Month: May 2019

Some might argue covering an entire album in the ‘Bad Songs List Court’ section is cheating, but since this album is basically an hour or so of uninterrupted noise collage divided only by the original LP album sides, I think it qualifies as a ‘song’ in itself for this purpose. This is one of the strangest and most unexpected examples of history vindicating a piece of music in the modern era. When Lou Reed first released it, all anyone could see was the perceived absurdity of an album consisting entirely of guitar feedback, and it received universal scorn and spent the next several years appearing on every ‘Worst Albums of All Time’ list of the era. Then, to everyone’s surprise, it wound up being the genesis for a perfectly respectable music genre…Noise Music…and now is regarded with a great deal of respect for its sheer forward-looking innovation. Heard today, it ranks as not only the innovator of Noise Music but probably still the genre’s greatest masterpiece…you wind up listening with amazement as Reed manages to create real, Classical-caliber melodies out of static and feedback alone. Occasionally you’ll find some clown who didn’t get the memo and still regards this album as a laughable failure, but overall, it serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly artistic greatness can be missed in the moment.

Verdict: Good, and it would amaze its first-time reviewers to see how many people today would agree with me.

Slipknot certainly have a fanbase, but they get a lot of hatred both from non-Metal fans (they aren’t the most abrasive band in the genre by a long shot, but they’re definitely the most public example of so-called ‘Extreme Metal’, so they wind up as a focal point for a lot of the rage toward it) and Metal snobs who see them as only slightly higher on the genre’s elaborate pecking order than acts like Limp Bizkit. But if you believe brutality is a virtue (and while I myself have my doubts about this, it’s generally the common mindset among the Metal crowd), then they deserve a certain measure of respect for being by far the most brutal band to remain remotely pop-friendly, and there’s something to be said for the sheer force and intensity of their music. This song was the climactic track on their second album, which was something of an artistic breakthrough for them. In concept, it’s not that different from the standard fare of Slipknot’s sometime cohorts Insane Clown Posse…an internal monologue from the point of view of a particularly twisted serial killer, punctuated with evil laughter in the background…but unlike ICP, Slipknot can actually pull off real terror, and the lyrics to this song are genuinely unnerving. It also shows the band had a sense of atmosphere…the track is essentially a kind of 15-minute Nu-Metal soundscape. I like my brutal music subtly and complexly textured, and this song certainly proves that Slipknot are capable of more than just simplistic musical assault…yes, even this early in their career. Granted, I approach pretty much all Metal music as an outsider, given that I’ve never really bought into the Heavy Metal mindset, but based on my analysis, I’d give this band a passing grade at least.

Verdict: Good.

For those who are goggling at that title, yes, Mick Jagger, legendary frontman of the Rolling Stones, made an appearance on a song by two of the most notorious no-talents in modern Pop music during his early-2010s career resurgence. It’s not a sample, either…Jagger recorded his verse specifically for this song. Why, Mick, why? You’re one of the greatest Rock singers of all time, a literal music God…why would you associate yourself with an incompetent idiot like Will.i.am or an untalented has-been like Lopez? Well, as you’d expect, Jagger’s verse is the only good thing about this song, which otherwise sounds exactly like “Scream and Shout” with a different washed-up pop star, but his involvement is still one of the saddest things to happen in pop music in the last few years.

Verdict: Bad.

