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.”

By Popular Demand: “Fuck Led Zeppelin and Here’s Why”

We do aim to please here at Bollocks!, so when a few friends asked to hear my “Fuck Led Zeppelin and Here’s Why” lecture, I decided to put my “Everyone Should Stop Covering Jimi Hendrix and Here’s Why” post on hold to bring you, by popular demand, my argument against Led Zeppelin.

But first, in this season of giving, let’s be charitable and talk about some things that were good about Led Zeppelin. I like one or two Zep tunes myself and I like to give credit where credit is due. For one thing, Led Zeppelin arguably had one of the best (next to the Who) rhythm sections in all of rock music. John Paul Jones and John Bonham don’t always get the media love that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant get, but those dudes could lay some shit down, musically speaking. So I honor the bassist and drummer of Led Zeppelin, but I don’t honor a whole lot else.

Why?

For starters, they stole a shitload of songs. From the (by now) well-documented theft of Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love” to their uncredited recording of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” Led Zeppelin never met a black dude’s song that they didn’t like. And by “like”, I mean “steal without giving the dude credit.” So it’s not just the theft of these songs that bothers me, it’s who they were stolen from – mostly poor, black musicians; guys who ran around the country singing their songs and shagging the wives of white men, only to make enough money to get to the next town and do it all again. And, as a fan of early blues music, I find Zeppelin’s versions of these songs pretty inferior to the originals. Take “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” – Blind Willie Johnson’s version has exponentially more soul than the Zep version and the sad thing here is that the Led Zeppelin version is one of their songs that I like. Check out the audio of Blind Willie Johnson here. You might disagree with me about this song, in which case you are quite possibly Robert Plant.

Which brings me to another reason Led Zeppelin sucks: Robert Plant and his banshee-wailing bullshit. I know I’m gonna get a lot of flack for this, but I have never understood why people think Plant is such a great singer. He spent most of his time in Led Zeppelin singing like a hysterical teenage girl from a B-grade horror flick (the rest of his time was spent finding black guys to steal from and trying figure out subtle ways to musically suck off J.R.R. Tolkien). You know what’s missing from all of my favorite Zep tunes? Plant’s banshee-wailing bullshit. He wasn’t bad when he just sang like a normal person, but even then, I don’t see what all the fuss was about. He was adequate at best and extra annoying at worst.

And as for Jimmy Page? Totally overrated. So he played with a bow on one song. Big fucking deal. You know which Jimi Hendrix solos are better than everything Jimmy Page ever played? All of them! Page also loses points for his continued denial, despite mountains of evidence (including lawsuits from original artists), that Led Zeppelin stole songs from people. And claiming that you’re paying “tribute” to an artist when you don’t give them credit for writing the song isn’t homage – it’s being an asshole. Page couldn’t even credit the correct songwriters when defending Zeppelin’s theft to an interviewer in 1977 – he said of “Bring It On Home” that there was “only a tiny bit taken from Sonny Boy Williamson’s version and we threw that in as a tribute to him.” I’m sorry, Mr. Page, the answer we’re looking for is Willie Dixon, who wrote “Bring It On Home.” And “Whole Lotta Love” for you too. If this were final Jeopardy, Jimmy Page, the answer would be, “A black blues musician upon whose back Led Zeppelin built their career.” And the question, in all caps, would be “WHO IS WILLIE DIXON, YOU THIEVING FUCK?” Incidentally, I’d like to tattoo that on Jimmy Page’s forehead.

