Month: June 2019

“Diva” by Beyonce

I get what Beyonce was going for here…the I Am…Sasha Fierce album was all about experimentation, and experiments, by definition, have the potential to fail. In fact, part of me respects her for trying such a daring sonic experiment as this one on such a high-profile Pop album. That’s not to say that this is a good or even redeemable song, though. For one thing, even if everything else about the song had worked, it would have failed on the music alone. With one of Bangladesh’s standard vertigo-inducing beats and one of his trademark fragmentary, insanely repetitive choruses, Beyonce couldn’t have salvaged this song even if she had been in top form, which she kind of emphatically wasn’t. I’ve wondered why her more recent attempts at rapping were so much more successful than this, and I’ve concluded that the pose she was striking on them (that of an utterly confident star at the top of her game, powerfully sexual but in complete control) is exactly what she actually is, so she came across as natural and convincing. But what Beyonce definitely isn’t is ‘The female version of da hustla’, and so her attempts to portray herself as a credible gender-flipped thug are just risible, even without the awful music.

Verdict: You have to acknowledge the courage it took to try this, but bad.

“If I Were a Boy” by Beyonce

I think the accusations Beyonce gets of being a misandrist can all be traced back to this one song. True, she’s always specialized in kiss-off singles, but there’s a difference between delivering a well-deserved putdown to a cheating ex-boyfriend and the kind of sweeping generalizations on display here. For the record, I have a great deal of respect for most of Beyonce’s output, and I’m aware this particular complaint…that sexism can work both ways…is often exploited for spurious trouble-making, but you can make a serious case that this song, with its ugly generalizations about the entire male gender, does go a bit too far. I get what Beyonce was going for here, because I’ve seen it done correctly many times, in Christina Aguilera’s “Can’t Hold Us Down” and in many of Beyonce’s own songs, but this kind of thing seems to be more suited to proud, declarative anthems than it is to this kind of bitter, brooding ballad. There’s no pride or defiance here…just a song from the point of view of a bitter, angry woman who’s decided that all men are scum because one man broke her heart. The fact that this song is probably at least mildly offensive isn’t really the main point here…I’m more concerned with the fact that its pervasive bitterness makes it a spectacularly unpleasant listening experience. Yes, the tune, like all those on the first disc of I Am…Sasha Fierce, is pretty, and Beyonce does convey the character she chose for this song very convincingly, but neither factor is enough to save the song. While Beyonce would certainly release worse songs from the Sasha Fierce album (“Diva”, “Video Phone”), no other song would ever do as much damage to her reputation as this one, and as much as I like most of her music, I have to say that this song was not one of her better decisions.

Verdict: Bad enough to do genuine damage to Beyonce’s well-earned positive reputation, which is no mean feat.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by Frank Loesser

This classic standard is often given sanitized, inoffensive performances, but in reality, the disturbing elements that everyone likes to point out now as though they’re being clever at the expense of a song from their grandparents’ time that many people still love, were almost indisputably completely intentional on the part of the songwriter (who was, by the way, the great Frank Loesser, the man who gave us Guys and Dolls). It wasn’t quite as nightmarish at the time as some people find it these days, since the concept of ‘date rape’ (more specifically, the idea that manipulating a girl into bed is no different from taking her by force) hadn’t really been introduced into the public consciousness yet. Still, this is a rather dark, predatory tale of a ‘couch artist’ (what we would now call a ‘Playa’) aggressively putting the moves on a not entirely willing girl, and that would have seemed sketchy and unwholesome at best even to audiences of the time. That’s why the best renditions have always been the ones that don’t sugarcoat the song’s vaguely creepy elements, like Ray Charles’ deeply unnerving duet with Betty Carter, or Norah Jones and Willie Nelson, who nicely emphasized the song’s predatory subtext simply through the obvious age difference between the singers. The reason so many performances try to distance themselves from the song’s real implications can probably be chalked up to the song’s inexplicable transformation into a Christmas standard simply because it takes place in winter, and I suppose that sexual coercion, however subtle, is not something you want the kiddies to realize they’re singing about. But in reality, this is a sly, cynical piece of innuendo in the tradition of much of Cole Porter’s work, and it deserves to be acknowledged for its dark wit rather than being dismissed as either just another squeaky-clean Christmas novelty, or worse, as some horribly dated relic of its time that has become unspeakably offensive now, like Al Jolson’s blackface routines.

Verdict: Good.

