A Steaming Pile of Aural Excrement (Songs I F@#$%^& Hate W/O)Oct 13 '03 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line As much as I like music, there are a few wholly unredeemable songs out there that keep coming back to haunt me... Share my pain... There are plenty of bad songs out there. In fact, there are probably more bad songs than there are good songs. But "bad" is such a subjective term. There are so many different types of bad. There are songs that are bad in such a way that the simply fail to register with us or stick in our heads. Songs by artists like Yanni come to mind here. There are songs that are bad because they disappoint us so much compared to our expectations. Look at half of the songs on Magical Mystery Tour. They don't exactly blow, but we expect so much better from the Beatles. Then there are the songs that are so over-the-top bad in their cheesiness, that they lap the field, moving so far beyond bad that they loop back, becoming good songs in a kitchy, ironic sort of way. Oh, Sherry and We Built This City fit this mold. These aren't the kinds of bad songs we're concerned with today, though. It's a rare song that sounds so out and out bad, so wrong and evil, that they cause you physical pain. Listening to them is like taking a cheese grater to your soul, and they leave you with the kind of oily taint that a thousand showers can't wash away. If you're lucky, these kinds of songs will fade away into obscurity, never to be heard again. More often than not, though, an artist who produces one of these songs has forged a pact with Satan himself, inked out with the blood of the innocent. These songs invariably defy the laws of nature and rise to the top of the charts to be heard from the rear speakers of every hoopty car, and the muzak speakers of every department store. Try as you might, you can't escape from these songs, sort of like when you're driving along a deserted country road in the fog, and you accidentally run over a creepy old gypsy woman, and you panic and leave her for dead, only she recovers and places a terrible curse on you, and she shows up wherever you go, be it the mall, or the bank, or the grocery store, or Mount Rushmore, or Borneo, and she doesn't actually say anything to you, but she just stands there with a spiteful look on her face, and she creeps you out so much that you go insane in tiny little increments, until one day you can't take it any more, and you snap and rip off all your clothing and tear apart a bus full of nuns. That's what these songs are like. Normally, I'm pretty good at ignoring songs that really bug me. I'm usually able to avoid them all together, or I manage to tune them out. Over the years, though, a few of these god awful songs have slipped through my defenses, scraping away at my eardrums like a steel wool Q-tip whenever I happen to hear them. These are the songs I'll do absolutely anything to avoid. If one comes on the radio in my bathroom when I take my shower in the morning, I'll go back to bed and hide under the covers, even if it means being late for work. If one comes on the radio in the car, I'll have to fight awfully hard against the urge to drive to a shoe store, buy some steel-toed boots, and start kicking away at my dashboard. I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but these are the songs that come to mind right now. Get the Party Started by Pink I don't care how much other people like this song. Everything about it sounds shrill and abrasive. That god-awful, repetitive siren sound in the chorus, the vacuous, insipid lyrics, the thumping, soulless bass line. It's an overwhelming mélange of trendy, but empty, worthless pop and hip hop elements carefully constructed to hide the fact that the song is not only empty and meaningless, but also annoying and repetitive if you stop and listen closely. To add insult to injury, this song gave us the oh-so-painful reminder that Linda Perry didn't disappear after recording What's Up as the laws of natures should have dictated, but rather survived to write annoying crap like this. Total Eclipse of the Heart by Nikki French Normally, I enjoy cover songs. Even if a cover song doesn't live up to the quality set by the original, there's usually something to enjoy, even if that enjoyment comes on a campy, ironic level. Sometimes something goes wrong, though. The original version of this song (recorded by Bonnie Tyler back in the early eighties) was one of the best ballads of its era. It was full of powerful emotion driven by Tyler's gritty voice, and featured a stark, simple piano background that fit the song perfectly. In her remake, Nikki French strips away any traces of emotional depth, leaving us with her weak, breathy vocals. The whole thing was sped up to a painful tempo, and a heavy, thumbing dance club beat stomped all over any remaining musical value. This cover version actually makes me wish I had never heard the original, so I wouldn't know just how badly French had screwed up the song (sort of like seeing an old friend who had been mangled in an industrial accident, horribly disfigured, and still alive, but only through the intervention of too many machines). Strong Enough by Sheryl Crow First of all, I've got plenty of respect for Ms. Crow. She's released quite a few albums that I've enjoyed. Her debut, though, is a vapid mess. She managed to take rootsy folk rock, a genre with a long history and plenty of potential for universal appeal, and turned it into a whiny, self-centered mess. Strong Enough is probably the most egregious example. The bare-bones acoustic guitar backing lacks any liveliness or spirit to draw the listener in, and the lyrics are just a woeful tale of co-dependence sung with a lilting whine that reminds me of someone scraping their nails across a blackboard. If you're going to ask me if I'm "strong enough to be your man," first you need some lyrics that will make me care about you, rather than ones that sound desperate and pathetic. Sorry, Sheryl, but I'm not even strong enough to listen to this song without feeling queasy. Days Go By by Dirty Vegas Let's not even get into the fact that Dirty Vegas are a group that sold out to commercial interests even before their first album was released. Forget that god-awful Mistubishi commercial with girl doing those robot breakdancing moves in the car nearly twenty years after everyone else on the planet realized how lame it looks. Every single aspect of Days Go By reminds me of what's wrong