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.

An Increasingly Not-Brief History of Awesome American Music Pt. 6: Here We are Now, Something Something

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way now: depending on what you choose to believe, Nirvana either did or did not kill hair metal. Sadly, hair metal is still alive and well here in Los Angeles, so they obviously didn’t nip the thing the bud. But once you get away from all the hyperbole, both from their ardent supporters and their snarkiest detractors, the fact remains that Nirvana made some damn good music – blending pop and punk in a way that was awesome, as opposed to the way Blink-182 does it (which is terrible). They only made three proper albums, all of them of sufficient quality to warrant their reputation – and Kurt Cobain made time to write the first Hole record for his lovely wife. You could argue that Cobain killed himself before Nirvana had a chance to nosedive like, say, the Foo Fighters have since the 1990s, but that’s all hypothetical. The defense offers three key pieces of evidence for their awesomeness: Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero. You can throw in the Unplugged album too, if only for its dogged to only play soft-rock versions of their hits.

While alternative rock was taking off in the early 1990s, a couple young dudes from Illinois named Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy were blending their favorite country and folk sounds with the punk stylings of the Minutemen. Their band was called Uncle Tupelo and they’re largely credited with giving birth to “alternative country” music, or “alt.country” as it is more retardedly known. To the band’s credit, nobody who played in Uncle Tupelo thinks they invented alt.country, and Jay Farrar has helpfully pointed out that there was no difference between what Uncle Tupelo did and what is commonly referred to as roots rock. Whatever you call it, their debut album, No Depression (and the three that followed it), is a whirlwind of ramshackle excellence. The band broke up because of conflicts (personal and creative) between Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. Farrar went on to form Son Volt, whose debut, Trace, is a lost treasure of the 1990s. Tweedy went on to form a band you might’ve heard of named Wilco, although his ability to get along with guys named Jay never really improved – he kicked guitarist Jay Bennett out of Wilco shortly before the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The thing about 1990s rock is that a lot of us still know the bands that were worth knowing and hopefully we’ve forgotten the ones that are forgettable. A band you might’ve forgotten (or never known in the first place) that was heavy, loud, and totally underrated, was Hum, another Illinois band that quietly dropped a  hit into the middle of alternative rock radio in 1995 with a little song called, “Stars.” The song has been featured in Cadillac commercials and, even better, in the video game Saints Row 2. But Hum don’t deserve to be considered one-hit wonders. You’d Prefer an Astronaut, the album that gave us “Stars” is one of the only down-tuned guitar albums I can tolerate. The music is murky, heavy, and melodic in a subtle sort of way. Sadly, you can probably find You’d Prefer an Astronaut in the 99 cent bin at your local used CD store, but that should give you the perfect excuse to pick up a copy. I know these guys didn’t ever make music history per se, but they’re worth knowing about and, like all popular historians, I’m perfectly willing to only tell you what I want you to know.

I know I’ve mentioned Tom Waits before, but I just wanna point out that he won two Grammies in the 1990s. Although Mr. Waits and I share a low opinion of that particular awards show, it’s worth noting that Tom Waits is the only guy to win a Grammy for Best Alternative Rock Album (for Bone Machine) and then win one for Best Contemporary Folk Album (for 1999′s amazing Mule Variations, which was my introduction to Waits).

Also, I should mention briefly that the Smashing Pumpkins were awesome throughout the 1990s, crafting some of the heaviest guitar tunes of the decade, including “Bury Me” and “Cherub Rock,” which rivals “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for album-opening awesomeness. I pretend that Billy Corgan quit music after the pretentiously-named (but still good) Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s just easier that way.

A band that probably should have blown the lid off the 1990s entirely (I still don’t understand why In the Aeroplane Over the Sea isn’t in the Smithsonian or something) is Neutral Milk Hotel, led by the reclusive (to say the least) Jeff Mangum. Part of the Elephant 6 Recording Company that spawned the Olivia Tremor Control and the Apples in Stereo (obscure enough for you?), Neutral Milk Hotel only ever released two full-length albums that were driven by Mangum’s nasally  yowl and often surreal lyrics. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, inspired by recurring dreams Mangum had about a Jewish family during World War 2 (some of the songs make reference to Anne Frank’s life; some songs make references to semen staining the mountaintops. That’s just how Mangum rolls), met with increasing critical praise that led to an ever-lengthening tour schedule which, naturally, led Jeff Mangum to have a nervous breakdown that forced Neutral Milk Hotel into a hiatus that continues to this day. Nowadays, Mangum is seen in public slightly less than Bigfoot, although he has appeared on a couple of tribute/charity albums in the last couple years, which keeps the hopes of a new Neutral Milk Hotel album burning bright for the optimists out there. Me, I think it’ll never happen. And part of me hopes not. At this point, any follow-up to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea will be expected to be the musical equivalent of endless orgasms brought on by the second coming of Christ during a hail storm of Milk Duds. Call me jaded, but there’s no way the next Neutral Milk Hotel album can be as good as we all think it will be. Although I welcome Jeff Mangum to come out of the woodwork and prove me wrong.

When can we talk about the Flaming Lips? In the early 1990s, they had a big radio hit called “She Don’t Use Jelly”, from Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, which is an underrated album as well (“Be My Head” is a tremendous song). The band actually got their start in the 1980s in Oklahoma but the 1990s saw them really get their shit together in a big way. Following the awesome four-disc social experiment Zaireeka, the Lips released the best album of the 1990s (sorry, Nirvana fans), The Soft Bulletin, in 1999. The best compliment I can give an album like The Soft Bulletin is to say I’ve never heard anything like it. Because I haven’t. And you haven’t either. The Flaming Lips are as weird as they’ve ever been, and they’re still going strong – last year’s Embryonic is a kickass rock record and they put on one of the all-time coolest concerts I’ve ever seen.

That’s about it for the 1990s, I think. That pretty much catches us up to Modern Times, so I’ll conclude this increasingly not-brief history of awesome American music tomorrow by cluing you in on some stuff you might’ve missed in the last ten years. I won’t make any predictions about the future, though, ’cause that shit is always whack.