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.

This Emo is Airborne

When I tell people that they should get off their asses and read Underworld and White Noise, I shit you not, the response I typically get is a frown and a question: “Oh. Is that the book that inspired the movie?” And part of me dies. Underworld, the only one that exists in my world anyway, is an amazing novel by Don DeLillo, a man whose literary gifts are unsurpassed. Literally every page of that book is a treat to read. Apparently, there is a horrid movie about werewolves or something that shares a title with DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece but anyone who knows me (or has talked to me for five minutes) knows I’d never tell you to read a book that could inspire such awfulness.

I get the same question about White Noise (awful Michael Keaton movie where he hears dead people). White Noise is another great DeLillo novel which prominently features an airborne toxic event but is not about that event.

Say you’re a band from L.A., one of music’s biggest talent vacuums (people here still care about Axl Rose and Motley Crue), and you glance through White Noise. I know what you’re thinking: “Dude! The Airborne Toxic Event would be a hella tight name for a band! We can give props to a good writer and let our listeners know that we know how to read!” So you name your band The Airborne Toxic Event.

The Airborne Toxic Event did grab my interest, but understand something here: if you name your band after anything written by one of my favorite authors, you had better be fucking amazing (if any band names themselves after something out of Kurt Vonnegut, they have to be Hold Steady awesome to impress me). It is not enough to me that you can prove you flipped through a book – your band’s awesomeness has to be directly proportional to the awesomeness of the book you’re ripping off.

From DeLillo’s White Noise: “Murray said, ‘I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostaliga, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.’”

Do you think, dear six people who read this, that there is anything even close to that awesome on The Airborne Toxic Event’s debut album? Not even close. Mikel Jollet is the smokey baritone who bleats out the songs – at his best, he sounds like Matt Berninger and makes me want to listen to The National and at his worst, he sounds like an emo version of Mike Ness and makes me want to punch him in the balls.

The Airborne Toxic Event, to be fair, is not a horrible album. But is by no means good. When Jollet screams “I’m such a bore” on “Happiness is Overrated” (that song title should warn you what you’re in for), I’m quite inclined to agree with him. You’ve heard this album before – the best bits and the worst. The best bits are The Arcade Fire meets Tapes ‘n’ Tapes and the worst bits are The Plain White T’s meets every other emo band on the planet.  Let’s do an experiment: listen to the first minute of “Wishing Well” from The Airborne Toxic Event and then listen to the first minute of “Neighborhood #1″ from The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Now multiply the feeling you get by 10 (the number of tracks on The Airborne Toxic Event). The feeling you end up with should tell you exactly how you’ll feel about The Airborne Toxic Event as a band. They’re sort  of a perfection of mediocrity, the sort of thing that L.A. would mistake for greatness (Los Angeles is also home to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that should just fucking stop… right… now.). They’ve even managed to trick a few reviewers here and there, but there is not a single track on this album that doesn’t make me wish I was listening to a band with a better singer (like The National) and/or a better lyricist (The Arcade Fire, The National, Okkervil River, and I could go on ad infinitum.) And repeated listens to The Airborne Toxic Event reveal something even more sinister – this music is emo, turned down and diluted by the Arcade Fire influence, but it’s emo none the less. I’m sure Mr. Jollet wants to tell you he’s inhabiting the characters of his songs or whatever, but take a lesson from Matt Berninger (does Mr. Berninger have the best voice in music right now? I think he might) – there’s no emo-quiver when Berninger sings “I leaned on the wall/ the wall leaned away”. His wariness is unfaked and unflinching, which is why he doesn’t need to scream very often (although, when he does, as on “Abel” and “Mr. November,” it’s pretty goddamn impressive).

Do you know what Mumblecore is? It’s this new movie genre (I guess) that likes to depict teenagers discussing somewhat deep things and bemoaning their lackluster love lives. It shoots for a superficial depth, the sort of thing that appeals to people who are blown away by books like The Four Agreements and who have read only one poet: Robert fucking Frost. The Airborne Toxic Event is like a mumblecore band (although they don’t mumble that much) – it’s a sort of safe poetry for people who can’t get far enough below the surface to crack open Boxer (best album of 2007) or read John Berryman. Every track on The Airborne Toxic Event screams “Trying too hard,” and its prepackaged pensiveness torpedoes any chance its (half-way) decent musicians have to propel the album in any really interesting direction. It’s the risk you run, naming your band after something awesome by an awesome writer: you’ve instantly asked yourself to be compared to that writer and when that writer is Don DeLillo, you’re bound to be found wanting.

