The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard #6: You Give Love a Bad Name

Have you ever wondered how and when I decide to do installments of The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard? I didn’t think you did, but I’ll tell you anyway. There are some songs I just know I’m gonna write about eventually (a perhaps unsurprising amount of them are by Kid Rock and John Mayer) but if, over the course of a week out in the world, I hear a song and can’t stop thinking about how awful it is, I start thinking about all the fun ways I could tell you how awful it is and that song ends up officially being one of The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard. Given that rubric, it’s actually pretty surprising to me that I haven’t done a Bon Jovi song before now.

We’re talking about “You Give Love a Bad Name” today because I was at a play last weekend (a series of short plays actually, called “Love Bites”, put on by the Elephant Theatre Company here in Los Angeles. I think the show runs two more weeks, so you should maybe see it if you can) and this song played at the end, perhaps to encourage people to leave the theater a little faster. My cousin-in-law is in the show and we were chatting with her afterwards, so “You Give Love a Bad Song” had time to worm its way into my brain and, luckily for you, I’ve spent the intervening four days thinking about how bloody terrible it is.

Trust me, it’s plenty terrible. With a lot of the songs I talk about in this feature, I have serious beef with the lyrics (because a lot of these songs have really stupid lyrics) but “You Give Love a Bad Name”, perhaps more than any of the other songs I’ve profiled so far, actually musically sounds like shit. The prominently featured bass drum sounds muffled and terrible (I also think I hear some kind of weird effect on the drums toward the end of the song), the guitar sounds almost electronic and fake (I’m not saying it was electronic and fake, Richie Sambora fanboys. I’m just saying it sounds that way), and though the video (also terrible, which is saying something because most hair metal videos were crap) shows a guy playing myriad keyboards, I don’t hear keyboards in the song (which, in all honesty, is a win for keyboards). It’s like Bon Jovi’s keyboardist was their manager’s nephew or something.

It might surprise you to discover that I don’t think the lyrics to “You Give Love a Bad Name” are offensively terrible. They’re not good or anything, but they’re by far the best part of the song. If you can’t guess what it’s about, let the good people at Ask.com tell you. I’m linking to their entry because it’s so clinical and hilarious. If your boss is blocking Ask.com, I’ll just tell you that, according to them, the song is “about a woman who has jilted her lover.” You should really read the whole entry when you get a chance, though – it’s all written in that mechanical tone and it’s full of information that can only properly be described as minutiae (spoiler alert: “You Give Love a Bad Name” went all the way to numero uno on the Polish singles chart in 1986. This article lists the Polish chart ahead of both the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the German Singles Chart. Which is as it should be; 9/1/39. Never forget!). Anyway, for a song that’s about what every other song in the 1980s was about, there’s not much here lyrically to piss me off. It’s all pretty standard; “You Give Love a Bad Name” sucks almost entirely based on its presentation. Though I meant it when I said I had no beef with the lyrics, I can’t stand the way Jon Bon Jovi sings them. His pronunciation of “fingertips” alone causes the blood vessels in my eyes to burst. The background vocals (especially the chorus-ending repetition of the phrase “bad name”) are uniformly awful, but they would become the trademark of a bunch of Bon Jovi tunes in the 80s, including “Livin’ On a Prayer” and “Bad Medicine” (two more BJ tunes destined to be featured on this list someday).

If I was feeling charitable, I’d let “You Give Love a Bad Name” represent every other Bon Jovi song among the Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard, because it does so adequately exemplify their musical modus operandi. They wrote some of the most sterile music to ever be lumped in with the hair metal of clearly heavier bands like Guns ‘n’ Roses and Motley Crue; looking at the artwork from the “You Give Love a Bad Name” single, it’s hard to imagine Bon Jovi doing anything but getting their lunch money forcibly removed from their pockets throughout much of the 80s. But it was a weird time and these guys managed to survive until the 90s when they could cut their hair and, following in Aerosmith’s cheesy footsteps, start selling power ballads like Scientology sells crazy.

