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.

Thoughts On the Changes At eMusic

So it’s been going ’round the internet that eMusic is making big changes this month. To hear them tell it, they’re adding over 250,000 new tracks to their system because of a new deal with Universal Music Group. Fine. I’m all for expanding consumer choice. But it doesn’t take long for this to get shitty. In order to get the Universal deal, eMusic had to change their price scheme to bring it more in line with the I-Tunes (and Amazon and just about everybody), price-per-song style of doing business. Before, I paid $20 dollars a month and got 50 “credits” good for song downloads. I could usually get four albums a month for $20. I was happy. What eMusic didn’t want to say explicitly is that their price “change” meant you were going to get “less” for your hard-earned “money.” I’m not alone in my disdain for this “change.”

eMusic’s shenanigans have had an unintended result (at least I hope it was unintended) that’s starting to get a lot of attention: indie labels like Beggars Group (which includes Matador, 4AD, Rough Trade, and XL) and Merge have opted not to go along with the new, awful scheme at eMusic. Which means artists like the National, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, She & Him, Titus Andronicus, Deerhunter, the Arcade Fire, Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dinosaur Jr., Camera Obscura, Art Brut, Jarvis Cocker, and you get the point will no longer be available (or their stuff will be limited to off-label releases and compilations) on a site that once claimed to be the “no. 1 site for independent music.” But you can get the new Weezer atrocity for just $8.50, as well as albums by Fall Out Boy, Hole, and Steely Fucking Dan. Goodie.  A press release from Beggars Group USA says that eMusic “was the dedicated home for independent music and is, in our view, not that any more.” They’re not kidding: if you go to eMusic right now, you’ll find more Ted Nugent than Ted Leo, which ain’t how it should be (Leo and the Pharmacists’ Living with the Living, on Touch and Go Records, is still available as I write this).

What’s clear is that eMusic had to change something to lure in Universal and that change was a bad deal for the smaller labels who, let’s be honest here, provide a ton of the music indie snobs like myself seek on eMusic. The trade-off must have been worth it to the folks at eMusic, and maybe it will be. But the loss of some of the best indie bands in the country could also be devastating (and maybe it should be). I can’t help but wonder, as I cancel my subscription yet again, if eMusic hasn’t just pissed away the one thing that made them distinct among so-called “legitimate” download sites. They emailed out a petition you can sign if you want to (ahem) beg Beggars Group, Merge, and a couple other labels to come back to eMusic, but I didn’t sign it. I have the nagging feeling that those labels got fucked by eMusic or, at the very least, got asked to fuck over their customers. I admit that I don’t have concrete evidence at the moment (let’s face it – I don’t have the cultural cachet of a Pitchfork so no one’s gonna return my emails asking what the fuck happened), but I’m pretty familiar with the artists on Beggars Group and Merge and those are labels that provide an extremely high value-for-money to their fans and I have a hard time believing that they would essentially make their stuff less available to those fans unless there was a good goddamn reason.

The first time I stopped being an eMusic subscriber was when I got fed up with the ratio of stuff they had that I didn’t give a fuck about to stuff they had that I wanted. When they fixed it, I rejoined them and was quite happy with them until this month. Just browsing through the Beggars Group roster, I see a lot of great stuff that won’t be available anymore. And, regardless of what eMusic says, it’s on them. Before they implemented their new scheme this month, those labels were happy keeping their music on the site and that music is gone because of changes eMusic chose to make. One has to guess that eMusic is doing what they’re doing to keep pace with the I-Tunes people, but they’ve inadvertently made it so I-Tunes can offer me something eMusic no longer can: National albums.

Even if I could forgive the fact that most of my favorite bands will no longer be available on eMusic (as I write this, for some reason, even the newest Hold Steady record is gone from the site. That does not bode well), I’d have a hard time looking past the whole thing where my money gets me less. eMusic tries to put the focus on the fact that the price of my plan hasn’t gone up, but if I pay the same amount of money and get less, how the fuck are you helping me? Oh, they also want to give me a paltry three dollar “loyalty bonus” every month, which will also not go as far as my eMusic money went in October. The bottom line, eMusic, is that there’s basically no way on earth to give me less for my money and make me happy about it. I’m better off just saving my twenty bucks a month for a trip to Amoeba.

At the moment, it’s hard to say what effect the loss of some of the best bands going today will do to eMusic, but it had an immediate negative effect on me as an eMusic customer. As I write this, I’m no longer an eMusic member and I made sure to let them know it was because they fucked things up this month. To be clear, I have no problem with the fact that eMusic added shitty bands from a major label – there are plenty of very shitty indie bands on eMusic too. My problems are 1) in order to get the additional shitty music, eMusic drove some of the best artists working today away from their site and 2) they trumpeted the fact that they didn’t raise their prices while hoping I would ignore the fact that my money buys me significantly less music than it did before. I’m guessing that I’m not  the only person who has these problems and I’m guessing that I won’t be the only guy getting out of his subscription as soon as humanly possible.