We Are Our Only Saviors

Over the course of their career, The Hold Steady have been given half-assed titles like, “America’s best bar band,” or “America’s best party band,” or whatever. But let’s not mince words, kids (instead, mince some garlic, toss it in a bowl with some chili powder and black pepper. Your tuna steaks should’ve been soaking in tequila and lime juice for a few hours; go ahead and dip them in the dry mixture and then pan fry on medium heat until the tuna flakes easily with a fork. Serve over a salad of black beans, cheese, tomato, lettuce, and avocado. Goes down nicely with a cold pale ale): The Hold Steady are the best rock band there is right now. Bar none. You can have your Chemical Romances and your Panics at the Disco, you can sell your organs on the black market to get Rolling Stones tickets (“Sure, I’ll pay four months’ rent to see corpses on stage! They’re legendary corpses!”), you can get high enough to dream that 1)Axl Rose will ever actually release Chinese Democracy and 2) it will be any kind of listenable, but you’d be throwing shit at a wall and waiting for it to stick. The Hold Steady are the real deal.

Consider: Stay Positive was supposed to drop July 15th. Sometime in June, it got leaked to the internet (like everything eventually does), and what did the band do? Did they throw a Metallica-style fit and make asinine claims about how they don’t make music for their fans? No. They put the whole fucking album up on their MySpace page, put the album out early on iTunes (youTunes, actually; I don’t), and then slapped three bonus tracks on the hard release, not least of which is “Ask Her for Adderall.” Because, as Mr. Finn says on “Stay Positive”: “We couldn’t even have done this if it wasn’t for you”. I’ve seen these dudes live three times and every time, they say thanks to us, the little folks, for giving them the coolest job in the world. The Hold Steady doesn’t have time for websites about how they saved your life – they’re too busy kicking your ass with the best rock music available anywhere.

From Almost Killed Me to Stay Positive, The Hold Steady have bested themselves, tightened their sound, added more instrumental flourishes, et cetera. The time was gonna come when Craig Finn was gonna have to learn to sing or destroy his voice (which should be listed as “baritone sax” on their first 3 records). So he took some voice lessons between Boys and Girls In America and the new album. The band is tighter than ever (Tad Kubler may be our last true guitar hero) and they’ve added some nice textures (horns on “Sequestered in Memphis”, a harpsichord on “One for the Cutters,” and J. Mascis playing banjo on “Both Crosses”) to back up Finn’s working-class poetry.  Stay Positive opens with my new obsession, “Constructive Summer,” which continues the Hold Steady’s tradition of opening the fuck out of an album and ups the ante considerably with lines like “Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer/ I think he might have been our only decent teacher/getting older makes it harder to remember/ we are our only saviors/ we’re gonna build something this summer.” It’s a blue-collar anthem (“me and my friends are like/ the drums on ‘Lust for Life’/ we pound it out on floor toms/ our psalms are sing-along songs”) that eats the lunch of every Springsteen song ever. I cannot listen to Stay Positive without listening to “Constructive Summer” twice every single time.

I could bore you with the track by track, but you already know I fucking love this record. It turns all of The Hold Steady’s previous tricks up to 11 – sing-along choruses, big guitar riffs, pounding drums, and Craig Finn’s raspy-assed poetry on every track. Stay Positive features, I think, some of Finn’s best writing. Take “One for the Cutters,” for instance: a sprawling epic (for a Hold Steady song) about the dangers of partying with townies, Finn pencils in every detail with verve (“one drop of blood on immaculate Keds,” is a line worthy of Tom Waits). There’s humor and hope and hopelessness all bound up in the 14 songs that make up Stay Positive. Finn is also one of a handful of songwriters who can use religious imagery without being a cloying, pretentious twat. “I met your savior/ I knelt at his feet/ he took my ten bucks/ and he went down the street” (from “Constructive Summer” – see? it’s fucking awesome!). On “Lord I’m Discouraged,” Finn talks about praying that his junkie girlfriend doesn’t die, but he’s getting the feeling that maybe no one’s hearing the prayer because she keeps “coming up with/ excuses and half-truths/ and fortified wine”. “Both Crosses” details the crucifixion of Jeebus through a woman’s visions – “she saw the footage right before it got cut.” “Both Crosses” describes the violence of crucifixion, the exploitation that followed (“Baby, that’s how we get energized”), and humanizes a story that some folks tend to see in very starry-eyed terms. Jesus, if he was a real dude, suffered a horrible death (on a day some people actually refer to as “Good Friday” without a trace of irony) – as did many other folks at the time (the Romans were big on crucifixion). If the story won’t save you, what will? Finn suggests that you have to save yourself, but he has also suggested, since the band’s inception on Almost Killed Me,  that rock ‘n’ roll can help.

