TK,
I ran across this piece by Sean Beaudoin at Salon.com. It’s a list of the bands he will be forced to listen to in hell:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/11/the_ten_bands_i_will_be_forced_to_listen_to_in_hell_salpart/
Top ten lists are nothing new—but there was something a little different about this one. Beaudoin just seems to center on the bands/artists he despises the most from a gut instinct. I can empathize with this. I have trouble articulating why I hate certain bands, but I can’t deny my gut instinct, not just my desire but my need, to stuff Billy Joel’s head in a vise and twist the crank.
Thought this piece might be a good jumping off point for you to create a similar list. The world needs your sage observations!
1. Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits—a two-time fag-baiter on record, a serial Fashion Police violator (think thick, white terrycloth headbands from The Jennifer Beals Collection!), an electric guitarist of monumentally self-regarding, fingerpicked somnambulism at all times, and the leader of the All-Time Out of Time Throwback Anachronism Quartet, who played their brand of deeply unspecial, Dylanesque Boogie Lite alongside actually vibrant Pub Rock and Punk bands at London’s Hope & Anchor Pub whilst they were coming up, before waving the dismissive hand of musicianly condescension at Everything New the moment their debut album went Gold in 1978! By the time they were playing stadia a few years hence, MK had perfected his ultimate shtick: The playing of two or three garden variety bent notes in the midst of gauzy, 15-minute Navel Gaze Epics, then standing back to bask in the adulation of thousands of equally-delusional fans of what might as well have been called The New Adult Contemporary. A pox on their invidious legacy, such as it is! More like “Sultans of Sludge”.
2. Crosby, Stills & Nash (including all “spin-off” permutations!)—was there ever a worse batch of hypocrite coke-fiend millionaires who gave Hippiedom such an awful bad name? To say that their “trademark”, pointlessly fussy harmonies could kill lab rats at even moderate volume is to state the obvious, and the fact that Neil Young was able to write both the subsequent CSNY’s great songs (“Ohio” and “Helpless”, for those mercifully too young to remember) on a long coffee break from Crazy Horse in 1970 speaks volumes. These three guys still hate each other for stealing away Joni Mitchell in turn that same year, and pioneered the concept of separate dressing rooms for each member of a band, in addition to treating their rhythm section like household help, as opposed to bandmates! The fact that they’ve never released a wholly-listenable (much less actually good!) album during 43 years of intermittent product creation, jointly or solo, should stand as the ultimate indictment of these burnt out fools, each of whom left or was booted from a notably superior band (The Byrds, The Buffalo Springfield, and The Hollies, respectively) and then dared to bill themselves as “The American Beatles”. Never was more fellatory ink/hype wasted on a band that promised so much and delivered so damned little!
3. Paul McCartney (post-1973)—once a towering talent, or at least an inarguably impressive one, so long as his teenage chum John Lennon was on hand to veto and/or edit his worst ideas, the early solo Paul was at least moderately tuneful, and on “Jet” and “Let Me Roll It”, downright anthemic, not to mention reasonably clever! But next year marks Year Forty in an unprecedented campaign of offhanded musical FLUFF and laughably inane lyrical embarrassment being presented to The Masses as the work of a Genius. Frankly, one struggles to decide where to begin in assessing the damage, as the commercial success of Wings practically equaled that of Sir Paul’ s “first group”. It’s a shame, actually, that Daevid Allen’s Gong coined the term “Pothead Pixies” first, because that at least begins to get to the heart of the matter, which is that a man reared on Little Richard and Buddy Holly, who was nearly-half of the great songwriting team of The Sixties, an excellent proto-metalist (“Helter Skelter”) and an ardent early adherent/adopter of Reggae and Soul rhythms, and a uniquely talented bass player and vocalist, could fling product at the proverbial wall for DECADES and have nothing stick, a few lovely jingles (“Listen to What the Man Said”, “With a Little Luck”) and a heartfelt album (1999’s Run Devil Run) of old rockabilly covers in memory of his late wife, aside. George Martin once noted that his boys had been granted “a license to kill, so to speak” when EMI opened up their wallets to finance Sergeant Pepper. And it’s downright criminal that someone with this much opportunity has accomplished so little yet assumes so many airs. How and why do people keep buying this tripe?!
4. Jackson Browne—a touchy, deeply pompous Malibu denizen, ol’ Jackson was once a teenaged contender, back in Warhol/Velvet Underground days when he wrote several fine songs for Chelsea Girl, the debut album by his then-girlfriend Nico. And he did champion his vastly superior pal Warren Zevon right from the git! But 40 years as a solo artiste have yielded little more than a boatload of allegedly-poetic navel gaze, and—aside from a cut or two on Running on Empty and “The Boulevard”, his one stab at actual rockin’—his samey, acoustified songsmithery has likely induced more nod-offs than Sominex itself! If his politics weren’t so reliably SoCal Lefty, I can’t imagine not wanting him to cease and desist altogether, but even so, his prickly pretensions could almost make you want to bomb a small Central American country all by their self-righteous lonesome. Sandals kill the mind, apparently! As must center-parted haircuts, given sufficient time.
