Month: May 2019

Twisted Sister have become a byword for everything wrong with the Hair Metal genre, but if you’re only familiar with their most famous work you might be confused about why. Their breakthrough record Stay Hungry managed to produce two hits, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”, that are still staples of Rock radio today, and while neither is particularly good or interesting as Hair Metal goes, it was on their next two albums that they gained their reputation as the laughingstock of their genre. Their last two albums featured a garishly ugly sound that was apparently an attempted compromise between the relatively authentic Heavy Metal of their early albums and the poppy sound of Stay Hungry, but wound up with none of the redeeming qualities of either. This song, a bloated would-be showpiece with a huge lineup of big-name guest stars and a music video that was banned from MTV, is a pretty good illustration of their notorious second album’s style, painfully cheesy and borderline unlistenable, with a stupid joke title and a lyric that reads like an idiot’s version of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. There’s a reason these guys are a walking punchline even among Hair Metal fans, and while they may be best known today for their two passably mediocre hit tunes, enough people remember this album and the one after it to keep the ridicule associated with these idiots alive.

Verdict: Bad.

Despite the genre’s reputation as a punchline among certain Rock circles, most of the really gigantic Progressive Rock acts have actually aged quite well. The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Frank Zappa are still about as good as they were perceived to be in Prog Rock’s heyday, but of the first-rank giants of the genre, Yes come across as far more genuinely dated. They were brilliant instrumentalists and had a terrific lead singer, but they weren’t really particularly good songwriters—their songs don’t feature much in the way of memorable melodies, and their lyrics are usually complete gibberish. And unlike another band with much the same strengths and problems, Led Zeppelin, they don’t really have a one-of-a-kind sound, nor were they particularly groundbreaking in their own right. This is exacerbated by the fact that they were one of the most self-indulgent bands in a very self-indulgent genre. This song, the title track and centerpiece of their most acclaimed album, is pretty typical of their output…an interminably long Neoclassical-Jazz composition full of extended virtuoso showcases for their instrumentation…and without the songwriting to back it up, it gets a little tedious by the eighteenth minute. Granted, the songs of the higher-quality Jam Bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish can be just as long and self-indulgent, but those are Free Jazz-esque improvisational jams, and this kind of thing is easier to take that way than in this kind of very deliberate, polished studio composition. For the record, the band’s one actual Pop hit, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, is a lot more concise and digestible, but it was recorded well past their peak, so I thought I’d cover something more typical of their style in their heyday.

Verdict: Not terrible, but surprisingly dated and kind of hard to take by the end.

The Grateful Dead take a lot of crap, but I’d blame that more on their image than their music. They admittedly put out some awful albums late in their career (Go To Heaven, Steal Your Face, Dylan and the Dead), but in their heyday, they made fascinating music that was far more sophisticated than their detractors give them credit for. After all, their original bassist, Phil Lesh, was a jazz musician, and the extended improvisational jams they specialize in at their live shows are not really all that different from the work of the more complex Jazz acts like Miles Davis. Most of their really classic records are live albums, but they did produce two of the great Classic Rock studio albums of the Seventies, and this song, from the first of the two, reminds us that in addition to their improvisational skills, their frontman Jerry Garcia was one of the all-time great Rock songwriters. Their first two albums had been fairly standard Psychedelic ‘Acid-Rock’, but with this album they truly found their sound. It must have been an immense shock to listeners at the time (and was, from the accounts I’ve heard) to pick up an album by a standard-issue Acid-Rock band and hear this beautiful, gentle Folk song with its poetic lyrics and gorgeous vocal harmonies as the first track, but it’s a direction they would continue in for pretty much the rest of their career.

Verdict: One of the all-time great moments of the Classic Rock era from one of its all-time great bands.

The 1991 film version of George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin is the quintessential mid-range, mediocre kids’ movie of the era. It’s not nearly as awful as most of Don Bluth’s Nineties efforts, but it doesn’t remotely compare to what Disney was accomplishing at the time, and the fact that it’s now forgotten except among a few devotees who grew up with it is not all that surprising. But like several much worse Nineties children’s films like Thumbelina or Quest For Camelot, the film’s one notable redeeming quality lay in its music. It only contains one song (although that song is reprised continuously throughout the film), but it is an extremely memorable one that is generally what those few remaining fans who grew up with the film remember most about it. In the original novel, MacDonald makes mention of the villainous Goblins being repelled by the hero Curdie’s singing; the movie jumped on the idea of music as a weapon against evil, introducing this stirring anthem in a thrilling scene where the hero drives off monsters with the power of music. It’s true that this song features a relatively unsophisticated musical idiom compared to the Disney award-bait ballads of the era, but its folksong-like simplicity gives it a certain primal power, and makes a nice contrast to the polished Pop of most Nineties animated movie themes. In any case, it sounds exactly the way the idea of music as a weapon against evil should sound, and as forgettable as the rest of the movie was, the scene where this song is introduced is one of the most memorable film musical numbers of the Nineties, animated or not.

Verdict: One of the best themes for an animated movie in the era, and fully able to hold its own with the Disney hits of the time.