“El Shaddai” by Amy Grant

Contemporary Christian Music has a bad reputation that, from what I gather, is not entirely undeserved, but Amy Grant was basically the CCM scene’s equivalent of the Beatles at this point in her career, so it stands to reason that her music would be of higher quality than most of her peers in the genre. Most people are largely familiar with her later, more mainstream Pop material like “Baby, Baby”, which, while it was still squeaky-clean and inoffensive to a fault, was at best ambiguous about whether it carried any religious message. But surprisingly enough, her early work, back when she was limited to the Evangelical Christian cultural bubble, is actually a lot more interesting. She was, at least superficially, making the same basic kind of Pop music in those days apart from the religious lyrics, but most of her overtly Christian music has a clarity and sincerity in both writing and performance that her Pop material doesn’t even distantly approach. You may not agree with the content of her Evangelical Christian message (I will readily admit that I myself do not share her beliefs), but she delivered it with a sense of inner fire that has to be respected to some degree, and her decision to go Pop really was a case of an interesting talent selling out to the conventional mainstream style. This song in particular serves her well…her breakthrough hit on the Christian charts, it was adapted from actual bible verses and sounds like a genuine legitimate hymn from the era when no-one had a negative opinion of religious music, and she sings it with an almost eerie intensity.

Verdict: I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so impressed by this, but it’s definitely some of the better religious music of the era. Good.

“Beauty and the Beast” by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson

Of all the Pop single versions of Disney Oscar Bait ballads to come out of the Nineties, this was probably the most severely botched…even Michael Bolton’s much-maligned version of “Go the Distance” did better by its original source than this. Don’t get me wrong, Celine Dion is a wonderful singer, but let’s remember that this song was originally a gentle, quiet piece written for Angela Lansbury’s musical-theater character voice. Blowing it up into a wildly overblown power ballad and getting oversingers like Dion and Peabo Bryson to wail out the vocals robs it of everything that made it so refreshingly different from every other animated movie theme of the era, and this version is far less interesting than the original, as well as being borderline unlistenable due to the vocal histrionics. On top of that, the singers’ delivery completely ignores the song’s excellent lyrics…seriously, there’s so little attention paid to the actual content of the words that you would be forgiven for thinking that they didn’t actually understand the English language and were simply singing phonetically. If you really need to hear a version of this song by a more legit vocalist than Lansbury, check out Beth Fowler’s lovely rendition on the Original Broadway Cast Album…there’s certainly no reason for anyone to seek this embarrassment out today, and even if it still invariably shows up on all of Celine Dion’s greatest hits albums, it does not present her in a flattering light at all.

Verdict: Bad.

N****r Fucker” by David Alan Coe

Released on one of David Allan Coe’s infamous ‘Underground’ albums, this song has gained notoriety for a reason…it’s actually kind of horrifying (note that this is the first song title I’ve ever had to censor in all the time I’ve been running this site). The weirdest thing is, judging from his actual life and the people he associated with, Coe doesn’t actually appear to be racist, or at least not racist enough to write something like this unironically. So the only conclusion I can come to is that this was an incredibly poorly-delivered attempt at satire. It was probably aimed at the more sincerely bigoted songs in this vein like the works of Johnny Rebel, but the end product is completely indistinguishable from one of those songs except perhaps in the graphic sex jokes sprinkled among the racial slurs. Now, it’s possible to make this kind of shock-value satire valid (Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”, which uses the same slur to make a serious point about racism and hypocrisy, comes to mind). But even leaving aside the racial component (assuming such a thing is possible), the song, like most of the content of Coe’s ‘Underground’ albums, is poorly-written, uninspired, and neither funny nor insightful, so anything that could conceivably justify the offensive content is clearly missing. Since I’m fairly certain this was ultimately just a horribly botched joke about real racists and not a sincere expression of racism itself, I’m willing to not hold it against Coe’s other, better works (especially given that the actual primary author of this song was not Coe, but the far more beloved Country songwriter and children’s author Shel Silverstein), but I get why people are still giving Coe crap about recording this today, and I hope he has the decency to be at least a little ashamed of it now.

Verdict: The second-worst song I have covered for this series, right next to “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck” by Anal Cunt.