Street-Legal is one of those Bob Dylan albums on whose quality no-one can seem to agree; depending on who you ask, it is either one of his all-time masterpieces or one of the worst albums of his career. Complicating things is that it came just on the edge of his widely-agreed-upon slump period that lasted for most of the Eighties, and whether it was the beginning of that slump or one last burst of glory before it started is hotly argued to this day. Its detractors point to the substandard, overly pop-sounding arrangements, dismissing it as a ‘Dylan-goes-Vegas’ album. And I’ll grant you that the garish orchestrations, which sound like a cross between something you’d hear in a Vegas nightclub and an uninspired Garage Band, and the female backup singers, who sound like they migrated over from a B-list disco single, do not present this composition to its best advantage. But the thing that has won Street-Legal a not-inconsiderable set of die-hard fans over the years is the songwriting itself, which is some of Dylan’s most dense and sophisticated work, and this song, arguably the highlight of the album, is a particularly strong example of such. The tune is some of Dylan’s best work as a melodist, maybe not on the level of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or “Tangled Up In Blue”, but still tuneful and stirring and far more interesting as pure music than the vast majority of Dylan’s output. And the lyrics are top-drawer Dylan, a reminder that quite apart from his role as a popular singer he ranks as one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest poets. The lyrics may not make any sense at all when parsed literally…indeed, they make “Desolation Row” look like a model of sense and clear storytelling…but as a stream-of-consciousness series of Classical-influenced poetic images, it ranks as one of the crowning achievements of Dylan-as-abstract-poet. While not a ‘hit’ in any conventional sense, this song has been a staple of Bob Dylan ‘Best of’ compilations for years, and it makes a pretty convincing case for Street-Legal‘s quality, especially since it sets the stylistic template used by most of the other songs, making it a good representative of the album as a whole.

Verdict: Good enough to cut through its lousy arrangement, and emerge as one of Dylan’s all-time classics.

The Common One album is by far the most divisive record Van Morrison ever released, with some calling it one of his all-time masterpieces while others, including most professional critics at the time of its release, dismiss it as a pretentious bore. This is largely because, while Morrison’s work often evokes spiritual contemplation, this album goes far further in the direction of abstract atmosphere music than any of his other works, being in fact one of the all-time greatest masterpieces of the New Age Music genre, and fans of his more conventional material are often baffled by it. This particular song, for example, is fifteen minutes long, the lyrics are largely endless repetitions of a cycle of small phrases, and there are frequent references to famous poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake and T.S. Eliot, which is part of what led some to accuse the song of being ‘pretentious’. But this is really beside the point, since the lyrics are more about pure sound and ritual than ‘songwriting’ in the conventional popular sense. Most of the track consists of mystical music blended from the sounds of Irish folk songs and Free Jazz, with Morrison repeating phrases like ‘Walk with me’, ‘It just is’, and ‘Can you feel the light?’ as though they were mantras. Of all the New Age Music I’ve heard yet, this is by far the most genuinely mystical and otherworldly, and I could actually see this music bringing someone into an altered spiritual state all on its own.

Verdict: Good, if you know how to approach it.

It’s almost unfortunate that this has become Jimmy Buffett’s signature hit, since it’s far from the best thing he ever wrote and tends to give people an incorrect idea about what the majority of his work is like. Granted, unlike the myriad brainless Country Drinking Songs it wound up inspiring, it was originally intended to have an ironic, almost pathetic undertone to its cheeriness, something that is still reflected in pretty much every word of the lyrics. But I’m aware this excuse only holds water up to a certain point, since every live version since Buffett reinvented himself as a live performer has completely ignored the lyrics and delivered the song as exactly the kind of carefree celebration it’s thought to be in the popular imagination. That said, Buffett, in his own unassuming way, was capable of writing some incredibly catchy tunes, and this is one of his most enduring. For all its problems, it’s somehow hard to resist this song, especially in Buffett’s loose, charmingly informal method of performing it, and while it is not an indication of his full range as a writer, it does capture much of the fundamental appeal of his work, especially his live shows.

Verdict: Not Buffett’s best by any means, but good.