Led Zeppelin is often credited with “inventing heavy metal.” Now, if you wanna have a really satisfying argument, argue with people about who invented heavy metal (I sometimes offer the two Gustavs, Mahler and Holst, as the godfathers of heavy metal, which ends arguments fast because precious few metal-heads know who Mahler and Holst were). A lot of people will say Led Zeppelin, a few will say Black Sabbath and some might suggest the Stooges or even Jimi Hendrix. But let’s not equivocate – Led Zeppelin did not “invent” heavy metal. Yes, they got their debut on the streets a few months before Black Sabbath and the Stooges, but Sabbath was the heavier band by far and I’m goddamn sick of Tony Iommi having to live in Jimmy Page’s shadow, despite the fact that he is a vastly superior guitarist. Also, Black Sabbath has credibility on their side – they wrote the songs on Black Sabbath, with the exception of two credited cover songs. The correct answer is that Sabbath invented heavy metal (though they, like almost all of us, owe a debt of gratitude to Jimi Hendrix), the Stooges invented punk (a decade ahead of its time!), and Led Zeppelin, sorry to say, invented cock rock. So the next time Warrant comes by your state fair, remember to thank Led Zeppelin.

Of all the reasons that I hate Led Zeppelin, the theft still weighs most heavily on my mind. Or rather, it’s what the theft means. Led Zeppelin made a lot of songs famous that they didn’t write and they’ve enabled generations of middle class white kids to avoid learning true history – kids who love “Dazed and Confused” aren’t going to seek out the original version. I actually got in an argument when I was in college over “Whole Lotta Love” and the kid I was arguing with, who had never heard the original, dismissed Willie Dixon by saying, “Led Zeppelin made it better.” It might be tempting to say that “it’s just music” and it doesn’t matter, but we’re talking about intellectual dishonesty here – the idea that you don’t have to acknowledge the truth if the lie is more comfortable. That philosophy, such as it isn’t, is dominant in our culture right now and if we can’t defeat it in our entertainment, what hope do we have of defeating it anywhere else? I’m not saying that it’s unethical to like Led Zeppelin – remember, I even like some of their tunes – but I am saying that the pedestal upon which their fans have placed them is built on the graves of talented black men and if you can’t admit that when you’re defending them, you’re showing me that you are susceptible to all kinds of (perhaps more dangerous) deception.

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.”

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.”

Oh Good. A New Hole Album. (Part 2)

If you’re just tuning in, beer (Ninkasi’s Total Domination IPA, to be exact. The good folks at Ninkasi have helped me through a lot of shitty records, but they’re also there for me during the good times and I would like to give them a very special Bollocks! shout-out) and I are reviewing the new Hole album. So far, neither of us like it very much.

The track I’m listening to now is called, “For Once in Your Life” and the music is a blatant ripoff of a song from 2005 or 2006 (I remember it from a Boston winter, but can’t remember anything else) that I can’t remember for the life of me. It’s driving me nuts that I can’t remember what song this is. Is it a Perishers song? Snow Patrol? I don’t know, but it’s definitely hackwork. I spent a fucking hour trying to figure out what song “For Once in Your Life” is ripping off – if anyone can help me out with this, I’d be much obliged. Vocally, she’s impersonating Bob Dylan circa Blood On the Tracks, to which I can only respond with some of Dylan’s lyrics from that album: “You’re an idiot, babe/ it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

Super good. The next song is called “Letter to God.” My Cloying-Meter just broke. OH LOOK, EVERYBODY. COURTNEY LOVE IS WONDERING WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT AND WHO SHE IS AND WHAT THE POINT OF IT ALL IS! WOW! NO ONE HAS EVER WONDERED THAT IN SONG FORM EVER BEFORE!!!!1!!!ONE.  If you’ve deduced (correctly) that I hate Nobody’s Daughter at this point, think about how much I hate the whole album, multiply it by a thousand, and you’ll get to about half as much as I hate “Letter to God.” This song is pretty much everything I think is wrong with music and writing in general right now.

The next song is called “Loser Dust.” It’s really dumb. Love doesn’t really bother staying in tune much on this song. I want you to ponder something with me, Bollocks! readers: how much did Kurt Cobain have to loathe himself in order to shack up with someone like Courtney Love? “Loser Dust” is the typical Love ego married to a bad Foo Fighters song (i.e., one that came after The Colour and the Shape). Also, it’s about – what else? – how people are always waiting for celebrities to  fuck up in public. You know what? There are two cultural things that make me wanna riot right now: 1) movies where well-meaning white people come into the inner cities and teach African American kids how to read* and 2) songs by spoiled famous retards about how tough it is to be famous because everyone is watching you all the time. If it sucks that bad, Courtney Love, try getting a real fucking job. You wouldn’t last a minute – your job now is “do drugs in public and make shitty records”. That doesn’t exactly qualify you for anything in the private sector, does it? Maybe you can be some town’s Doddering Fuck-Up in Residence**, but that’s about it.

