1. Bang Camaro
The Boston band performs anthemic original rock tunes that achieve the whooshy gang-chorus sound of ’80s pop-metal by combining the hollers of a dozen or so vocalists onstage. There are several guitarists, too. Every pop-metal throwback band should have a chorus when it tours. See also: Diarrhea Planet.

2. 77 Boa Drum by The Boredoms
In 2007, the legendary Japanese noise-rock band convened 77 drummers in a park in Brooklyn for an audio/video project. So much drumming. “YOU are the 78th member! This is because the sound will spiral outward, from left to right, like DNA, from deep inside of us right out to you,” says text from the trailer video for the DVD. Whoo, drums!

3. Glenn Branca
Army of axes! The avant garde composer has been a font of ideas for the use of electric stringed instruments, including pieces that require orchestras of 100 guitars.

4. Up With People
This group still exists, apparently. In the early years of the Super Bowl era, their weirdly positive halftime takeovers were unavoidable in the world of televised sport. There’s something solidly U.W.P. in the Cesena video’s vocalists. See also: The Langley Schools Music Project; that famous Coke commercial.

5. Yanni
Maybe it’s just the presence of the longhaired conductor dude on the platform in the Cesena video. Or maybe it’s the fact that Cesena is part of a Mediterranean country. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this particular performance of “Learn To Fly” has distant undertones from Live at the Acropolis by the Greek god of the keyboard. Or maybe we just want Dave Grohl to dress like Yanni if/when The Foo Fighters play Cesena.

The petition started today has a simple mission: Persuade Dischord Records to sign Foo Fighters so Foo Fighters breaks up.

Started by music writer Grayson Currin, the petition on change.org stems from Dave Grohl’s recent suggestion that a deal with the influential D.C. label is on his super-successful band’s bucket list.

“If the Foos could do a Dischord single, then we could break up. Done deal,” Grohl said in a video interview with NME.

“People should support this petition because Dave Grohl says that, should Dischord release a Foo Fighters single, Foo Fighters will break up,” the petition reads. “This is very important, as Grohl and his band might be the most insufferable band of bros on the planet.”

In an email to Bandwidth, Currin calls his petition “entirely a joke” and says he doesn’t wish the Foos any harm. Yet, he adds, “I find Grohl’s opinions about music to be prescriptive and limiting and kind of myopic, and I feel like he often treats his values like official positions that should be adopted by heads of state or something.”

Grohl directed Sonic Highways, an HBO series about national music scenes and studios that also captured the making of his band’s latest album.

As of this writing, Currin’s petition has 55 signatures with a goal of 100.

Grohl recently publicized a letter he wrote to Dischord co-owner Ian MacKaye when he was 14, asking MacKaye to help out his teenage band Mission Impossible. He told NME the ex-Minor Threat vocalist found the letter in his attic.

I’ve reached out to MacKaye for comment on this petition business. No word back yet.

Sonic Highways is really about the process of recording the latest Foo Fighters album in eight American cities, and this episode (I haven’t seen the others) deals with Grohl’s own musical coming-of-age. But along the way, the show aims to trace at least a few decades of D.C. music history, and it does that well—though clearly within the parameters of Grohl’s own experience.

After a short discussion of the 1968 riots and class/race stratification in the District, Sonic Highways takes on go-go, leaning heavily on feedback from Trouble Funk’s “Big Tony” Fisher. Grohl pulls choice footage of Chuck Brown’s live shows, explores the go-go pocket and grabs a few soundbites from Pharrell Williams and D.C. Mayor Vince Gray. But Grohl discusses go-go mostly through a rock lens. Virginia hip-hop/rock band RDGLDGRN (Grohl collaborators), Black Cat co-owner Dante Ferrando and Dischord Records’ Ian MacKaye—among others—all have their say on go-go, then the show moves right into punk and parks itself there for the rest of the episode. Anyone looking for a thorough study of D.C.’s most distinctive African-American music won’t find it here.

The show’s brightest moments come from key footage of local shows, images by scene photographers like Lucian Perkins and—above all—the swath of big personalities Grohl roped into the episode. MacKaye and punk activist Mark Andersen get a lot of well-spent screen time, but the candid Trouble Funk leader, Bad Brains’ funny and direct bassist Darryl Jenifer and bearded superproducer Rick Rubin made some of the strongest—or at least funniest—contributions. (Though I suspect it was Rubin’s L.A. Buddha routine, not his quotes, that produced the laughs at last night’s screening.)

Toward the end of the episode, The Foo Fighters charge into “The Feast and the Famine,” a song it recorded at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio and wrote based on elements of D.C. music discussed in the program. (Hear the song below.) The song’s title speaks to that commonly cited dichotomy so central to D.C.’s identity: that this is a city home to both the world’s greatest power and the starkest example of that power’s disastrous failure.

It’s obvious that Grohl doesn’t have deep ties to the underprivileged half of that dichotomy, and certainly doesn’t now—in the Q-and-A that followed last night’s screening, Grohl said he paid for the entire TV series by playing two stadium shows in Mexico City—but he gives it pride of place on an extremely visible platform. The show’s emphasis on activism is unexpected and commendable, considering that the local punk scene’s hard-left, DIY-or-don’t-bother attitude is what granted it staying power—even more than the sound of D.C. punk rock, which has taken so many forms over the decades.

Early in the episode, Mark Andersen summarizes one of the most valuable takeaways from Sonic Highways, though he can’t take full credit for it himself. “Charles Dickens I think once called Washington, D.C. ‘the city of magnificent intentions,'” Andersen says. “The gap between the dream and the reality is excruciatingly wide.”

The show airs tonight at 11 p.m. on HBO. Tonight’s screening and Foo Fighters show at Black Cat is sold out.