Given the artist byline, which features the premiere maker of bad Dubstep side-by-side with the most notorious teenybopper singer of the current decade, you’d expect this song to be outright horrible. I was immensely surprised myself when I realized that it’s actually fairly decent. Granted, like most of Bieber’s stuff in 2015, the lyrics have something of a petty edge, but the production resembles distinguished producer Diplo’s previous work far more than it does Skrillex’s, and Bieber is probably better suited to EDM than any other genre, since they have a ready-made excuse to heavily process his vocals and obscure the terrible singing voice that has always been his biggest liability. This was, in fact, the point where Bieber went from ‘the worst Pop star in the known universe’ to ‘kinda-sorta-maybe-okay-ish-if-you-squint-at-him-a-little-bit’…which for him, was actually pretty significant progess.

Verdict: Surprisingly decent, especially given who it’s coming from.

This song gets much less respect than other Eighties Phil Collins hits like “In the Air Tonight” and “Land of Confusion”, with many suggesting that it was the point at which he ‘sold out’ (even if the near-universally beloved Invisible Touch album by Genesis, of which he was the primary author, was still two years in the future). One common criticism is that the hook is too similar to “1999” by Prince, and while it doesn’t reach the point of outright plagiarism, the song does sound distinctly reminiscent of Prince’s work. But what no-one seems to notice about that argument is that if a song strongly resembles one of the greatest hits by one of the geniuses of popular music, it probably isn’t a bad song at all. This is actually a highly enjoyable piece of music, and if it’s more upbeat and goofy than Collins’ earlier material, it still hasn’t settled into the dull Easy Listening morass of his Nineties work…it still has the percussive edge that tells you this track was written by a drummer. The lyrics are gibberish, true, but Collins wrote them specifically to lay well on the tune, and they do indeed fulfill that criterion admirably, so maybe he knew what he was doing after all.

Sade have their detractors, partly because of the usual prejudice against Easy Listening and partly because they really did influence a lot of genuinely bad acts in the Smooth Jazz and Adult Contemporary genres. But in the 80s Easy Listening scene, which at the time was becoming more and more homogenized and synthetic, Sade were far more interesting than most of their peers. They had such a one-of-a-kind, utterly original sound that they could basically be said to have invented their own genre, blending elements of Jazz, Soul, R&B and Soft Rock into a style that must have seemed downright surreal at the time and still sounds unusual today, even after their innovations laid the foundations for about six different genres for the next ten years or so. This was their breakthrough hit outside their native England, and it is a fascinating song, with an appropriately smooth melody and Sade Adu’s distinctive and haunting contralto giving it an extremely memorable atmosphere. And while Sade’s cool, dry sound can feel a bit detached at times, that’s actually quite appropriate to this song’s portrait of a heartless, emotionally callow playboy breaking hearts with complete indifference. It’s a truth in life that you can’t have the good without the bad, and if Sade’s genre innovations may have led to some unfortunate acts like Crystal Waters, they also provided the basis for some of the greatest music of the Eighties and Nineties, and their own work still sounds fresh and unique even to this day.

Verdict: Good.

John Denver produced a number of hits, but there are two masterpiece-level songs in particular for which he will be most remembered—”Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Annie’s Song (You Fill Up My Senses)”. However, while “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is so beloved that even most of Denver’s loudest detractors consider it an exception to their antipathy, “Annie’s Song”, while well-loved among Denver’s fans, is a popular target for those who have contempt for his Soft-Rock leanings and open sentimentality. I’ll admit there is a certain disparity between the two songs in terms of lyrics…the lyrics to “Annie’s Song” work well with the tune, but the lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” would work as poetry even without the music, whereas this song’s lyrics would probably just come off as sentimental drivel on paper. But the fact remains that this is one of the most ravishingly rhapsodic melodies in any of the myriad of genres Denver falls into, and whatever you think of the lyrics, the music itself is almost impossible to dismiss. For all the scorn he receives from Rock snobs and other opponents of Easy Listening, Denver is one of the most distinguished names in the softer Rock genres, and this song ranks as one of the very greatest Easy Listening/Soft Rock ballads of all time, and does a lot to support the case that the genre should be more respected.

Verdict: A masterpiece.