with the modern music world. If a little bit of electronic looping can add spice to a song, then using nothing but electronic looping must obviously be like a gourmet meal. If a little bit of pitch correction on the vocals can smooth away mistakes, then slathering on pitch correction with a trowel until it hurts the listeners' ears must make the music sound crisper than the Vienna Boys Choir. If you can find brief, catchy snippet of music less than five seconds long, why bother trying to do anything different in the song? Just use that single snippet over and over and over until you've reached the minimum length to release a single. Taken to this extreme, "popular" music elements just end up boring and dull. Of everything wrong with this song, though, I hate the vocals the most. That creepy electronic vocal effect used here and used when Robo-Cher sang Believe (a song that just missed out by a hair from being in this list), as well as in too many other pop songs forced down our throats by Clear Channel, is easily the most irritating musical trend to come out of the late nineties. We may as well have computer voice synthesizers record vocal tracks for thee songs if the singers can't achieve the desired effect themselves. (Incidentally, there's an acoustic version of this song that Dirty Vegas recorded that actually sounds pretty good. Just goes to show how the wrong kind of production can ruin an otherwise decent song.) Music by Madonna Madonna is a true musical empire. She fought her way tooth and nail to get where she is and she has more power than just about everyone else in the industry. Like so many other empires (think Roman, Ottoman, etc.), she's been around long enough to get complacent, full of unnecessary waste and pointless self-indulgence. She's an empty figurehead now, and the only reason she's still selling millions of albums is inertia. She's been surviving solely the coattails of her previous success, and nowhere is it more evident than on Music. The song has no soul and is nothing more than annoying electronic beeping and squawking with some of the most boring, repetitive lyrics we've seen in years. If Madge weren't distracting us with her constant image makeovers and leapfrogging from world religion to world religion on a bi-weekly basis, the listening public might have simply been able to roll their eyes at this musical garbage and move on to someone whose well of talent hasn't run dry. Music simply makes me angry, reminding me how often we fawn over washed-up stars and ignore fresh new talent. Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous by Good Charlotte This one may seem like a rather obvious inclusion, but I'm not including it on the list because the song is overly simple and repetitive, and I'm not bringing it up because neither the band nor their fans understand that punk is supposed to about so much more than just the surface image. This song drives me to a murderous rage simply because it glorifies hypocrisy like no other song in recent memory. Just look at the lyrics. The whole "message" of the song is that rich people are evil because "they're always complaining." What better way to put these rich people in their place than by whining and complaining about them... Hello Pot. This is Kettle. You're black... I Love You Always Forever by Donna Lewis Here's a song I had nearly forgotten about. I hadn't heard it in years, and a few weeks ago, I wouldn't have bothered to include it in this list. Not long ago, though, I was on my way to dinner with some friends and this song came on the radio, bringing back a floor of memories from my college years. My senior year, this song was all over the radio, and I had never seen such a gratuitous celebration of mediocrity. The backing music was bad enough, with its simplistic beats repeated ad nauseum over boring dance hall beat. The lyrics, however, could not be more vapid and repetitive. It's bad enough when your song sounds like amateur poetry. This song's lyrics fit that description, but there are only about three or four different lines of bad poetry, repeated over and over for four minutes (that feel like four hours). Hearing it on the radio a few weeks back reminded how I'll never be able to fully escape any of these god-awful songs. They'll always keep coming back to haunt me. Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meat Loaf It's a sacred cow for some, but I have always hated this song, and always will. I'm fine with the fact that Mr. Loaf didn't write this song himself. Plenty of great artists have become famous with material they didn't compose. I'm also willing to overlook the fact that Meat Loaf is a one-trick pony (musically, at least). I simply hate this song because it is so overblown, so pretentious, and so full of itself that, if the song were a person, I'd have a hard time resisting the urge to sneak up behind it and punch in the back of the head. It's all well and good to give your song a theatrical, symphonic feel, but at least find some decent material to place before this backdrop. You can start with a song about two teenagers getting laid, expand it to eight and a half minutes, break it up into several musical movements, and give everything an overblown orchestral feel, but in the end, it's still just a song about two teenagers getting laid. The fact that the teenagers-getting-laid song that lies at the heart of Paradise by the Dashboard Lights sucks pretty badly to begin with makes it all the more painful to listen to. (And yes, I am aware of the slight irony here. Earlier I praised Total Eclipse of the Heart as a fantastic ballad, and here I'm trashing Paradise by the Dashboard Light, when it turns out that both were written by Jim Steinman. That's just the way the music business goes...) There are probably plenty of other songs that could fit on this list, but I've managed to block them out of my head well enough that they don't come to mind right now. All this talk about songs that suck is making my head hurt, though. I've got to get to some good music before I hurt someone. The above diatribe is part of Fartzarellah's Songs I F@#$%^& Hate write off. Be sure to check out the hate spewing forth from these other writers: Bob_Tomato DrFaustus (Me) Fartzarellah (our host) Kristinafh Plorentz Sadgit Shilmafone Speeddemon531 Teamfreak16 Thevoid99 Vanwarp and anyone else who decides to crash the party. You know want to... it's fun.  |
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