This story is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. It has now sold out—but you can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.
A decade ago, VICE writer Timothy Faust caused a ruckus when he went into a Brooklyn bar and refused to stop playing “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy until he was told to leave. In homage to both that folkloric attempt to annoy strangers and the gut-punch genius of one of music’s greatest (and shortest) drum intros, we decided this should exist.
Nowhere in recorded history has Deftones’ seminal 1997 single “My Own Summer (Shove It)” been used in psychological warfare. Despite having all the necessary hardware—heavy distortion, guttural screams, and of course, a meme-ified two-beat drum intro that would surely induce Pavlovian panic in any nonconsenting repeat listener—it is yet to join the likes of “Enter Sandman” and the Sesame Street theme tune in the torturer’s canon.
Today, we break new ground.
In my city, jukeboxes are a dime a dozen. But many are old-school machines stocked with The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac. This will not do. After some reconnaissance I locate a digital one in a bar frequented by students and perverts. And I, being neither, planned to descend upon it on Saturday evening like the U.S. Navy SEALs occasionally do an ill-prepared South American capital.
I stroll in and punch the letters “M – Y – O – W” into a touchscreen keyboard that has the latency of a 2012 Galaxy Tab. Avoiding Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” and “My Own Prison” by Creed, I see it: my weapon of choice. The band stands proudly on the thumbnail, as if signaling their readiness to charge into battle. “Play us,” they call out. “Play us again and again and again.”
I tap my card onto the reader, giving myself several credits. With the jukebox unguarded I spend several minutes adding “My Own Summer (Shove It)” to the playlist an obscene amount of times. My hands tremble as some other, lesser song nears its final chorus. I don’t have long. I add even more “My Own Summer (Shove It)” to the queue. After the 17th entry, I lose count.
Sitting down, pleased that I had already managed to program around an hour’s worth of “My Own Summer (Shove It)”, I delight as the speakers fade to silence before the iconic CLACK CLACK drums pound into earshot. It begins. Little did the poolplayers and barflies know, they had just become guinea pigs in a new psychological experiment. I lean back, joyous, and think how this will be the easiest article I’ll ever have to write.
And yet, like those stories of promising varsity athletes who succumb to unknown congenital heart defects before reaching the big leagues, the world loses something of great promise. I listen for the drums heralding play #2, but they never arrive. Instead, the staccato strings of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” boom across the bar, and dread falls over me.
What the fuck? I had paid this establishment at least £7 to hear “My Own Summer (Shove It)” by Deftones at least 17 times. And there I was, like an idiot, listening to “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay, while everyone in the bar sang: “Wooooooooooah-woaaaaaaah! Wooooooooah-wooooooaah!”
Scrambling for my pockets, I download the jukebox’s phone app to find out what the hell is going on. I open the queue—which had once been graced with “My Own Summer (Shove It)” in quantities hitherto unseen—to find it totally bereft of any and all kinds of it, shoved or unshoved. Worse still, someone was adding other songs to the queue.
I jump to the jukebox, knowing I should have never let it out of my sight. Two blondes in their early twenties are consulting a Spotify playlist before adding a variety of tunes of the most dogshit variety. “Rockstar” by Nickelback. “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. I join the line. The taller of the blondes, who is wearing an Eminem hoodie, turns to confront me.
“Are you… alright?” she says, with the kind of squint-eyed contempt I have only ever seen deployed by mean teenagers against first-time hallucinogen users.
“I’m just waiting for the jukebox,” I say, because that’s a perfectly normal thing to do.
“We’re using it,” she hisses.
“Well, you won’t be that long!” I chuckle.
“We’ll be ten to 15 minutes,” she says. “You should sit down or go somewhere else,” before turning back and typing in “Ms Jackson” by Outkast.
“I watch over the jukebox like a smug king. The blondes have fled”
I return to my table, shoulders hunched, utterly defeated as “Rockstar” sees me off. It finishes and, on her word, the girl is still adding songs to the fucking jukebox, fingers flying like an iPad baby smacking for its next dopamine hit.
It’s here in my downtime that I surmise someone behind the bar must have a wipe privilege, a kind of kill switch to stop people like me. That’s why my deluge of Deftones has disappeared. It seems my entire plan is ruined. But then I remember two very important facts: 1) This jukebox has an app that allows me to add songs from my phone; and 2) I can pay extra to have my songs played first. It’s a pay-to-win jukebox, and I have more spare cash than sanity.
