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 Worst of 2009

Well, I’m back after a restful week in Seattle and it seems to be that wonderful time of the year when everyone arbitrarily quantifies all their favorite whatevers – I’m not immune to such behavior. But before I tell you what I thought was so great about 2009, I wish to – in the interest of balance, of course – point out the very worst that 2009 had to offer. I’m limiting this to music because, if you expand the Worst of 2009 list to, say, news stories, you can get depressed fast. I should hope the image of a vomiting clown suggests we’re here to have a good time.  So, without further et cetera:

Worst song of 2009: “Desolation Row” (Bob Dylan cover) by My Chemical Romance. Now, I didn’t like the new Bob Dylan album. I do, however, enjoy much of his early work. It just so happens that “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61 Revisited, is my very favorite Bob Dylan tune. Of all time. When I heard that My Chemical Blowmance was going to cover the song for the Watchmen soundtrack, I knew it was going to be bad. I just had no idea how bad. This band truly pioneers shittyness. Fortunately, My Chemical Toilet didn’t bother to cover all 11 minutes of the original. Still, they put together a painfully awful three minutes. I was doing pretty well at ignoring MCR’s evil up to this point. But now, I want them destroyed. Fuck this band.

Worst album of 2009: Scream by Chris Cornell. I should think this is unsurprising to Bollocks! readers. Scream was a perfect storm of really bad ideas (Timbalind producing a dance-pop record by a grunge icon? I thought there were laws against shit like this) and, somehow, the whole manages to be far worse than the sum of its parts. Cornell has been slipping since Soundgarden broke up (I know, that’s putting it mildly), but Scream was the point where I completely lost my faith in the man. With dull, misogynist hooks like “No, that bitch ain’t a part of me,” and vocal performances that could charitably be described as “lackluster”, Scream is terrible enough to be a dark horse candidate for worst album of the decade.

Worst person of 2009: Chris Brown. Oh, I know. He apologized and he wants our forgiveness and wants us to buy his terrible new album, but I don’t feel like letting him off the hook just yet and here’s why: I was able look the other way while Brown became an inexplicably famous adolescent pop star with a swimming pool full of money and a stunning girlfriend. It happens all the time in this country and I don’t begrudge Brown his success, up to the point where, in a sports car that costs more than I make in a year, he smacked around said stunning girlfriend. You don’t get to be an inexplicably famous pop star and an abusive cocksucker, Chris Brown. Fuck you. If you want my forgiveness, here’s what you can do: purchase a Yugo, four bottles of Old English, drive out somewhere in the hills, drink the malt liquor, and then beat the shit out of yourself. You do that, and I’ll run out and buy your shitty new record. I promise.

Worst Live Act of 2009: Ghostland Observatory. I saw these assholes open for the Flaming Lips. They looked like a Ren Fair crashed into a Star Trek convention and sounded like a sack of kittens and a laptop in an industrial-sized blender. At first, I thought this was some kind of Andy Kaufman thing where they were fucking with my perception of what a “good” band should be. But then I realized that no, they’re just no-talent ass-clowns with a pretty good light show.

Most Pathetic Comeback of 2009: Creed. Hey, even Jesus hates these guys. And his word is Gospel.

Worst New Band of 2009 (and Possibly of All Time): Wavves. I guess they’re not technically “new,” because they put something out last year too. But I just wanted to take another opportunity to point out that Wavves is a god-fucking-awful band. How awful? I shit you not, I’d rather listen to My Chemical Blowmance’s Black Parade album at top volume while Gerard Way bad-touches me and reads aloud from the My Chemical Romance Saved My Life Site than listen to Wavves even one more time. If I’ve already doled out a “Fuck this band” to Way’s MCR, I reserve the (much more severe) Triple Dog-Fuck This Band for Wavves. No… Quadruple Dog-Fuck This Band.

Worst Record Label: EMI. And Sextuple Dog-Fuck EMI for not putting out Dark Night of the Soul. It’s ironic to me that labels often assume you would buy an album that you downloaded if you couldn’t get it for free. This is definitely not always the case. But, with Dark Night of the Soul, EMI is putting me in the position of having to steal an album for which I would gladly have paid. Way to keep the kids from getting what they want, EMI.

That’s about the worst stuff I can think of for this year. Later this week (starting tomorrowish – we don’t have hard and fast schedules here at Bollocks!), I’ll tell you some of my favorite songs of the year and 13 of my favorite albums.