5. Sting (solo)—once the writer of singles so distinctive, so immediately memorable, and so catchily inventive that he eventually owned the pop charts and headlined Shea Stadium during The Summer of Thriller, the former Mr. Gordon Sumner became an unbearably pretentious jazziste twiddler/composer of earnest, occasionally “political” (retain those quotes, please) pabulum, once his solo career took off into the Adult Contempo stratosphere. The sheer, supposedly “jazzy”, characterlessness of his later hits was hugely dispiriting, and I’d unquestionably rather listen to the contemporaneous output of Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, or even Steve Winwood, if someone were to point a heater at my temple and force me to choose one of them or The Best of Sting! And for the handsome singer-songwriter who gave us “So Lonely”, “Roxanne”, “Walking on the Moon”, “Message in a Bottle”, and “Invisible Sun” to fall that far was a truly (every) breathtaking inverse-accomplishment. Eventually, he resorted to smugly blathering on about his “Tantric” sex life wit’ the missus, and even a Police reunion, which proved nothing more than that he’d broken up his band at least one album early, and that they (still) hated their leader!
6. Michael McDonald/late-Doobie Brothers—I had a boss a few years back who once asked whether I might like to buy a pair of REO Speedwagon/Styx concert tickets from him (for full face value, natch!). He was later escorted from our campus by burly security staff with one hour’s notice, for having spent nearly his entire career pursuing Internet Poker and shirking his few duties. Anyhow, I once loaned said boss a 2cd collection of High Sixties Motown. When he returned it he insisted that I borrow an album he “liked even better”, the infamous, chart topping 2003 LP, Motown, by The California Silver Fox! Even for a Sludge merchant like me this was very rough sledding, or rather, so appallingly smooth and featureless as to induce spontaneous coma, at least whenever it wasn’t making me wish his Platinum-selling larynx could be removed via BLOWTORCH! Of course my antipathies to MM had much deeper roots, from back when he made his move from mere Steely Dan sideperson to de facto leader of The Doobies. Not that said mindless boogie-ists were ever any great shakes of course, not even when they unleashed their shamelessly incoherent stadium rocker, 1973’s “China Grove”. But at least their pre-McDonald vocalists managed to avoid entirely filling their mouths with marbles before entering the studio! The mushy unintelligibility of his much-acclaimed megahit “What a Fool Believes” (phonetic translation of its opening line: “Huh cay fruh suh wuh bokkih thuh lohhn aguh…”, which allegedly equals “He came from somewhere back in the long ago…”!) is emblematic of Mister Mellow’s great shtick/tic, which is the patent refusal of enunciation, as supposed proof of deeply-soulful FEELING, or somesuch shite! It’s bad enough when your first mansion comes from mangling top shelf Kenny Loggins material, but to render Peak Motown unlistenable requires the dubious gift of a sensibility utterly oblivious to the strengths of any song worth covering. Ultimately, I just thank Jehovah that I was never exposed to McDonald’s subsequent Motown 2 and Soul Speak, as I really have no stomach for the invidious comparisons with late-Eighties Michael Bolton they would have engendered!
7. Natalie Merchant/10,000 Maniacs—perhaps it’s a tad cruel to single out these timid/tepid Eighties folk-rockers from Upstate New York, particularly since they never rose to the top of anything more ubiquitous than the College Radio charts, but I have a special loathing for what I’ll call The Affected Twee, so here goes. Miz Merchant is likely no worse an artist/influence than her beloved Cat Stevens, whose insipid “Peace Train” she rode to modest prominence during the second half of The Reagan/Stipe Decade. But there was always about her something of the exquisitely passive-aggressive high school poetess—sternly judgmental to the point of mania; hippy-dippy and positively hooked on the language of gauzy non-specificity, as though thoroughly convinced that NO ONE could possibly understand what she’d been through and that it was up to us to figure it out; and terminally a Big Fish in the Small, thoroughly Insignif, Pond of radio formats (Seattle’s “The Mountain” comes to mind) wherein Bruce Hornsby and Sarah McLachlan were Artists for the Ages. One anecdote can probably stand in for all her simpering, (allegedly) well-meaning music: A friend of a friend once volunteered at the Virginia stop on one of the Lollapalooza tours, an occasion at which Our Nat played beard/buddy to one M. Stipe, and held court as though they were Nico and Brian Jones at Monterey Pop. Anyhow, at some point Dear Natalie tossed a conniption fit when her supply of precious Evian bottled water briefly ran out, and treated said friend’s friend as if she were some trifling moron. Rather than waste time finding another pristine plastic bottle of the then-Politically Correct “real thing”, she instead went over to the nearest trusty, rusty garden hose and filled ’er up. Miz Merchant was more conciliatory from then on, and happily sipped away at her “pure” spring water simulacrum! Such ado about nothing just about sums her up. As does her hopelessly random, twirly-bird “dawwwnnncing”, definitely best experienced with the sound off!