“The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson

When Brian “Marilyn Manson” Warner was at the peak of his popularity, what people generally said about him was something along the lines of “love him or hate him, but he gets people passionate about his work”. Strangely, I don’t hear many of them saying it now. While he had a fair number of defenders in his heyday, it’s now pretty hard to find anyone who will admit to liking him…the bulk of his fanbase have grown up and view their having liked him with a certain amount of shame, like an embarrassing photo from their adolescence. The man is almost as passe as Insane Clown Posse, but without the tiny corps of insanely dedicated cult worshipers that group can still claim. Now, I realize that a portion of Manson’s negative press is based on his cheap shock-value theatrics and compulsive baiting of a sacred cows, and that many of the people who hated him are the same who hate good controversial artists like, say, Eminem, but I’m not inclined to cut him much slack, given that his offensive subject matter was really just a pose—unlike Eminem and his other peers at the time, there was nothing real or personal about it. It was just a marketing ploy, designed to create publicity through controversy and attract teenagers at that particular rebellious youth phase where they actually would jump off a bridge just because their parents told them not to. His ‘shocking’ image was never anywhere near as original or interesting as naïve disaffected teens accepted it as…indeed, his entire persona was based on ripping off other, better musicians in a pretty blatant manner. His image was Alice Cooper minus the sense of humor, and his music was mostly warmed-over retreads of either David Bowie or more legit Industrial acts like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. Interestingly, though, as with the TRL-era boy-bands, Manson is more infamous on the grounds of his image than his actual music. Manson was never an important musical talent by any means, but his first album, Antichrist Superstar, is actually quite strong, thanks to a heavy assist in the writing and production by Manson’s then-mentor Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. In fact, this particular song, which was easily the best thing on that album, basically sounds almost indistinguishable from an actual Nine Inch Nails song. It features one of Reznor’s most creative and memorable productions, even if the lyrics are pretentious as Hell, and it would prove to be the most significant legacy Manson would ever leave to popular culture, and is still the only Marilyn Manson song you’re likely to hear today without specifically choosing to listen to it.

Verdict: Good for the song itself, but I completely get why some people can’t get past Manson’s admittedly rancid and dishonest self-marketing image.

“Doo-Wops and Hooligans” by Bruno Mars

Bruno Mars has become so known in recent years as a brilliant pastiche artist that it’s easy to forget that when he first came on the scene, he had an extremely distinctive style of his own. He didn’t abandon it immediately after his first album, either; his second album featured a mix of pastiche and works in his own style, and even the most overt pastiche tracks (such as “Locked Out of Heaven” or “Treasure”), had hints of his original style about them.

But then came the runaway success of “Uptown Funk”, and now his most recent album, 24k Magic, seems to consist entirely of pure pastiche, with little or no reference to the distinguishing traits of his early work. It is, in fact, essentially an album-length version of “Uptown Funk”. Now, I think one album of this is acceptable, but I hope he doesn’t try to continue in this vein indefinitely.

Pastiche, after all, by its very definition, doesn’t stretch, and while there are artists who can basically release the same song over and over again (and indeed, even some who should), Mars is too talented to be reduced to that kind of thing. So while I appreciate his attempt to expand on the success of “Uptown Funk”, I hope that for his next project he returns to the style he premiered on this record, which has far more potential to accommodate artistic growth.

That style is defined primarily by its hyperemotionalism…the happy songs are not just happy, but euphoric and blissful, while the darker songs have a terrifying, almost operatic intensity to them. Nowhere is that more obvious than on the album’s first track and second single, “Grenade”. A terrifying stalker ballad with crazed lyrics and a sort of pop-operatic vocal style, this actually came out a few months before Adele released “Rolling in the Deep” and was thus one of the first signs of the dramatic intensity that would dominate much of Pop music in 2011.

Other examples of the album’s more dramatic side include the despairing Reggae drinking song “Liquor Store Blues”, the enticing yet threatening seduction song “The Other Side”, the explosive ‘warning song’ “Runaway Baby”, and the gorgeous, melancholy “Talking to the Moon” (which became very popular in Brazil, of all places, after being used as the theme song to a popular Brazilian television program). But lest you think the album is a heavy and dark one, there are an equal number of soaring expressions of sheer bliss.

The first single, “Just the Way You Are”, is one of the most romantic Pop songs of the decade, and it seemed like a revelation in the era of thuggish sex jams into which this album initially debuted. “Our First Time” resembles a smoother, more confident R&B incarnation of John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland”, or perhaps Mars’ own later track “Versace on the Floor” but with actual feelings. “Marry You”, with its giddy declaration of devil-may-care euphoria, actually managed to become a Top Forty hit in the Glee cover version. And the gentle acoustic ballad “Count on Me” is adorably sweet, sounding almost like a classic-era Sesame Street song. I don’t know what Bruno Mars is actually like in real life, but these songs paint him as the perfect person to be in love with.