Now, I had a plan. As the next song finished, I would quickly pay the premium amount of credits for priority play—effectively jumping the queue at the last moment and placing “My Own Summer (Shove It)” where it belongs, right at the top.
Like Gabriel’s trumpets I hear it: CLACK CLACK. Immediately a curly-haired twenty-something throws his hands into the air as the riff rings out: “Oh my god, it’s the same fucking song.”
I watch over the jukebox like a smug king. The blondes have fled. The ghostly visage of Ed Sheeran appears on the top portion of the LCD screen as a young couple attempts to add his music, unaware that I can elbow them out of the way whenever I like. And so, as “My Own Summer (Shove It)” concludes, I pay a premium price to play it again.
“If that fucking song plays again!” screams one lad in a white long sleeve, storming towards the jukebox with his pool cue. We’re only three plays in and people are already losing it. Each time the drum intro plays there is a barometric shift in the bar’s mood. Drinks are paused. Heads fly back and groans emerge from open maws. Their faces read like the song’s lyrics: “Tell me when it’s over.” The song plays again as four flatscreens display a UFC match; it’s a fitting soundtrack.
“My Own Summer (Shove It)” is now playing for the fifth time. As the bar is filled with yet another familiar tom-snare one-two punch, a choir of cheers erupts from the pool area. Already they are cracking under the pressure. Stockholm syndrome is setting in.
“He thinks he can use sex to defeat me”
The song is skipped. Suddenly, it dawns on me that the bar staff can override anything on this infernal machine. This isn’t as devastating as first appears, however. The most important part of “My Own Summer (Shove It)” is objectively the drum intro, which rings out in less than a second. I have learned by now that the most violent reactions follow the moment of pause between songs, when everyone collectively hopes that “My Own Summer (Shove It)” won’t play again. And then it does. All I need to do to make everyone upset is make them hear one second of “My Own Summer (Shove It)”. And that’s what I do.
“Mate. This song again,” one young man despairs. It’s shut down five seconds in. “Oh my god!” someone else yells before “My Own Summer (Shove It)” is skipped, just to reveal yet another “My Own Summer (Shove It)” waiting right behind, like a Russian doll in JNCO jeans. The music begins to impact my emotional wellbeing as much as everyone else’s. I start to feel like the song sounds, an angry social misfit misunderstood by wider society. As I revel in the widening gap of empathy between myself and the other bar patrons, I’m too slow on the draw, and “Meet Me Halfway” by the Black Eyed Peas sneaks onto the queue. The entire bar is singing along. I am incensed. The torturer has become the tortured. But it will only be a short reprieve for them.
After Fergie dissipates, the drum dyad smacks through the speakers with glorious twin plosives and one young woman, visibly quite stressed at this point, lets out a genuinely upsetting and drawn out “Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.”
The Playlist War continues for some time. My wallet cries as each premium payment is withdrawn. “My Own Summer” plays. The bar skips it. “My Own Summer” plays. The bar skips it. But all it takes is one second of play to get what I need.
I step up to the jukebox to brazenly reveal myself as the evening’s torturer. I look towards the staff. They’re busy serving two dozen students, but with one of them I lock eyes. I smile and punch in “My Own Summer” on priority play. CLACK CLACK. The groans erupt.
I see one member of staff reach for what I presume must be the skip button, but I, once again, use the priority play to add “My Own Summer (Shove It)” to the front of the queue.
This open warfare doesn’t last long, however. A drunk man begins to grind on me, sticks his fingers in my ears, and then gropes my arse. He has made himself a honey trap. He thinks he can use sex to defeat me. Undeterred, I turn to him with a polite, “No, thank you,” before returning to the touchscreen to select “My Own Summer (Shove It)” once again.
After inflicting a sonic assault upon over 30 bar patrons, one of whom countered by sexually assaulting me, I decide to call it quits. Deftones hammers out for a handful of seconds for one final time, and I head to the bar, carve myself a space in the huddle and ask the nearest member of staff why they keep skipping my song.
The answer was written on her face. Yet the torture session has been unsuccessful. She looks at me, sighs, and refuses to offer up the information I’m looking for.
“Can you please just leave?”
Follow George Francis Lee on X @GuhFuhLuh
This story is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.
The post I Played the Same Deftones Song Over and Over on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out appeared first on VICE.