8. Colin Meloy/The Decemberists—in forty-plus years of following The World of Pop Music, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never encountered an artiste of such stupefying pretension as my fellow ex-Montanan, Mister Meloy! This pains me greatly, as I’d always hoped that the first famous singer-songwriter/bon vivant from The Treasure State would evince at least some li’l bit of “edge”, as they say, particularly given the rough and ready legacy of Montana-based Punk and Postpunk that long preceded Young Colin’s elevation to the Top 40. Whether playing dress-up (as The Band circa 1968…in 2006!), prancing across the TV stage in ill-fitting raiment on Austin City Limits, shrilly, affectedly pronouncing words of such dubiously anachronistic uselessness all over a shelf full of albums, or making dizzyingly silly pronouncements intended to indicate the “depth” of his intellect and discernment, Our Colin has rendered himself (via his snootily self-regarding pronouncements and vastly-too-vast output) perhaps the single greatest menace to finely-attuned ears since Ian Anderson’s early-Seventies “prime”. And without resorting to the constant deployment of a flute….thus far, at any rate!
9. The Red Hot Chili Peppers—to say that I’m indifferent to these vastly misbegotten California Punk Funkers would be too kind. Not only did they lobotomize and render mediocre-to-immensely-irritating the musical innovations of Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, The Ohio Players, Led Zeppelin, and many others, The Chilis also made the serial backstage humiliation/dehumanization of women so much washboard-stomached male sport. That their efforts at funk and groove were always affected, often spazzily inelegant, and ever-dunderheaded in the words department misled an entire MTV Generation into assuming that this was as good as it got! Of course there’s no accounting for stupidity of such magnitude, but once the belated, groaningly-punful Californication (1999) outsold even the limp likes of their 80s/90s high water marks, Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, I simply gave up on an entire subset of our species! Flea and Anthony were the “real” Beavis and Butt-head, though even once they “grew up” they lacked any semblance of their animated equivalents’ wit or intelligence.
10. The Grateful Dead (post-1973)—many years ago—whilst residing in Missoula, Montana, that very last outpost of The Sixties, from 1982-87—I forced myself to come to terms with the bizarrely-adored, lysergically-enhanced, eternally somnambulant Dead. Their recorded legacy, at any rate. And I found that said albums were perfectly consumable (if often less than outright compelling) right up through their (first!) triple live album, Europe ’72, though only very intermittently from thenceforth. In 2004 I saw the wonderful, absurdly-belated music documentary Festival Express, which lovingly captured an obscure Summer of 1970 Canadian railroad tour, featuring Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, The Dead, and several other luminaries of that time. The Dead’s three numbers (and a glorious, informal jam session on the tour train featuring Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and The Band’s Rick Danko) finally drove home the fact that—during an all-too-brief window in time, at least—they’d been a pretty great band! But let’s be frank….the sheer bulk of crappy records, dubious ideology, and gruesomely obnoxious audience of self-proclaimed “Deadheads” has made it all but impossible to feel anything aside from revulsion at the bulk of their output, at their myth, and at the stupendously awful legacy they’ve bequeathed to us via their musical influence (such as it is), on an army of truly heinous “jam bands”! That their devotees still invoke the band’s name as if some live tape from 1969 (or 1989, for that matter!) contains unequivocal evidence of The Dead’s position at The Vanguard of some kinda musical REVOLUTION just seems ludicrous, and has for decades. If the underlying commercial machinery that has spewed forth several HUNDRED (marginally) different live cds into the post-Jerry marketplace, not to mention entire lines of apparel and “lifestyle” bric-a-brac, would ever relent for a few years, perhaps it might (I said might) be possible and/or worthwhile to fairly reassess the legacy of a band which forever lacked a notably good singer, or any sense of its own limitations, whether in the realms of coherent songwriting, supposed philosophical “insight”, or in the alacrity of its fabled “improvisations”. Until then I will simply erect a big red Stop sign at New Year’s Eve 1972, and stick with all the great music that commands my attention at a level that even Peak Dead, in all its stumbling quietude, never has.
Many also currently occupy (in no particular order)…
“Hell’s Antechamber!” (22 major irritants, in brief)
Chicago (logistically, they were Clive Davis’ worst nightmare!)