All in all, Stay Positive is a love letter to rock music and to The Hold Steady’s fans – like all Hold Steady albums, it’s a great disc to crank up while you’re driving anywhere with the windows down during the summer. Or when you’re having friends over for a beer or five. In any case, it’s The Hold Steady’s best album yet and a true rock accomplishment in an age of emo and pop-punk posers. If someone is going to release a better rock album than Stay Positive, they’d better get to work – the gauntlet has been thrown down by The Hold Steady. While Craig Finn and company are raising a toast to St. Joe Strummer, they can rest assured that somewhere, perhaps from a corner booth at The Afterlife Bar & Grill, he’s raising a pint right back at them.

Am I Too Happy to Like Death Cab For Cutie?

If you were single and bummin’ even slightly when Death Cab for Cutie released Transatlanticism in 2003 (is that the right year? I don’t care), you probably got a bit of a thrill out of hearing Ben Gibbard sullenly sing, “So this is the new year/ And I don’t feel any different.” And if you liked good music at all when Death Cab released Plans in 2006 (and the incomprehensible single “Soul Meets Body” along with it – ugh), you probably went home and gave Transatlanticism another couple of spins.

My friend Zac has opined to me on many an occasion that now that he’s in a happy, long-term, committed relationship, he just has no need to listen to Death Cab for Cutie. I can see his point – I don’t really listen to their good old stuff anymore, despite the fact that I know the music is good. I certainly never consciously reached a decision: “Wow. I’m satisfied enough with my romantic situation that I will no longer listen to Death Cab for Cutie.” It didn’t help that Plans, Death Cab’s major-label debut, was a phoned in affair with one of the worst radio singles ever. I didn’t need Plans to serve the same purpose that Transatlanticism did (and Transatlanticism is one of my all-time lonely-guy albums) so I could look at it for the music without having to ride any emotional ebbs and flows that might come along with it. Good thing, too. Apart from “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (great song, dumb premise), there’s not much to remember about Plans.

So when I found out that Narrow Stairs was coming from Gibbard and company this year, I really had to wonder if I was going to bother with the thing. I heard that their first single was 8 minutes long and I was actually encouraged by this – Plans was a safe record, way too safe. The fact that Death Cab was leading off with an 8 minute single (their longest song ever for those of you keeping score at home) signaled to me that they may have gotten some of their balls back. Early Death Cab (listen to it) is a quirky affair; Plans was a Coldplay album. Narrow Stairs doesn’t completely undo the adult contemporary feel of Plans but it’s not the tepid listen that Plans was either.

So let’s talk about that 8 minute single, “I Will Possess Your Heart.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that this song, should it become a hit (is it a hit? I don’t listen to the radio), will join R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” (not a love song) and “Losing My Religion” (not about religion) as one of the most misunderstood hits in the history of modern radio. It’s a stalker anthem, building around a menacing bass-line and sung by Gibbard in a cold, detached, “I’ve got something for you in my van, little girl” kind of way. I’m serious, ladies – if a dude calls your local top 40 station and dedicates this song to you, fucking run.

The rest of Narrow Stairs is leaner than “I Will Possess Your Heart,” and reflects the fact that for this album, Death Cab tried to record as much as possible as a live and entire band. It’s a good way to go and the music thrives because of it. I’m not really gonna go into a whole track-by-track thing because it’s a Death Cab album and the songs are all about love and death and empty beds and et cetera. You know, the shit that kid on The OC was all about or whatever.

Narrow Stairs is Death Cab for Cutie realizing that they can be the same band on a big label and it’s an enjoyable listen, which I actually did not expect. I’m not even going to bother with the new Coldplay album but I will arbitrarily declare Narrow Stairs better than it. So there!