Near as I can tell, there are two kinds of people who like “You Give Love a Bad Name” – people who enjoy it ironically, like they hear it at bars and laugh and say stupid stuff like, “It’s so bad it’s good” or “It’s cheesy but I love it” and people who actually honestly really fucking love Bon Jovi. Those people exist. I think a lot of them live in Bon Jovi’s native New Jersey (and hey, as awful as I think Bon Jovi is, I bet they’re a lot less embarrassing to the Garden State than Jersey Shore). The top-rated YouTube comment for the official “You Give Love a Bad Name” video (linked above. Warning: reading comments on YouTube videos is like lodging a shit-covered beehive directly in your brain. You really shouldn’t do it. I wore goggles and welding gloves) says, “95% of teens these days listen to the same crappy pop songs over and over. if [sic] your [still sic] one of the 5% left who still listen to real music, thunb [sic for a third time] this up, then copy and paste it to least 5 video’s [and sic a fourth time even]. DONT [damn, that's sic number five] LET THE SPIRIT OF ROCK DIE.” That was posted by a user named billymasterofpuppets, presumably a teen himself, possibly from New Jersey. I certainly hope he’s still in school because his English is fuck-terrible. I can’t decide which is sadder – the kid’s grammar or his misguided belief that “You Give Love a Bad Name” somehow embodies the all-caps “SPIRIT OF ROCK.”

To My Fellow White People: Please Stop Doing This Shit

Hey, fellow white people. Can I have a word with you?

First of all, I was wondering if you could please tell me what the fuck this is. What are we doing here? It sounds like some white dude pretending he’s funky and fantasizing about an interracial blowjob. Now, I’m not opposed to interracial blowjobs at all, but I want to know why this is a song. I think you’re at least partly to blame, fellow white people. And I’ve come here to ask you to please stop encouraging this shit and, if you make this shit, please stop making it. Now. I know “Hey Soul Sister” won a Grammy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t some kind of high grade cultural toxin.

What am I talking about when I refer to “this shit”? I’m talking about the pseudo-funky white guy shtick that Pat Monahan is doing in that fucking video. I’m talking about the bad frat-rapping of pretty much every Jason Mraz song (yes, except that ubiquitous single of his, but don’t think for a minute that “I’m Yours” is any better) and that Hot Topic reggae shit that 311 is peddling. And don’t even get me started on the goddamn Red Hot Chili Peppers. This shit just has to stop. If you think there’s anything redeeming in “Hump de Bump”, you are almost certainly in the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Here’s the thing: if you’re some nerdy little fuck with an acoustic guitar, your job is to play nerdy little fuck songs on your acoustic guitar and bang teenagers. Nowhere in your job description does it say you can try to pass yourself off as funky by speak-singing really fast. I know that fools a certain percentage of the population, but to a lot of us, it’s just really embarrassing. And I’m not saying this out of some kind of misguided white pride – I don’t have white pride. I don’t have racial pride or national pride at all because you’re born into your race and nation by pure and simple luck, and I have moral qualms about taking pride in shit that happened to me instead of shit that I actually made happen through the sweat of my brow. Is that old-fashioned or new-fangled? Who cares? The point is, what people like Train, Jason Mraz, John Mayer, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, 311, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (among, unfortunately, countless others) do is not simply degrading to white folks – it’s an affront to all human dignity. These people are doing things they clearly cannot and should not do. These things just happen to be things that lots of black people did (and still do) really well.

Let’s be clear here, fellow white people, I’m not suggesting that the aforementioned white entertainers are racist. Chances are, they’re quite the opposite, just like every misguided white college kid (with dreadlocks, naturally) who sits on the steps of his student union plaintively plucking out a Bob Marley tune (usually, laughably, “Redemption Song”) on his acoustic guitar. When Pat Monahan sings, “I’m so gangsta, I’m so thug,” I don’t think he hates black people; I think he’s an idiot. A lot of the white guys (and it’s always guys, isn’t it? Why do white men think they can do whatever they want? Oh yeah, ’cause they have for thousands of years. Assholes) I mentioned above probably think they’re “grooving” or being soulful or funky or whatever, and all they’re really doing is unintentionally watering down something that was frequently more vital, sensual, and sexual before they fucked with it.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with honoring the music of our strong, black brothers (did I just make an En Vogue reference?) and sisters, but sometimes you can do that better by, say, producing a Mavis Staples album (or buying a Curtis Mayfield one) than by trying to kick phat rhymes over your Dave Matthews guitar riff. The thing is, it takes a certain je ne sais quoi (which is French for, “unprecedented awesomeness”) for white guys to play funk, bust rhymes, or sing the blues. There are white people who can do all of those things. Atmosphere makes awesome hip-hop because Slug can balance the style and substance required to do so. Tom Waits can sing the blues because Tom Waits can literally do anything (I hear a lot of talk about this Chuck Norris guy, but I assure you Tom Waits could kill Chuck Norris with his fucking mind). I’ve not heard a white group that I would call even remotely good at funk or reggae since the Clash and if you try to say, “Matisyahu” after I just said, “the Clash”, there’s probably gonna be some violence.