Not too much to go, but “How Dirty Girls Get Clean” is pretty awful. See, it starts out with an acoustic guitar for a few lines and then it gets all loud. To show the emotional impact of Love going through rehab or something. All the dynamics on Nobody’s Daughter are trying to be the dynamics from the Pixies’ Doolittle and they’re failing miserably. “How Dirty Girls Get Clean” is packed with the same lyrical cliches that plague the whole album. Also, more Dylan-impersonation. Minus a million points.

Last track! It’s called “Never Go Hungry.” Love sings about how she’s hungering for dignity. It’s a little late for that. “Never Go Hungry” has a sorta folky vibe to it, but the overall message is that Love will do anything so long as she doesn’t have to go hungry again. You know, like Ghandi did. Actually, I think Courtney Love is making a pretty bold declaration of her morals here: “I don’t care what I have to pretend,” she sings with more conviction than she has shown on the album so far. It’s cliche as fuck, but Love has finally let us know what she stands for: Courtney Love stands for Courtney Love and if you don’t like it, she’ll Twitter some incoherent nonsense about you.

Okay. It’s nearly 1 in the a.m. and my Ninkasis are nearly drained. Musically, Nobody’s Daughter is bland, derivative, and obvious. Lyrically, it is cliche as hell when it’s not being irritating as hell and the combination serves to make it, overall, fucking dreadful. I wouldn’t even recommend this album to people who hate themselves.

*I know someone is going to say that Dangerous Minds and movies like that are based on true stories, but that’s bullshit. “True story” movies are almost always embellished for dramatic effect (hate to rain on your parade, but the real guy from The Pursuit of Happyness was a bad father who abandoned his kid for his precious Wall Street career; the coach in Rudy actually wanted to let the runt play football, they just needed a villain for the film; and don’t even get me started on Braveheart). Know what I wanna see? A movie where Samuel L. Jackson goes to the backwoods of Georgia or Louisiana or Kansas and teaches white rednecks about evolution. Hell, if Mr. Jackson is game, I’ll fucking write that movie myself.

**It’s sort of an advanced version of the Town Drunk.

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown‘s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown‘s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

Portugal. The Man Makes Crappy. The Album

Okay. There’s no point beating around the bush here. I really don’t like Portugal. The Man. I hate the pretentious period in their name, which would be a stupid name without the superfluous punctuation. I hate their stupid, redundant album title, The Satanic Satanist. And I hate the fact that words like “lovers” and “golden” appear roughly 90,000 times in the space of 11 songs. I don’t really have anything nice to say about The Satanic Satanist and I know you’re inclined to suggest that I say nothing at all because of that. But that cliche imperative could use a 21st century update and that is this: if you don’t have anything nice to say, post it on the internet.

I don’t honestly even remember how I got this album. I read that Stupid. The Band Name was from Portland (which is only partly true – they’re originally from Wasilla, Alaska, a place from whence, thankfully, no other unbearably stupid people have emerged) and I think that prompted me to check them out. I have a great deal of pride in the music that my old hometown is cranking out these days (and no small amount of pride in the fact that my beloved Oregon Ducks just handed the USC Trojans the worst ass whoopin’ of Pete Carroll’s tenure there. I don’t want to rub USC’s noses in it too hard, though – they’ve given Oregon so much already. Like 613 yards of offense. 386 of which came from our tiny, spry quarterback) and so I’m usually willing to check out a Portland band. But Portugal. The Pretentious is giving me reason to revise this strategy.

