Month: June 2019

These guys are one of the most prominent bands in the Indie Rock genre, but they kind of stick out among that category because of the sheer degree to which they do not deserve that status. The two bands that shot off from this group when they broke up, Royal Trux and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, would eventually mature into somewhat more respectable bands, but while they were performing under this name, these guys were barely more legitimate than the likes of Anal Cunt. This song is a typical example of their style, which they described as ‘Scuzz-Rock’: deliberately irritating vocals screeching unintelligible nonsense over simplistically abrasive instrumental noise, all recorded so badly that you can hardly make it out to begin with. They were clearly going for the same niche occupied by the Sex Pistols back in their heyday, but the Sex Pistols, while not very capable as musicians, did have considerable performing charisma and panache, and without these things, Pussy Galore fail to make their sloppiness endearing or fun. These guys are essentially frauds trying to cash into the ‘so-bad-it’s-art’ market, and like most artists that attempt that ploy they don’t have any real artistic merit whatsoever.

Verdict: Bad.

Xiu Xiu are one of those Indie bands that seem to be going out of their way to make people hate their music so they can cash in on the purely contrarian critics and buyers that unfortunately have always existed within that genre. They technically belong to the New Wave Revival movement, but are really part of the trend of Indie Rock becoming more depressing and self-involved as the Twee Pop era gave way to more brooding fare. Their music is a ridiculous mix of utter despondence and juvenile puerility (the album this song is from actually closes with a ‘pull my finger’ joke). The images in this song’s lyrics are absolutely disgusting, and this, combined with its utterly dreary musical sound, makes it one of those rare songs I cannot imagine conceivably appealing to anybody. It seems the only reason anyone has heard of this band is the aforementioned contrarian mentality in some Indie Rock critics and fans, but it’s hard for me to comprehend that anyone is enough of a contrarian to subject themselves to this just to prove their countercultural credentials.

Verdict: Really bad Indie Rock is generally much worse than even the worst of mainstream Pop music, and this is a perfect example of that.

Of Montreal don’t get a lot of respect in the Indie scene, and are generally thought of as second-stringers. Their name, which despite their repeated denials is obviously a ploy to fool audiences into believing they are from the titular city, doesn’t help. (They actually hail from Athens, Georgia, which has been even more of a goldmine for great bands in the past, but Montreal was trendier with Indie critics at the time, having produced such critical darlings as Arcade Fire and the Unicorns around this band’s heyday). They were part of the Elephant 6 collective of Neo-Psychedelic Indie Bands, and fell on the more Psychedelia-influenced side of the Twee Pop trend. This song, from their first and most successful album, represents the potentially annoying side of Twee Pop…stiff, awkwardly self-conscious melody set to sentimental and entirely too quaint intentional cliches, all delivered with a detached, condescending sense of irony that becomes tedious very quickly. On top of that, there was already another Elephant 6 band, the Apples in Stereo, who dealt in pretty much the same shtick, but did it about a million times better, actually capturing the magical, whimsical wonder of Twee Pop at its finest.

Verdict: It’s bands like Of Montreal that give Twee Pop in general a bad name, and I’m kind of amazed they got as much critical acceptance as they did.

Weezer’s first two albums are almost universally considered masterpieces, but their later work gets a pretty bad rap. I gather that their later albums are far more uneven, but their singles, apart from the tunelessly belligerent “We Are All On Drugs”, continued to hold up pretty well almost throughout their career. This seems to be a particularly disliked example of their later singles, which frankly baffles me…I think it’s wonderful. I’ve heard Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo accused of writing about things no-one can relate to, but this song displays an eye for naturalism and period detail that perfectly captures what it must have been like to be young and in love in the late Nineties. My experiences in that era were very different from Cuomo’s, but he makes me feel like I was right there. The chorus is as insanely catchy as Weezer is generally known for, and the surprisingly ambitious ending is reminiscent of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, with the narrator and his girl stuck in a loveless marriage. But unlike in “Paradise”, where the narrator can only “pray for the end of time”, the final repetition of the chorus indicates that this narrator is still determined to try to save the relationship, which is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who likes Weezer’s style to begin with could dislike this song, and I would go so far as to consider it one of their all-time masterpieces.