And I know, fellow white people, I know you’re just dying to point out how popular some of these painfully white motherfuckers are; they’ve won awards, you’re thinking. Sold literally millions of albums. Hell, if you combined them all, they’ve sold billions of albums. How can that possibly be bad? It can be, fellow white people. In fact, it’s worse than you think. I submit to you that the popularity of all this Wonder Bread music reveals a fatal flaw in our cultural psyche because it allows us to ignore where our music came from and, by extension, where we came from. I’d be less incensed (but still incensed) about this stuff if every multi-platinum 311 album caused a spike in sales of Bob Marley and Lee Perry records. What if people heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers and then bought a Funkadelic record and called out the Chili Peppers for the hacks they are? But I’ve seen no evidence of this. What I’ve seen instead is a whitewashing of our diverse musical heritage.

I’m not suggesting we choose the past over the present, but allow me to get a little (more) religious on ya for a second (because music is as valid a spiritual practice as any religion. More so, in the case of Scientology): I believe that all great music carries with it a certain spirit (there’s that je ne sais quoi again) that embodies not just the best of what music can be but also the best of what human beings can be (this is why I attend a yearly party called Rocktoberfest). In the past, this spirit was manifest in the songs of Son House, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and in the voices of people like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. Bob Dylan had that spirit when he (against his will, according to his autobiography) became the voice of his generation. Joe Strummer let that spirit shine right through him for fifty short years and if you listen to the songs he sang and the things he said, you’ll hear stuff that will light you up like a goddamn Christmas tree. See, the reason my fellow white people – and indeed, all people – shouldn’t keep putting up with shit like “Hey, Soul Sister” and “Amber” is because we all know we can do better.

So come on, fellow white people. Let’s knock this shit off. Okay?

The Very Worst Album of 2010 Part II: Reflection (And Maybe Just a Little More Hostility)

Having vented my spleen on Santana’s utterly shitty Guitar Heaven, I would like to turn now to a broader contextual discussion of the record. How does something like this come into existence (and I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that a mad scientist created it in an attempt to destroy the world) and who is it for? And what, if anything, could such a musical abomination mean?

To take the last question first, Guitar Heaven might be the last nail in the coffin that holds the rapidly putrefying remains of Rolling Stone’s credibility. The magazine gave the album three stars (out of five) and called the performances, “mostly faithful to the originals” which suggests to me that Rolling Stone‘s Mark Kemp may not have actually listened to Guitar Heaven. Not that I can blame him. If you think the Joe Cocker-sung abortion that they call “Little Wing” on this album is “faithful” to Jimi Hendrix’s original, I will fight you. I will literally, violently, will all the force of my rage, fight you. With a two-by-four and a sock full of quarters. If anything, Cocktana’s version of “Little Wing” serves as definitive proof that we should pass an international law that forbids people to cover Jimi Hendrix songs.

And how did something like Guitar Heaven come to exist? That’s the easiest question of all to answer: it came about the same way every Santana album has for the last dozen years. Santana decides he wants to buy a boat, some producers come in and write some shitty tracks, arrange the collaborations with some brand-name, talentless vocalists (I know some people think that lasting a few weeks on American Idol means you’re talented, but I submit to you that it means exactly the opposite of that), and behold! a full-length album’s worth of crap is ready to clog up your FM radio for another year. Santana gets his boat, one or more asshole collaborators get Grammys, and everyone wins except, of course, people who believe in things like truth and beauty. Guitar Heaven turns the formula on its head by eliminating the need to actually write songs at all – now, Santana and his partners in crime (let’s just call it what it is, okay?) can mangle songs that people already know and love. And don’t believe for a second that this is a one-time deal; I’ll bet you every one of Carlos Santana’s dollars that there will be a Guitar Heaven II some time in the near future.