This song has a reputation as one of the worst songs ever recorded by an ex-Beatle, but when you actually think about it, there’s not really a lot wrong with it. Originally a cover of an obscure album track by Soul musician James Ray, it’s certainly got an extremely catchy and memorable melody, and while it is somewhat repetitive (especially since the Harrison version trimmed the verse sections a bit), it isn’t any more so than “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)”, so I don’t really see what the problem is. The song’s negative reputation can mostly be traced to the decisively horrible music video, a stupid horror movie homage that looks hideous and doesn’t fit the song in the slightest. But even if this song came out in an era where music videos were at their peak of relevance and considered almost as important as the songs themselves, it’s still not really the song’s fault it was attached to a bad video, and when heard without the video, it doesn’t really have any major problems to justify the hatred it receives. In fact, from a purely musical perspective, this is actually one of George Harrison’s best solo songs, and given that he had arguably the most distinguished (and certainly the most consistent) solo career of all the Beatles, that’s saying something.

Verdict: Good, at least when not attached to that awful music video.

John Tesh is the only big-name New Age musician who can actually claim to be worse than Yanni, so it’s fitting than Yanni was the one who gave him his start. He was a TV show host before he became a musician, and I will acknowledge that he at least has a distinct (if irritatingly smarmy) personality when he talks, but as an actual musician, he seems to have no value at all. He combines the blandness and lack of effort characteristic of the Contemporary Christian music genre with the pretentious tedium of bad New Age Music, so you can imagine how bad that combination turns out. The particular song I chose as an example, “Breathe”, is often cited by Tesh’s fans as a ‘highlight’ of his famous Live at Red Rocks concert. The tune is utterly banal and frustratingly slow, with long, unnecessary pauses between each line, resulting in one of the most boring songs I’ve ever heard in my life. Not helping are the lyrics, which are stale platitudes with none of the eloquence a good hymn should have and which devolve into insane levels of repetition after the first couple of verses. Tesh has a reputation for being a musical punchline even by the standards of musical punchlines, and frankly, from the stuff of his I’ve heard, I can’t really argue with that assessment.

Verdict: In terms of overall lack of quality, this is one of the worst things I’ve ever reviewed.

The Lonely Island are one of the most successful novelty musics acts that aren’t named “Weird Al Yankovich”, but the quality of their actual output kind of comes and goes. The reason this song is funny while the group’s others songs in this vein like “Jizz In My Pants” or “I Just Had Sex” are mostly just groanworthy is that this song actually tells a joke beyond the repetition of a dirty word. The song is a spot-on and surprisingly sophisticated satire of the kind of arrogant, overconfident, socially oblivious men who think sex in an acceptable way to fulfill a gift-giving obligation to their significant other. Just how prevalent the mindset it’s satirizing really is can be seen in the fact that, three years after this song was released, “Birthday Sex” by Jeremih was a Top Ten hit. This legendarily bad song has basically the exact same concept as “Dick In a Box”, but with one important difference: it’s not intended as a joke. If that song can be a hit three years after “Dick In a Box” became a near-universal meme parodying that mindset, I’d say this song has lost none of its relevance today.

Verdict: Good.

This is Nsync’s very first single, and it is easily the darkest and most dramatic thing they ever released, coming off as a genuine expression of pain and conveying an almost frightening level of desperation. This is certainly a marked contrast to their much shallower treatment of similar themes in their later work, such as the glib “Bye Bye Bye” or the smugly self-confident “Girlfriend”. NSync, despite their generally negative reputation, did have a few good singles, including some that are actually better than this song (like the Gloria Estafan collaboration “Music of My Heart”), but this song still seems to carry the promise of a more interesting band than NSync actually wound up being.

Verdict: Good, but it’s disappointing the band didn’t continue in this direction.

This is one of the most romantic songs of all time, but that’s exactly what the primary complaint of its detractors is, as the lyrics and delivery are hyperromantic to the point of being completely over-the-top. In fact, it bears a certain resemblance to “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill in that regard, but I’d argue it makes much better use of those elements than that song did. The lyrics may be exaggeratedly sensitive and melodramatic, but they’re not pretentious, and are actually quite good at choosing just the right words to express these intense sentiments. Also, while Enrique’s vocal performance is admittedly pretty overwrought, it’s delivered with more of a delicate touch than Dan Hill or most other Easy Listening oversingers (note that nearly all of the song is delivered in a trembling whisper). This is one of the great Easy Listening ballads from the waning days of that genre, and its overblown romanticism works in its favor, evoking the feel of a romantic fantasy rather than the prosaic self-pity of “Sometimes When We Touch”.

Verdict: Good.

This cover of the Bob Dylan classic is from the controversial but generally underrated U2 concert film Rattle and Hum, and it is often cited as one of the main reasons the film is supposedly so terrible. Blowing the song up into an Arena-Rock anthem can’t really be considered a crime after the universally beloved Jimi Hendrix version did the exact same thing, so it all really comes down to the fact that they added a short verse’s worth of new lyrics to the song, and to Dylan fans, adding your own contributions to his lyrics is tantamount to blasphemy. But what gets overlooked in this frenzy of offense is what you’d expect to be the most basic question, namely “Are these new lyrics any good?” And given that an expression coined in these added lyrics, “three chords and the truth”, has now become common parlance in Rock circles, I don’t think you can accuse them of being any less pithy or memorable than Dylan’s originals. In fact, given how well they managed to mimic Dylan’s usual turn of phrase, I suspect that no-one could have told the difference between Dylan’s work and U2’s contribution if they hadn’t previously known.

Verdict: Not only good, but right up there with the Dylan and Hendrix versions as one of the definitive renditions of the song.