There’s only one real dud on this album, and it’s admittedly a pretty severe one…the inane acoustic ‘comedy’ track “The Lazy Song”. It seems that Mars likes to periodically blow off steam by writing these kinds of stupid novelty songs (in addition to this one, there’s “Gorilla” on his second album, as well as that “Bow Chicka Wow Wow” song he wrote for Mike Posner). But given how consistent the entire rest of his output is, I think we can forgive him for amusing himself in this fashion from time to time, even if he is amusing absolutely no-one else in the process.

Overall, this is one of the finest albums of 2010, and one of surprisingly few of those albums to produce any hits on the Pop charts (2010 had a fair number of classic albums in the Indie scene, but it wasn’t what you’d call a ‘good year’ for Pop music). Moreover, it still holds up today, and is a reminder that Bruno Mars is more than just a gifted musical chameleon, and has a style of his own that’s just waiting for him to take it up again.

“Save Me, San Francisco” by Train

I will give Train this much—they’re the most interestingly bad act in Pop music today. Not the worst, by any means, but the most colorful and fascinating in their awfulness. This is rather surprising, given that they started out in the early 2000s as the definition of a competent but dull Soft Rock outfit (comparable to pre-NativeOneRepublic). They did manage to produce one enduring classic, the song “Drops of Jupiter”, but otherwise, they never seemed particularly notable for much of anything.

They followed the standard career path for that kind of band, too…producing a single hit each from their first three albums, and breaking up after their failed fourth album. But in 2009 they reunited, claiming to have stopped worrying about what the world thought of them and rediscovered the joys of just making music. This album was the result, and while it certainly put them back on top commercially, from an artistic perspective, I’d argue that maybe they should have paid a little more attention to the ‘what the world thinks’ angle. Admittedly, the album was a hit, but it also made them the laughingstock of the Pop music world.

This may not be the worst album I’ve ever reviewed, but it unquestionably has the worst lyrics out of all of them. The lyrics on this album are simply insane, filled with stream-of-consciousness non-sequiturs, incredibly poorly-chosen analogies, and random Pop culture references from decades ago. The two big hits, “Hey Soul Sister” and “If It’s Love”, while based on a very simple premise (the proverbial “silly love songs” template), are two of the most bizarre songs of the decade. The former builds a chorus around a reference to a half-forgotten Soft Rock band, contains some frankly disgusting choice of imagery, and for some reason feels the need to insert the phrase “So gangsta/I’m so thug” into an acoustic Soft Rock ballad, a move that has become legendary among enthusiasts of famously bad songs.

“If It’s Love” is less patently ridiculous, but far more confusing, as it’s often genuinely unclear what the Hell the singer thinks he’s talking about. “Breakfast in Bed” is much the same as these two songs, with an increasingly bizarre choice of analogies to refer to the girl in question (“You’re the skin I never want to shed”). The cloying “I Got You” is relatively normal for most of its running time, but has one incredibly misguided moment where the singer compares his love to Sonny and Cher, then seems to backtrack when he suddenly remembers how that relationship ended.

“Marry Me”, the third Top Forty hit from the album, is crazy in a subtler but no less disturbing way. Here, the actual word choices are relatively toned-down…it’s the premise itself that makes the song so insane. For those of you who are familiar with Weird Al Yankovich’s Mandatory Fun album, do you remember the song “Jackson Park Express”? You know, the one where the singer has an elaborate fantasy about a relationship with someone he’s never spoken to, who’s merely sitting across from him on the subway? Well, imagine that exact same premise, but meant completely seriously and without a hint of irony, and you have this song. You actually have to be listening pretty closely to catch it, but once you do, it’s hard not to cringe.

At least the crazier parts of the album are if nothing else entertaining, but much of the material is simply boring. When the lyrics aren’t being utterly surreal, they’re simply arch and trite, dripping with gooey sentimentality and relying on the most hackneyed love song cliches available. And the music doesn’t exactly liven things up, either. Train’s sound may be rooted in Adult Alternative acts like the Counting Crows, but their tone owes more than a little to the dull, sludgy Post-Grunge that dominated the Mainstream Rock scene when they debuted, and if their lyrics have worsened considerably, their actual musical sound hasn’t changed much since then.