So who’s it for? You might be inclined to guess that it’s for the same Baby Boomers who saw Santana, drugged off his ass, at Woodstock forty-one years ago. If so, shouldn’t they be outraged? After all, Guitar Heaven almost certainly represents the co-opting and watering down of some of the great, primal rock ‘n’ roll moments that were the soundtrack to the youth of a many a Baby Boomer. Santana’s guitar tone renders the notes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Angus Young in a warm, digitally polished shine that is about as vital as a road-killed squid (it happens more often than you think) and only one vocal performance on Guitar Heaven really does justice to the original song; Chester Bennington’s performance on the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, is every bit as boring as Jim Morrison’s.

Of course, Guitar Heaven isn’t just a cynical attempt to create and cash in on the perfect Baby Boomer nostalgia bait. It also tries to nab those of us on the cusp of Generation X and whatever the fuck the generation after X was. “Photograph” was a song from my childhood and having Chris Daughtry sing it is a clear attempt to get fourteen-year-old girls to buy this album or at least get that one track from I-Tunes. And if we’re talking about cynicism, what other word describes putting “Under the Bridge” on the album at all? The song is clearly not a guitar classic, but it was on the radio twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for about two straight years in the 1990s. That one is aimed squarely at people my age (as is the inclusion of Chris Cornell, although I was not fooled into believing for even a second that Cornell is as great as he was even as late as Superunknown), but literally nobody my age has ever strummed a solitary air-guitar note to “Under the Bridge.” Why? Because it’s the slow, sensitive song you put on when you want to try and slide into second base (I never did that, but I knew guys who did).

If you’re troubled and/or infuriated by Guitar Heaven, allow me to provide you with some comfort: although you’re right to be infuriated by this album (because – and I’m listening to it as I type this – it really fucking sucks), you needn’t worry that it represents some new kind of musical evil. These attempts to cash in on music someone else wrote have always been around. Paul Anka tried it a few years back with an album called Rock Swings which was so transparently hungry for the money of twenty-and-thirty-somethings that Anka even attempted a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” There are, of course, good covers albums but they are the exception that proves the rule (the rule being, “Covers albums are generally cynical attempts to get money quick”). Astute readers will be in a hurry to point out that I loved Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, and I say, “That’s very astute of you.” The thing is, LaVette, without any big-name assistance, took songs other people wrote and made them her own. There’s a sense, for instance, of the personal resonance that “Wish You Were Here” has for LaVette. When you listen to Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana choke the life out of “Sunshine of Your Love”, you can hear that the song means dollar signs to them and nothing else. They’re wringing it out like a sponge, waiting for money to fall out.

It might be tempting to try to link Santana’s decade-long mission to sell out as much as possible (which is his right, by the way – if you want to suck for money, that’s up to you, but don’t get all indignant when I call you a whore) to the Baby Boomer Generation as a whole. After all, a lot of these people spent maybe a decade (some more, some less) trying to stick it to the Man before deciding that they can save more for retirement if they just started working for him. Again, that’s their business and I certainly don’t mean that all Baby Boomer are sellouts, but I am willing to bet that those among the Boomers who buy Guitar Heaven are probably the most ashamed of their hippie-dippy past.  And to be honest, I don’t care so much that Carlos Santana is a sellout per se. I care that he’s a sellout who makes shitty music and now he’s making shitty music out of formerly good music.

And, lest I receive any Red-baiting comments, let me clear up what I mean when I say someone is a sellout. Making money doing what you love is not selling out. Watering down, pussifying, and taming your passions for mass appeal is selling out. Let the great Joseph Campbell sum it up for you: “There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.” Carlos Santana hasn’t just fallen “off the beam”; he’s swan-dived off of it into a swimming pool full of money, exchanging soulless, lifeless “music” (for it can just barely be called that, and mostly only because it consists of known chords and notes) for cold, hard cash. Or, to put it more succinctly:

Ladies and gentlemen, Carlos Santana has “lost his life.”