Blood, Sweat, & Tears (the sound of horn-fueled constipation)
Eric Clapton (post-1974) (The God of the Nod)
Barbra Streisand (butchered Bowie’s “Life on Mars”, and virtually every other good rock or pop song she ever assailed)
Neil Diamond (“Cherry Cherry” wasn’t bad)
Michael Bolton (pre-Otis butchery, as The First Coming of Bryan Adams, he gave us 1983’s “Fool’s Game”, perhaps The Greatest Arena Sludge Anthem of All-Time!)
The Eagles/Don Henley & Glenn Frey solo (hateful, insecure twits high on cocaine and self-righteous self-regard)
Phil Collins (popularized the hairstyle known in mid-’80s Missoula as “Recesion”)
Billy Joel (in his sole halfway good song, he arranged for “Captain Jack” to get us high tonight)
George Harrison (specifically, for the sound and thoroughly dismal influence of the heinous “Saccharine Guitar Treacle” he created in the laboratory, er, studio with George Martin sometime in 1969, and with which he thoroughly disfigured his own subsequent solo output)
James Taylor (was perfectly passable in Two Lane Blacktop!)
Jethro Tull (“Locomotive Breath” has a rousing guitar riff, and “Teacher” a great bass part)
The Beach Boys (post-1977) (the sound of Mike Love’s chest puffing up as his hairline went even further north, and his ego wit’ it)
REO Speedwagon (Kevin Cronin’s hapless stage patter met Gary Richrath’s lame string scrapes, time after time!)
Journey (rich short guys—except for the ex-Baby—they never got over their dreadful reviews)
Duran Duran (the sound of white-suited fops with world class pouts)
Jane’s Addiction (the ceaseless braying of a vocalist who combined the very worst aspects of Alice Cooper, Freddie Mercury and W. Axl Rose)
Phish (Vermont dullards wit’ moderate chops who butchered some of the greatest albums of all-time—Quadrophenia, The Velvets’ Loaded, The White Album, etc.—and that was on their “good” nights! Their “original” material remains unspeakable.)
Billy Corgan/The Smashing Pumpkins (despite all his “rage”, he was still just a prat on the stage)
Wilco (pointlessly, even monumentally, rootsy avant-tedium that sounds far better in theory than on record, much less the stage)
“Nineties Rape Rock” aka “Nu Metal” (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Staind, Slipknot, et many al.) (the sound of chromosome damage mixed with Jagermeister)
Coldplay (a sound so ethereally prissy that I’d go deaf to avoid hearing it ever again!)
Divadom (er, Divadumb)
Whitney Houston (peaked with her first recorded vocal, on (of all things) an old Soft Machine song called “Memories”, a 1982 duet with famed saxophonist Archie Shepp, and backed by Bill Laswell’s Material!)
Mariah Carey (married The Boss, paid the cost)
[All subsequent “Divas” and “Talent” Show Contestants influenced thereby!]
Finally, a….
Special “Career/Reputation Obliteration” Disavowal
David Bowie (post-1983, as he doesn’t seem to have released a single decent album of new material in nearly 30 YEARS!)—where once there had been ceaseless change, and even musical innovation (from 1970-83), recent decades have seen the world’s greatest Rock Star Chameleon flitting about desperately in search of his former relevance and spark. A heart attack at 60 seemed to stanch the flow of desultory LP product, but not before he’d damaged his myth/legacy almost beyond repair. I mean, his 1976-79 “Berlin Period” grows in stature by the year, and no one’s skein of 1971-74 Glam Era anthems was so utterly compelling, but by the time the Nineties were over he seemed like the dilettante he’d always (unfairly) been accused of being. In time I suspect all the dully expedient stuff will simply recede into deserved obscurity, leaving only that splendid run of thirteen albums from THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD through LET’S DANCE, but for now I’d prefer that the former Mister Stardust/Sane/Duke left well enough alone.
R.E.M. (post-1997, as Bill Berry’s departure seemed to doom them to pompous pronouncements and relatively shite albums for the next 14 years)—given sufficient time with their clip file, I’m confident that I could find (at least) one of the three terminal members of this oft-fine band proclaiming that every single album they made post-Murmur was “really the best thing we’ve ever done…I feel like we’ve really taken it to the next level…this is my favorite of all our albums…this is the album we’ve been trying to make all along,” racka, racka, racka! And once their drummer called it a career there was a severe diminishment in quality control, so Ol’ Monobrow Bill must have been the one to say, “I don’t know about this one, guys…” throughout their first 17 years together. They should’ve followed The Mighty Zeppelin’s stellar example and folded up the tent once their skins basher called it good!
– Tom Kipp