Verdict: Good.

This is one of the most legendarily bad songs of all time for a reason. In addition to the insipid tune, the irritating vocals, and the lame double-entendres in the lyrics, the particular combination of this blandly innocuous music with these coy, self-consciously sleazy lyrics is actually kind of sickening. The Starland Vocal Band are a pretty strong contender for the single worst Soft Rock act of all time…disturbingly enough, not only is “Afternoon Delight” their best song, it is their best song _by a considerable margin_. It’s not as obvious from “Afternoon Delight” alone, but listening to their other material makes it clear that they were trying to jump on the Pop pseudo-Folk bandwagon pioneered by acts like the New Christy Minstrels. But by this time, we already had a John Denver to fill that niche, and he was about a billion times better at it than these bozos anyway. Indeed, for as much as everyone makes fun of them today, even the New Christy Minstrels were infinitely more respectable than these idiots. These guys make even the later poster children for bad Soft Rock look good: next to them, Air Supply and late-career Chicago look like Elton John and Fleetwood Mac, and while they only produced one enduring hit, the level of success and credibility they received at the time is terrifying in hindsight.

Verdict: Bad

Club rapper Flo Rida gets very little respect, but say what you will about him, he usually comes up with some pretty damned good songs. Granted, a lot of that is his choice of collaborators…he functions as a showbiz remora of sorts, latching onto people more talented than himself and relying on guest artists and samples to carry his songs. That said, he’s not completely devoid of artistic talent. His lyrics are nearly always just party-song cliches (and whenever he attempts more than that he just reminds you why he shouldn’t), but there’s a reason he calls himself “Flo Rida”. He’s actually the direct ancestor of acts like Young Thug and Future, where the melodic flow of the delivery is more important than the actual words. He’s certainly primitive compared to those later acts, but he’s come up with some pretty good tune fragments in his day, and he ultimately functions more as a singer than a rapper. As for this particular song, producer David Guetta basically just recycled the formula that had given him a smash hit the year before with the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”, but this song actually manages to improve on “I Gotta Feeling”, largely by dint of having better, less repetitive lyrics. The lyrics, improved though they are, still aren’t exactly Shakespeare…they’re mostly the typical Flo Rida cliches…but that’s still far less annoying than hearing every phrase in the lyrics ten times in a row. And the chorus (featuring vocals by an uncredited Nicole Scherzinger) is possibly the single greatest hook from any Flo Rida song, which is saying something for Pop Music’s acknowledged King of catchy choruses (even if he didn’t write any of them himself). Between that, the superb production, and some forcefully joyous ‘flows’ from Flo Rida, this is probably the best old-style Club track of the whole Club-music boom…but then, it was produced by David Guetta, who would help take popular Dance music to a whole new level a year or so after this song came out.

Verdict: Good.

It seems that from 2009 to 2011, every song Rihanna released or appeared on seemed to be of two kinds: ultra-serious songs that were actually about abusive relationships in some form or another (“Russian Roulette”, “Love the Way You Lie”, Kanye West’s “All of the Lights”, “We Found Love”), and raunchy, increasingly masochistic sex jams. The former are perfectly understandable…after the well-known domestic abuse scandal she had been involved in early in ’09, it’s natural that she would want to express her feelings about it in her art, and even if Rihanna isn’t really a singer-songwriter, she seems to have found the means to select songs that conveyed her emotions on the subject. But the same factors that make those attempts laudable make the songs where she sings about how she likes to get tied up and beaten…uncomfortable, to say the least. After this song became the only hit from her largely confessional and serious Rated R album, either she or her record label apparently decided that trying to milk what had happened to her for masochistic sex appeal sold more records than seriously addressing her story (which probably says something very disturbing about popular culture at the time, but I digress). Her next album, Loud, consisted almost entirely of these songs, which is why it’s still probably her worst album. I will reluctantly admit that “Rude Boy” is the best of a bad bunch, despite its dubious status as the song that launched the trend in the first place, mostly because it’s tamer and goes less far than later songs such as “S&M”. That said, like all of these songs, it’s still loud, abrasive, and would come off as more creepy than sexy even without the added real-life baggage. Given the utterly ridiculous furor the internet raised over “Blurred Lines”, I imagine that, had “Rude Boy” come out a few years later than it did, the reaction to it would probably have been much harsher. In any case, this is a bad song as well as an offensive one, and I have no patience with the few die-hards who are still trying to defend it.

