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 Is Where It Gets Bad: A Clinical Examination of Eels’ Tomorrow Morning

Hey everyone. I’m busy getting ready for a Thanksgiving road trip to Oregon, so updates are going to be spotty this week. However, I’ve been listening to the new Eels record, Tomorrow Morning, a lot lately and I remembered that when I reviewed Hombre Lobo, I said I only needed to listen to Eels records to see how Mark Everett is doing. Tomorrow Morning isn’t a good album, but it sounds like Everett is a pretty happy guy at the moment. I don’t have time to break it down for you, but my musical pathologist friend, Dr. Rebecca Mellor, does (musical pathology is a fairly new field and she spends a lot of her time playing Tetris on her MacBook). So below is her expert opinion on the new Eels album and what it means for Mr. Mark “E” Everett. Enjoy! (Note: I might get one or two more updates in this week, but don’t hold your breath.)

Hello. Apparently, Mr. Chorpenning thinks I do not read his introductions. Although I am quite busy running a study that tests the ability of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to influence the size and flavor of beefsteak tomatoes (we have not published our results yet, but I can tell you they are mostly large and delicious), I am also quite fascinated by artists whose music seems to decline in quality as their personal lives improve.

There is ample evidence that Mark Everett’s life has been filled with emotional trials and, in the early part of his career, he turned those trials into anthems of hard-won optimism (“Last Stop: This Town” is a particularly edifying example). Experts in my field (and I hope you will not think me immodest for saying that I am foremost among those experts) agree that Mr. Everett reached his musical peak with 2000′s Daisies of the Galaxy. Over the last ten years, he has wavered in quality from bad to pretty good.

On his last album, End Times, Everett sang of a cataclysmic break-up. He followed End Times only a few months later with Tomorrow Morning, an album of almost unyielding optimism. It is clear from the content of this new album that Mr. Everett has replaced the flood-bringing girl of End Times with someone new – a “Spectacular Girl,” by Everett’s own account. If I may indulge myself slightly by quoting the film Gloomy Sunday (a mildly melodramatic, but otherwise well-done fictionalization of the creation of one of the most depressing songs ever written): “apres le deluge, nous.”

Everett’s new love is placed on a pedestal almost immediately; her love, coming so soon on the heels of his last relationship, inspires him to sing that she loves him and “is smarter than you”. Elsewhere, he says that he is “the Man” which may betray delusions of grandeur, although I take it to be an attempt to convey that “on top of the world” feeling that we experience when we fall in love. Mr. Chorpenning has suggested that this is a good time to point out to Bollocks! readers that I am single. Personally, I do not see how that is relevant to our current discussion.

As a psychologist (I double-majored), I am concerned about the rapidity with which Mr. Everett has recovered from what was, according to the evidence, a profoundly difficult breakup. However, as a musical pathologist (which is the capacity in which I am currently writing – I do try to stay on task), I am more interested in the fact that Tomorrow Morning is almost uniformly bland where it is not cringe-inducingly awful. “Baby Loves Me” falls into the latter category and “Spectacular Girl” barely misses it. No serious person believes (do they?) that you have to be miserable to make brilliant music. Matt Berninger, the lyricist for the National, is a happily married father; yet, he writes mopey anthems like “Terrible Love.” And, he has written one of the best break-up songs of this young century (“Runaway”).

No, Mr. Everett’s problem is how eager he is to pour his happiness into the ears of his listeners. Sometimes, when we are striving for simple honesty, we end up with too much of the former which makes it hard for music fans to care much about the latter. Tom Waits lies about himself constantly and many of his songs are simply stories of people who have fallen by the wayside in life; but if you cannot identify the emotional honesty of his work, you need to schedule an appointment with me immediately (you can reach me by email at askdoctormellor@gmail.com). On Tomorrow Morning, Everett’s lyrics are forgettably direct – they are equivalent to a character loudly declaring, “I’m happy” instead of smiling, which would show us that they are, in fact, happy. You would not want to watch a film where the characters run around monotonously declaring their feelings but Tomorrow Morning is an all-too-appropriate soundtrack for just such a film.

You would have to be a sociopath to ask a musician to sacrifice personal happiness to make better music and I honestly hope that Mark Everett’s “Spectacular Girl” sticks around, even if it means that Eels will never be good again. Perhaps, as the relationship matures, Mr. Everett will find less declarative ways of conveying his happiness instead of verbalizing his diary over the same bland beats over and over again. This is purely speculative, but I am assured speculation (“the wilder, the better,” according to Mr. Chorpenning) is acceptable on Bollocks!, even if it is not accepted in the scientific community.

Perhaps a study is order: it seems harder than it has ever been to write decent, happy love songs (Tom Waits’s “Picture in a Frame,” which was written for his wife and songwriting partner, Kathleen Brennan, is one of the best love songs of the last twenty years. Along with “Do You Realize?” by the Flaming Lips and “I’ll Believe in Anything” by Wolf Parade) and while some artists can live happy lives and write compelling sad songs, there seems to be a general lack of artists who can turn their personal happiness into proportionally happy (and good) songs. Tomorrow Morning seems to prove fairly conclusively that Mark Everett fits all too well into this last category.

Rebecca Mellor is a musical pathologist and macramé enthusiast who will not reveal whether or not she is related, even tangentially, to a certain punk rock icon. She only uses contractions when she’s been drinking and only drinks when she’s hanging out with the Bollocks! staff. As the official musical pathologist of the Bollocks! music blog, Ms. Mellor is available to our readers to answer pressing musical health questions. Email her at askdoctormellor@gmail.com.