The Very Worst Album of 2010, Part I: Hostility

I know I already said that M.I.A.’s Maya was the worst album of 2010, but that was before I found out about Santana’s Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time. I don’t really have the words to tell you how awful this album is, much less to describe how much it personally pisses me off.

But allow me try.

Back in 1998 or 1999, Carlos Santana broke all the charts right in half with his smarmy Rob Thomas collaboration, “Smooth.” The song was huge and it was terrible. But the album upon which it appeared, Supernatural (I think. I really don’t care), became the blueprint for every album Santana will make for the rest of his life. Why? Because it earned him a swimming pool full of money.  I’ve mostly been able to ignore Santana (so much so that I forgot to put him on my list of the ten most overrated guitar players of all time, despite the fact that he is highly – highly – overrated as a guitarist) and his insipid collaborations with every corporate, top-40 flavor of the month that will give him the time of day. But I can’t ignore Guitar Heaven because I saw this fucking video on YouTube. That’s Gavin Rossdale (formerly of Bush, currently living off of Gwen Stefani) mangling T. Rex’s “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” with the help of Carlos Goddamn Santana. That video, which was taken from the American Music Awards, tells you pretty much all you need to know about what sucks in American music today. Not just the bludgeoning to death of a glam rock classic, but the crowd shots of other top-selling morons trying to awkwardly groove to Rossdale’s wooden vocal performance – seriously, Gavin Rossdale did to T.Rex what Mel Gibson did to Hamlet (and if you think that’s a compliment, I want to have a word with you. Well, my fists want to have a word with you).

So anyway, I done got the deluxe edition of Guitar Heaven (because if I’m gonna torture myself with this shit, I’m going all in – I need the version that includes Scott Stapp singing CCR’s “Fortunate Son”) to try and see just how furious it can make me. Turns out, it can make me plenty fucking furious. Even the songs on here that I’ve never liked (like “Whole Lotta Love” which Led Zeppelin stole from Willie Dixon) deserve better than Santana and his brute squad of talentless art-butchers give them. Except “Riders on the Storm.” That song has always sucked and Santana’s cover, with vocals from one of the Linkin Park assholes, just makes it suck more and helpfully proves that it will always suck.

Santana tries to play the intro to “Whole Lotta Love” with what I can only assume that he assumes is a certain Latin flair, but it ends up sounding dull and lifeless, which is actually kind of perfect because Chris Cornell comes in a few seconds later and removes any doubt about whether or not he will ever be good again. I swear, youngsters, there was a time when Chris Cornell was awesome. It lasted until about halfway through Down on the Upside and I fear those days are never coming back. “Whole Lotta Love” is one the first pieces of ordnance I launch when delivering my standard “Fuck Led Zeppelin and Here’s Why” lecture, but Santana and Chris Cornell have actually made me feel kind of bad for Led Zeppelin, which only pisses me off more. How dare Carlos Santana make me feel compassion for my enemy!

But what of the songs I like? For instance, the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’,” which is sung by Scott Weiland, the sometime Stone Temple Pilot and all-the-time rehab dropout. Say what you will about Keith Richards, but his guitar tone fit the Stones’ good songs like a comfy pair of jeans. Carlos Santana’s tone is all wrong for the song and so is Weiland’s. He spends half the song sounding like Kid Rock. Come to think of it, I’m kind of surprised Kid Rock wasn’t tapped for this album. Maybe they wanted to get him for a song but then realized that with Scott Stapp and Rob Thomas already committed to the project, they would achieve some sort of critical mass of assholes.

So yeah, Rob Thomas is back and this time he helps Santana skull-fuck “Sunshine of Your Love” to death. This is one of the only Cream songs I like, and Santana and Thomas have smoothed (no pun intended) all of its rough edges and turned it into a guitar and vocal wankfest, which, come to think of it, is a fairly succinct description of the entirety of Guitar Heaven. Except the vocal performances are almost uniformly terrible and the guitar bits are the same fucking guitar bits that Carlos Santana has been regurgitating for the last twelve years. In fact, every track on Guitar Heaven is so sterile and bland that I’ve begun to wonder if maybe Santana secretly hates these songs and wants to destroy them. That’s the only explanation for something like the version of “Back in Black” that appears on Guitar Heaven. The song, originally by AC/DC (a band for whom I have no small amount of affection), is stripped of its signature riff and has the vocals handled by powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll vocalist… um… Nas. The rap guy. Carlos Santana hates “Back in Black” (and, presumably, all of humanity) so much that he teamed up with Nas to turn the song into a clubby rap-rock tune. By the time I made it through this track, I was beginning to wish this album was a person so I could hit it in the face with a brick.