Also, something definitely seems to have happened to singer Pat Monahan’s voice during the period where the band was broken up. Monahan was never an especially interesting singer to begin with, but on all of Train’s post-comeback material, he sings in this wrecked, nasal squeak of a voice that just makes the band’s material even more unbearable than it already is.

I suppose I understand how someone who was only familiar with the hits like “Hey Soul Sister” or (from their next album) “Drive By” or “50 Ways To Say Goodbye” might come to the conclusion that Train were a group of absurdist geniuses that were creating this kind of insanity on purpose. But given that about half of this album consists of sentimental tripe that never remotely rises to that level of inspired craziness, it seems unlikely that that effect was deliberate, which leaves the band as merely a bunch of massively incompetent imbeciles who have no idea how insane their material sounds. It’s not the most charitable view of the band’s intentions, but it’s the only one that seems to make sense once you’ve heard their albums as a whole.

“Progress” by Take That

Originally, Take That were one of the numerous crop of Nineties boy-bands. They were perhaps slightly more legit than most of their peers in the field, given that they did write nearly all of their own music, but they were still essentially a fairly standard-issue boy-band. They only really became noteworthy after their 1996 breakup, mostly because two of their original members, Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams, went on to become the greatest Soft Rockers of the 2000s in England.

Barlow reformed the band in 2006, but because Barlow had matured into a great talent in the intervening years, their new sound was far more sophisticated than it had been—suddenly, this half-forgotten teenybopper act was the premiere Soft Rock act in Britain. They released two albums with this line-up, reaching Number One on the British charts with some fantastic songs like “Shine” and “Greatest Day”, when an amazing thing happened. The band’s other big solo offshoot, Robbie Williams, who had become even more lauded as a solo act than Barlow, reconciled with his former bandmates and decided to rejoin the group. This album was the result of that partnership.

There’s a good reason this album was the best-selling British album of 2010, and the third best-selling album worldwide that year. If you thought the sound of the first two records by the reformed Take That had been leaps and bounds over their previous stuff, this album kicks it into the stratosphere. Indeed, this is probably the best Soft Rock album of the current decade so far…its only real competition for that title would be OneRepublic’s Native, and of course that was in the Adult Alternative vein of Soft Rock, not the old-school style this album captures.

The sound of the music is heavily influenced by Eighties Synth-Pop, with anthemic melodies over heavy electronic instrumentation, but it features an immense degree of musical sophistication that seems to combine the instrumental intensity of New Order or Depeche Mode, the passion and force of Foreigner or Journey, and the poetic eloquence of Sting’s solo career. If that sounds like a heady and thrilling blend of influences, it isn’t all this album has to offer: there’s also “Pretty Things”, which sounds like it could have stepped right off of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory.

The high points are the unforgettable singles “The Flood” and “Kidz”, but there are plenty of other great songs. Take “Eight Letters”, which, to cite the cliche, actually found a whole new way to say “I Love You”…one so obvious I’m surprised no song had used it before. The songs are mostly tormented love and/or breakup songs, but several of them actually take on a sardonic, even vaguely political tone, with almost violently intense music and apocalyptic imagery in the lyrics.

The album was ultimately followed up with a bonus EP, entitled Progressed. This was common practice in Pop music at the time, of course…Lady Gaga, Kesha and Usher had already done the same thing. The bonus EP’s material, although it featured more songwriting contributions from the other band members without Barlow or Williams, is generally up to the same high level as the original album, and it features two more outstanding hit singles, “When We Were Young” and “Love Love”.

Robbie Williams sings lead vocals on the majority of tracks on this album, and at the time it was popular among critics, due to his impressive solo achievements, to give him primary credit for the album’s quality. But Gary Barlow definitely contributed a lot to the album’s songwriting…those who’ve heard his later score for the Finding Neverland musical will recognize the seeds of that score in some of this album’s songs, particularly “The Flood” and  “When We Were Young”.

I almost can’t believe that this album exists. For such an achievement in what was by then a long-dead musical idiom to come out as lately as 2010 actually gives me hope that old-school Soft Rock might not be as dead as we think it is. In any case, I highly recommend this album to anyone who loves the Soft Rock and Synth-Pop sounds of the Eighties. Don’t be turned off because it seems to be coming from a boy-band…believe me, this is not at all the same band that made their Nineties records, even if it has the same name and line-up. These are seasoned professionals making some of the best British Pop music of the decade, and you owe it to yourself to hear them do it.