In many ways, The Redundant Album Title is a prototypical Album I’m Not Going to Like At All. Among its many offenses, it strives to revive the 1970s, or some TV dream of the 1970s, in much the same way Amazing Baby tried to do earlier this year (you’ll remember that I despised them as well). They come off as the kind of people who will futilely argue with me that the Bee Gees were fun and that “Stayin’ Alive” is “catchy.” I don’t care; fuck the Bee Gees. On top of that, Portugal Period The Man traffics in that annoying white-bread funk that was made more popular by Maroon 5. There are several reasons that this is a crime against music and possibly humanity. I’ll just list the first few that come to mind: 1) George Clinton 2) Curtis Mayfield 3) early Stevie wonder 4) As a rule, you should never do anything that Maroon 5 beat you to the punch on.  Do you really want to be accused of riding those coattails?

And that’s just off the top of my head.

Also, the best bits on The Satanist (fixed that for you, Portugal. The Repetitive) are sue-ably close in melody and sound to the best bits of MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, an album I appreciate more and more after hearing shitty bands like Amazing Baby and Portugal The Seriously, I’m Not Putting A Fucking Period After the First Word of Your Stupid Band Name. If Joe Satriani could get a nice settlement from Coldplay over whatever stupid song of theirs (allegedly) ripped off a stupid song of his, MGMT could probably fund their next three albums and tours with the money owed them by PTM. If I had the technology, I’d do a mash-up of PTM’s “The Sun” and MGMT’s “Weekend Wars” that would be particularly instructive. And, what PTM isn’t taking from MGMT’s songbook, they’re taking from Curtis Mayfield’s playbook (you know, the guy who supplied the “People Get Ready” part to Bob Marley’s “One Love/ People Get Ready”. Also, the guy who wrote fucking “Superfly”). If Mayfield were alive today, I imagine “music” like he’d find on The Satanic Satanist would kill him.

Which brings me to perhaps the biggest crime committed by PTM on The Satanic Scientologist (see, that’s at least funny. Did you know Scientologists hate gay people? That’s why the guy who directed Crash left their flock.) is one of prioritizing style over substance to a harmful degree. Now, I’m not saying that substance is better than style – good bands (and artists like the aforementioned Curtis Mayfield) have both. The Clash, a.k.a. the best band ever, welded the two together in a way few bands have been able to manage since. But it seems like, at least lately, a lot of bands are coming out aping their favorite old records without actually saying anything. PTM, for instance, offers this line in the annoyingly repetitive song “Lovers in Love”: “Lovers loving love just like these lovers are loving in love.” Unless you have some odd combination of Autism and Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, that’s just plain lazy and you should either be kicked in the crotch or forced to watch Suzanne Somers blather on about how bad vaccines are for you (I thought about linking to some of that, but that would be cruel). And every other song on this pastiche-and-shit sandwich has that same, lumbering, white-bread funk beat and an annoying, Scissor Sisters-esque falsetto, courtesy of singer John Baldwin Gourley. I propose a new rule, kids: if you use a white-funk falsetto, your song has to be at least as awesome as Beck’s “Debra.” If it isn’t, you’re instantly classifying yourself as a douchebag.

Douche. The Bag’s defenders (assuming they have any) will probably accuse me of taking the band too seriously and say, “They’re just fun, man!” That’s fine. People think that about Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, Maroon 5, and Jimmy Buffet too. That doesn’t mean I have to like any of that shit (and, in case you missed where I’m going with this, I don’t). One man’s fun is another man’s torture (not to beat a dead Trojan horse here, but I’m guessing Jeremiah Masoli’s fun last Saturday was not fun for a USC defense that had, until they met the Ducks, allowed just under 80 rushing yards a game) and you’re well within your rights to have “fun” listening to Period. The Used Incorrectly. If you do, however, pray that you never encounter the music of Curtis Mayfield; the experience will illuminate your folly with such blinding clarity that you’ll set fire to your house to get rid of your copy of The Satanic Satanist and the stench that it left there.