Setting aside the fact that Santana and company just completely fuck up every single song on this album (don’t even get me started on what they did to “Little Wing”, which just happens to be my favorite Jimi Hendrix song. It makes me wish Carlos Santana was a person so I could hit him in the face with a brick), one glaring issues remains: whoever decided that these songs were the “greatest guitar classics of all time” has probably survived on a steady diet of paint chips and their own paint-fumed feces, because there are tracks on Guitar Heaven that even the lowest-functioning retard (Sarah Palin) wouldn’t mistake for a “guitar classic.” Fucking “Riders on the Storm” isn’t even a guitar song! It’s a meandering, bullshit electric organ tune that proves beyond all doubt that the use of electric organs in music should be tightly regulated. How do you make an album of great guitar tracks and not include at least one early Black Sabbath tune? Or “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad some of my favorite guitar songs didn’t suffer at the hands of Carlos Santana and his flying monkey squad of songfuckers.  But the logic in terms of track selection is mind-boggling and it underscores the utter stupidity that clearly drives the whole project. These aren’t the greatest guitar tracks of all time – they’re just some guitar tracks from select periods in time and, in many cases, their greatness is subject to serious debate. Who, even among people who can stand the fucking thing, thinks “Under the Bridge” is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time? This album isn’t an anthology of great guitar songs at all; it’s just a place where some rock tunes went to die.

At the end of the day, people whose priorities are so fucked that they made time to vote for Chris Daughtry on American Idol (and also made time to get angry when he didn’t win) might find something to like on Guitar Heaven, but just like the fundamentalist view of Christian heaven, the whole things strikes me as perverse and wildly unimaginative. If Kirk Cameron’s Heaven is the “right” one, who would really wanna go? Cameron’s god is an abusive (possibly alcoholic) stepfather who would’ve sent Ghandi to hell, and if you’re willing to condemn Ghandi after the life he lived, you’re fucking nuts. But you’d probably enjoy Santana’s Guitar Heaven.

I Was Dared to Review This Track

Okay. My friend Zac, knowing I would take the bait, dared me to review the song “Leotard Stories” by the Atlanta group La Chansons (which is roughly French for “The Songs”). I don’t know if Zac likes this song, but he probably knew that I wouldn’t. Incidentally, if you want to dare me to review songs or albums, feel free – if you supply a healthy dose of booze, it will exponentially increase the odds that I will take your dare, no matter how much it might hurt me.

My first impression of “Leotard Stories” is that it makes me miss “Blue Jeans,” the only Ladytron song that I like. My second impression is that La Chansons traffic in some sort of bullshit, ironic “I Love the 80s” style of synth rock that gets more infuriating the more I think about it. If you take a moment to examine the album art for the La Chansons record, you’ll notice husband and wife duo Greg and Carson Keller are decked out in their finest 80s style (although Greg looks a little like he’s about to go deer hunting after the photo shoot) and the song is, of course, an ode to the leotard, that staple of every workout your mom did before you came along and screwed it all up for her. As far as I can tell, “Leotard Stories” boils down to a way to say absolutely nothing over a lazy, sparkling beat. I presume the intention here is to get the listener to giggle and coo about how it’s so funny that La Chansons did a song about leotards. But it’s not funny, it’s fucking stupid. And if you try to convince me that this song is a comment on how meaningless dance music was in the 80s, I will fight you to the death, assuming my eyes recover from the strain of rolling so hard that blood trickles out of my tear ducts.

The reason LCD Soundsystem obliterates every other dance-rocky/synthy/electronic group out there is because James Murphy doesn’t just talk about absurd shit over lazy beats. Murphy isn’t afraid to talk about big kid stuff with his audience instead of just spewing cutesy bullshit, which is what “Leotard Stories” is. I found a live track of La Chansons on the YouTubes (I won’t link to it because I love you too much) and it was a song called “Sparklin’”, about roller-disco. Because that matters to today’s listeners, am I right?

