The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard #1: “Waiting On the World to Change”

Well, folks, the new year is officially here and Bollocks! is coming off a pretty satisfying 2010; this blog was viewed 19,000 times last year, which probably ties into the unemployment numbers somehow, but I don’t want to dig too deep into that lest I start feeling all depressed. Since I’m always looking for ways to improve your Bollocks! experience, I decided to come up with a new feature called “The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard” to shed some light on some of the worst individual songs of all time. Why would I do this? Because I have heard all of these songs (some of them occasionally get stuck in my head) and I need you to share my pain. This is not a countdown – like my much-vaunted (well, by me) Great Fucking Albums feature, The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard is listed in the order that these things occur to me. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the first installment – I’ll put up a page so you can gain easy access to your (least?) favorites as the list grows. Because believe me, it will grow.

The reason I decided to do this feature is because I hear bad fucking songs all the time, when I’m out shopping or dining somewhere with my wife or when her alarm clock goes off in the morning and the radio station it’s set on greets us with the Ataris cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” (which, I mean, it should just be the soundtrack to a book called How to Make Bad Things Worse). But that’s not the song I wanted to start off my list with.

No, there was a clear favorite for the first song against the wall when I started thinking about The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard: “Waiting On the World to Change” by John Mayer. Released in 2006 on his Continuum album, “Waiting On the World to Change” is a great way to find any reason you can think of to dislike John Mayer’s music (and maybe him as a person just a little bit).

Musically, the song is not that noteworthy, unless you’re noting that it is a ripoff of Curtis Mayfield’s vastly superior “People Get Ready” (you might have noticed that I sing the late Mr. Mayfield’s praises quite frequently here. Listen to his music and you’ll see why). But the music mostly keeps to the background so as to better highlight the “gee-ain’t-I-deep” lyrics which are some of the most laughably stupid I’ve heard this side of the first Hanson album. Mayer starts out singing about how he and all his friends “just feel like we don’t have the means/ to rise up and beat”… um… well, whatever it is he’s talking about. Oh: “everything that’s going wrong.” Well, John, let me tell you a little secret: nobody, in the entire history of everything, has changed anything by attempting to tackle “everything that’s going wrong.” So your problem is all in your approach. Why don’t you start small by maybe recycling or protesting a war or something? John Mayer and his friends are content to sit at home and wait for the world to change because they can’t solve every problem all at once, and the chorus, complete with an airy gospel choir, tells us that Mayer & Friends are willing to sit on the sidelines as long as necessary to get the job done. Imagine if Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks had thought that way.

“Just you wait,” thinks Rosa as she dutifully moves to the back of the bus, “In about fifty years, we’ll have a black president, and then you honky motherfuckers are gonna get it!”

Mayer’s assertion basically amounts to “I don’t wanna do anything about any problems because doin’ stuff is hard.” First of all, you fuck, you play guitar for a living. Your job is to rip off Stevie Ray Vaughan and wallow up to your neck in celebutante pussy – and you can’t take a few minutes on your day off to, I dunno, clean up a beach? Fuck you! There are people with real goddamn jobs who make time constantly to try to help other people, which is world-changing shit. There are people whose whole job is helping people. And none of them got to fuck Jennifer Aniston.

My favorite part of “Waiting On the World to Change” – and by “favorite part”, I mean the part that sends me into a nearly homicidal fury – is the part where Mayer sings, “One day our generation/ is gonna rule the population/ so we keep waiting (insert gospel chicks with a “Waitin’” right here)/ waiting on the world to change.”  Now I’m guessing that John Mayer, being 33, is part of my generation and I’m happy to say that none of us elected John to lead the charge on this whole “ruling the population thing.” Many of the very good people in my generation don’t even think in those terms, and I’m glad. It seems to me that John Mayer has created a convenient way to never do anything meaningful or helpful for humanity. After all, if he and his pals are operating on the premise that the time for action is after the world has already changed, can’t they just keep saying that it hasn’t change yet? “Hey John, can you take out the trash?” “Nah, I’m still waiting for the world to change.”

In an interview with the Advocate, Mayer said that “I know that if I were engaged in changing anything for the better, or the better as I see it, it would go unnoticed or be completely ineffective.” So Mayer doesn’t wanna try because he’s afraid no one would notice. Well, John, I’ve got something you could do that would not only change things for the better, but would be immediately noticeable: stop making music, you fucking hack.

