if not a constant Skype page on their phone, for Christ’s sake. 

So again, I was in a way relieved and happy for Homme to read NME’s report and find that Homme didn’t have like some fervent emotional attachment to his daughter or anything like that — it sounds like the kids were being as much a pain in his a** as he was to them. And this morning when I woke up I was thinking about it, when I still thought he’d been attempting something romantic with his daughter, I kept mulling over those three consecutive tracks on Lullabies to Paralyze, an album title which itself of course could be construed as vengeful against the offspring in itself, of course. You’ve got “I Never Came,” which is probably a pathetic attempt at double entendre but is obviously decidedly sexual, “Someone’s in the Wolf,” a likely reference to Little Red Riding Hood (Homme’s son is named Wolf, ahem) and the relentless chorus matra of “So glad you could stay forever”, and, perhaps most eerily of all, “The Blood is Love,” which sustains this album segment’s testosterone-fueled rock onslaught. It’s like this turbo-powered monsoon of rife, unmitigated sexual frustration, which, I must admit, was very useful to me as a balding college student exposed to Colorado girls. And the more of these singers that are accused of “abuse” the less I care, obviously, per basic economic law, and just want to trudge on with my life and take catharsis and gratification from wherever I can get it. Normalcy is a myth. That heater you’re sitting by in the winter is pumping out HEAT, not normalcy.