But it does suggest that I have to face a somewhat less irritating possibility here: what if the Kellers really do love the 80s that much (I really don’t get why anyone, apart from now retired coke dealers, has much love for the 80s. To quote the Hold Steady, “The 80s almost killed me/ let’s not recall them quite so fondly”)? What if the cutesy nonsense of “Leotard Stories” is a sincere attempt on the part of La Chansons to pay homage to a garment no one in their right mind has worn since 1987? The other reason I’m having this thought right now is because I clicked on a link to Carson Keller’s art on the band’s website. One of the paintings is called “I Can Do Anything” and it’s a painting of a Barbie and the background is fucking glitter! I’m not really sure how to handle this. It gives me the feeling that there is a pile of dead unicorns (or horses with paper towel tubes stapled to their heads) in the Kellers’ garage and yet that feeling is still more bearable than the thought that La Chansons are some kind of ironic joke band. Irony has become the first refuge of scoundrels in today’s music and I’d prefer to think just about anything about a band other than thinking that they’re constantly being ironic.

Either way, when you get down to the music, this song still blows. Technology has blessed us and cursed us, fellow music fans: the good news is that any asshole with a few bucks can make an album, which has made it easier to hear music from people you might otherwise never get to hear. The bad news is that any asshole with a few bucks can make an album, making it easier to hear music from people you would never want to hear in a million years. “Leotard Stories” sounds like someone stopped reading the manual for their Casio keyboard about halfway through and lyrically… well, it’s better to ignore this song lyrically. Carson Keller rattles off some colors of leotard that she likes and calls the black leotard her “go-to girl.” If you know me at all, you can’t really expect me to do anything but hate this song and I do hate this song and now I’m going to go back to listening to songs that I don’t hate. Or maybe I’ll head over to E-Music and download “Blue Jeans.”

I Didn’t Know I Was Worth Stealing From

Did you happen to read my not-so-brief awesome American music? Did you like Part 5 in particular? That was the one about how hard it was to be cool in the 80s. Well, these assholes liked it so much that they stole it, turned it into nonsense, and then posted it as their own work on their shitty blog.

I don’t know if the good folks at CDDB are not used to the English language or if they’re allowed to steal your shit as long as they turn it into gibberish, but either way, they fucked my words right in the nostrils. Just look at the first paragraph, if you can stand it. My favorite part is where they decided that “I am a female of that decennium and VH1 thinks I should fuck it to death.” It gets more hilarious/retarded from there.

I don’t make money doing Bollocks!. It’s purely a labor of love, but because it is, that makes what CDDB did kind of worse. Because this blog is about me and my geeky-as-fuck love of music, I feel like CDDB took a giant shit on my passion. They’re powered by WordPress, just like me, so I contacted WordPress to see what my options are. I’m guessing I just have to grin and bear it. I don’t want you, my 20+ readers (okay, I spend a lot more time around 60 readers a day than I used to, but I’m trying not to let that marginal improvement go to my head), to go to CDDB and start a flame war with them or anything. You’d only be giving them better numbers while futilely calling them cunts or whatever. It would be better if nobody went to CDDB and read their shit (I only linked to their post so you could compare it to the original) – who knows how many other poor bloggers they’re stealing from? I had thought that Bollocks! flew pretty far under the radar of thieving interweb magpies, but I guess not. If CDDB can find my stuff and steal it, they can probably steal stuff from much more established bloggers.

Just got an email from WordPress, telling me that there is a difference between being hosted by WordPress and being powered by them. Since CDDB is hosted elsewhere, WordPress can’t take down their post. Though they seem to agree that my shit got wholesale jacked by those fuckwits at CDDB.

What really troubles me about this is that CDDB is stealing people’s writing and making it unreadable. To what end, exactly? They don’t seem to be making any money off of it, which is good. But what purpose could it possibly serve to just compile other people’s writing and turn it into crap?

I’ll be looking into my options to stop CDDB in the weeks ahead (although I’m getting married in 3 weeks and will be busy as hell between now and then), but in the meantime, I would like the people at that site to come to their senses, do the right thing, and take down their crappy version of my post. Also, if you are a blogger and you have had your shit stolen by these guys, maybe drop me a line in the comments and we can put our heads together to bring these assholes down.