Verdict: Bad.

Ah, yes, Mike Posner’s first hit, the ‘Pop song people forgot’, as he calls it. This song got a lot of grief when it was new, with many declaring it one of the worst songs of 2010 (which is not a statement to make lightly). The truth is that while it’s certainly easy to make fun of, this song isn’t really all that terrible. The lyric is admittedly pretty embarrassing, but the melody is terrific and showed a hint of what Posner was capable of as a songwriter. The real issue here is Posner’s performance. Posner has significant (at times even immense) songwriting talent, but his breathy, underpowered rasp of a singing voice is a liability at the best of times. It’s forgivable enough on the singer-songwriter material he sang on his magnum opus At Night, Alone, but the odd vocal style he attempts here (which he described later as ‘trying to sing Hip-Hop’) sounds absolutely terrible in his voice. So, no, I’m not sure I’d classify this as a “good song”, but it certainly showed potential, even if most people didn’t notice at the time, and given that Posner would go on to write classics like “Beneath Your Beautiful” and “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”, that potential has pretty much been fulfilled. People actually respect Posner now, so this song has, if nothing else, historical importance as the hit that initially launched his career.

Verdict: Not exactly ‘good’, but still showing visible hints of talent and artistic potential.

Alanis Morissette started out as one of the vilest teenybopper acts of her era, but with her Jagged Little Pill album she became the prototype for the more artistic and ambitious generation of Pop stars that would begin to proliferate a decade or so later. However dated Morissette’s work seems today, acts like Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson and Pink all owe a great deal to her innovations. And the truth is, her other two singles from that album, the searing “You Oughta Know” and the flippantly jubilant “Hand In My Pocket”, have aged better than most people give them credit for. However, it’s hard to offer a convincing defense for this overexposed misfire, which has gained a not-really-undeserved reputation as a hallmark of Pop music’s cultural illiteracy. The central complaint about this song…that she misuses the word ‘ironic’ so severely that not a single one of her examples constitutes actual irony…has been reiterated so many times that it’s become a cliche, but there’s a reason for that—it’s such a pervasive flaw that it really ruins the song. If she had selected a different title, this might have been a touching song about the way life makes a mockery of our expectations, but frankly, the writing is so clumsy and heavy-handed throughout that it might not have mattered. Morissette was genuinely good at the overwrought relationship songs she specialized in, but she clearly wasn’t up to this kind of ambitious philosophical contemplation in her songwriting, and she really should have stuck to what she knew and left this kind of thing to the Tori Amoses of the world.

Verdict: Bad.

This was the first of Olivia Newton-John’s three signature Pop hits, and while it is not entirely undeserving of its extreme negative reputation, it’s still less terrible than the other two songs in that category, “Have You Never Been Mellow?” and “Physical”. It’s actually possible to make this song work…it was written by famed songwriter Peter Allen, and the musical based on his life and works, The Boy From Oz, manages to make very effective use of it. In the show, it’s given to Peter’s lover Greg after his death from AIDS, singing to Peter from the great beyond, and in this context the song comes across as genuinely touching. Unfortunately, the song itself is so simplistically written, with a lyric consisting entirely of cliches, and so overwhelmingly syrupy in its emotional content, that heard on its own as a standalone Pop tune, it just sounds inane. And Newton-John’s notorious lack of acting ability comes into play here as well: while Jerrod Emick in The Boy From Oz performed the song with quiet, understated sincerity, Olivia’s attempt to do the same thing here is so clumsy and blatantly artificial that the results are cringe-inducing.

Verdict: While this song can be made to work, the Newton-John Pop version that it is most known for is just as bad as everyone says.