Of course, right after Mayer said the above sentence, he added, “A lot of people have that feeling.” And what pisses me off is that he’s right - a lot of people don’t lift a finger for anyone else because they feel like nothing they do will help. They see a vast sea of troubles and don’t feel like there’s a vast sea of people who can do anything about it. The problem is, if we all did simple stuff that was completely within our means (like just being kind to each other, for starters), it could make a big difference (is that naive? Fuck you, we’ve never tried it, have we?). And I get that it’s tough to know what to do to help humanity (that’s a pretty general term to start with), but writing an anthem that excuses apathy (“It’s not that I don’t give a shit, I’m just waiting on the world to change”) is fucking pathetic. John Mayer has made plenty of music to be ashamed of, but I don’t think any of his songs tops “Waiting On the World to Change” in terms of audacious stupidity and general suckitude.

Fender Makes Shameless Plea to Your Asshole Stepdad

I play guitar, which I believe I’ve mentioned a zillion times here. So I buy things, occasionally, from Guitar Center. They send me coupons, the coupons save me a few bucks. Sometimes, they send me other things. It’s an arrangement that I’ve grown somewhat comfortable with (the people at my local GC aren’t strictly “knowledgeable” about what they’re selling so much as they’re “commission-hungry douchebags” about what they’re selling), as much as I’ll ever be with having advertisements sent to me.

Of course, my semi-comfortability with having Guitar Center send me stuff (as opposed to my totally comfortable delight when the folks at Bev-Mo send me a coupon) means that I actually look at the stuff that they send me. Which means that I couldn’t help but notice a flyer from Guitar Center advertising the new line of Fender Guitars due out this month.

Now, for my money, if you play guitar, you either play a Fender, a Gibson, or some shitty guitar that’s not worth the time and effort it takes to deride it. But oh, wait, I do have spare time to deride it while you try to keep the fucking thing in tune and wrestle your off-rhythm rendition of the intro (the only part you know, of course) of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” out of it. (Note: Squier and Epiphone, the respective cheaper brands of Fender and Gibson are also acceptable guitars – more than acceptable in fact. I play an Epi Les Paul and have heard  no complaints about the noise I can make with it.) My point being, I have respect for Fender. Tons and tons of respect. So I can only shake my head at the contents of this flyer, announcing Fender’s new “old” guitars. Fender is proud to announce to your alcoholic, middle-aged stepdad that they now have a guitar he can play that looks like it’s been out on the road for fucking decades.

They’re called Road Worn guitars and let’s be clear: this is the electric guitar equivalent of pre-torn jeans. And it’s coming from a legendary brand. I mean, I would expect this kinda shit from Ibanez, but not from Fender. The idea is that these guitars look like they’ve been on the road since the fifties or sixties, but they’re brand spankin’ new. In other words, if you buy one of these guitars, congratulations: you’re the biggest fucking poser in Poserland. Pray I don’t find you.

The point of playing rock ‘n’ roll hard, in a  rock ‘n’ roll band, is that you beat up your instrument. It gets its various dings and dents from your various musical (mis)adventures and each one is a story from your life that you get to cherish. Or you can just cut out all the hard work, buy a Road Worn guitar, and talk about how your guitar has a dent in it just like the one you saw on Eric Clapton’s Strat back when he was (and you might’ve been but probably weren’t) cool. How exciting is that?! I’m torn between the desire to weep and the desire to kill.

Fender makes some of the best sounding guitars on the planet, they really do. And these Road Worn guitars might sound like the very voice of god (meaning: Jimi Hendrix), but no self-respecting musician with any  kind of work ethic will buy these guitars. The dents are part of the work of playing in a band and if you don’t earn them, you don’t need them. Save your money, play the guitar you already have, and the dents and stuff will come. Trust me.

The Road Worn guitar will hopefully be the Crystal Pepsi of electric guitars, but I have a feeling they’ll do pretty well. There’s a certain would-be rocker segment of our population that is going to go ga-ga for this synthetic piece of rock history (they’re the same people who think Dan Brown is “deep,” drink Bud Light from buckets of ice at Happy Hour, and shell out big-time Pay-Per-View dollars every time there’s an Ultimate Fighting Championship match. In short, assholes) and it’ll probably sell like fucking hotcakes for a while.

Psst… you want a real road-worn guitar? I’ll build you a Pete Townshend model from his heyday. It’ll be a box of broken wood and strings and maybe a couple of volume knobs. That’ll be $5000.