paganbabies

Dead Music

It long has been openly acknowledged that the majority of popular things in our culture are genuinely not good. We know, and seem to embrace the idea that a great deal of chance determines the latest catch phrase, the newest hit TV show, or recent billboard top ten. It often seems as though a group of thoughtless middle-aged white people is gathered in a room somewhere in Ohio, deciding what the rest of us will have poured into us for the next month or two, until the group's fancies change (very slightly) and we are fed another iteration of shit. Can't you just picture the ditzy midwestern mom, for weeks after seeing the movie, throwing out "Show me the money!" references at every chance, thinking she is being hilarious, while in reality she is the embodiment of the modern Antichrist? In the worst cases, sometimes one of their choices sticks like gum in our hair and we have to live with it for years, or decades after. Below I present ten such unfortunate selections which I would like us all to just plain forget. Each of these songs is uniquely terrible, but all have shared an inexplicable longevity. (Not 'inexplicable,' I suppose, as American idiocy explains roughly 100% of the problems in my life.)

10:

C+C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)
Two jerks walk in to room with a synthesizer. Some broad screams some lines at a microphone. Some other broad lip syncs in front of a camera. #1 hit. Seventeen years later, I'm still hearing this four-minute headache, generally at the gym and sometimes at sporting events (the latter, as we will find, are havens for awful music). Listening to this track, one can surmise two things, one: the general public of 1990 must have been wildly satisfied with the simplest imaginable music as long as that music was generated electronically, and two: (and this holds true today) a song needs only one hook, and that hook can be as simple as four notes used in constant repetition.

9:

The Village People - Y.M.C.A.
Wikipedia: "Collectively, the Village People have sold 85 million albums and singles." Staggering. More: "YMCA is number 7 on VH1's list of The 100 Greatest Dance Songs of the 20th Century." Not as staggering, because any retard can (and will) do this dance, and while he is dancing, he must be thinking that he does not look foolish because he is dancing correctly, and if he is very good he even remembers to lean left on the "C" so it looks right to the observers. But such dancers neglect the central problem with the Y.M.C.A. dance: it is a retarded dance to begin with, and therefore, even (especially?) when executed perfectly, it necessarily makes the executor look retarded. It has been the scourge of drunk uncles at weddings for almost 30 years and I don't see a quick death for it anywhere on the horizon.

8:

Bon Jovi - Living on a Prayer and Have a Nice Day
I joined together these two sonic cesspools merely because they both spewed from the same dreadful fountainhead; otherwise, they are both awful, but they are differently awful. "Living on a Prayer" is possibly the best song on this list (thinnest kid at fat camp); it's what that song turns people into that needs to be killed. Who honestly likes that song outside the hours of 12 a.m. and 3 a.m. or outside of a crowded bar and 0.13+ BAC? No one I care to speak to. For my own part, I have pledged to stop taking part in the drunk shouting circles that this song incites to action, and I never renege my pledges unless I've been drinking. The other, "Have a Nice Day," is new, I know, but it has already received 20 years' worth of airplay. Companies play it when they want to sound tough, but how fucking tough can a song be with the line "Have a nice day" as its refrain and mantra? "Oooh. I'm tough and independent. I'll show you! Have a nice day?" Awful.

7:

Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
This one should have died within a year of its arrival (or better yet, have been delivered stillborn) but it found a hole some place and slithered into it, worming out and into your ears about once a month (another that finds many victims at sporting events). The way this bitch demands that I "pump up the jam" is probably the track's most offensive characteristic. Listen to it closely and what you hear is a pouting little girl in need of a slapping. Over and over. And over.

6:

Maroon 5 - This Love
I'm not an idiot. For the most part, I hear the catchy motifs, the repetitive and simple pop music structures (introduction, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, coda). I can understand the base appeal of every song on this list, but one. Maroon 5's "This Love" jars me so thoroughly that I cannot find within it any quality that might legitimize its insane (and I truly mean insane) popularity. If one were to seat an autistic four-year-old before a piano that had only three strings remaining, and those strings were detuned, and then give the child a hammer to play with the resulting noise would hold no less appeal for me than "This love."

5:

Ricky Martin - La Vida Loca
Not only did the song get sprayed all over us relentlessly for about a year, the phrase "la vida loca" became a catch phrase among those same idiots I mentioned in the introduction, the ones also responsible for "Save a horse, ride a cowboy" and, perhaps the worst of all, "Git-R-Done" (I'm so ashamed to have that phrase on my website). I will admit that this particular song seems to have faded a great deal from America's collective auditory cortex, but I use it as a vehicle for discussing these little phrases that become baubles for the easily occupied minds of my countrymen, the same minds that laugh at show me the money jokes and feel intellectual when they discuss the Da Vinci Code. I would like to beg these people: "Okay, the RIAA/MPAA/TV moguls have recognized that you hold most of our population's purchasing power. When you buy into this shit you hurt, physically hurt the rest of us. If you would only step up your level of sophistication to that of, say, a squirrel we would be forever indebted."

4:

UB40 - Red Red Wine and The Way You Do the Things You Do.
I give these guys credit for publishing "music" for close to thirty years, but I give them no credit for the "music" they published as being music. "Red Red Wine" is one of about 970 songs written by Niel Diamond and "The Way You Do the Things You Do" is another cover, so why do I have to listen to these nerdy Brits sing their crap smooth jazz versions everyfuckingtime I'm in a retail store? Just look at these guys.

3:

Black Eyed Peas - My Humps
Do I have to say anything?

2:

House of Pain - Jump Around
Probably THE song for sports arenas, a place which, at least in the bleachers, is not at all safe for jumping around. DJ Lethal went on to Bizkit, and we all know what happened to (oh my, what an unfortunate name) Everlast. Again it is a simple repeated anthem with a (sort of) dance that anyone can do, ala YMCA, but its manly enough for a football game, so they keep it around. And what is that terrible siren wail? BREEEEE! BREEEEE! JUMP AROUND! .... okay.

1:

B-52's - Loveshack
Every girl likes this song. Every one of them. You could play this song for Phumzile from Nigeria, who never in her life has heard recorded music, and the second time around you know she would yell that fucking "Tin Roof" part and be completely into it. Men, I'm sorry, but you know how women won't let go of things - we may never be able to kill this. But if I could get rid of just one song for good and for ever, it would be "Loveshack." And that's an end on it.

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