You now know me as a music snob giant. I have a music collection that humbles all but the most impressive collectors, I look down on lesser mortals in the realization that my taste in music is far better than theirs and probably more obscure, too. I am pretty damned cool.
It was not always so. While I rarely feel the need to apologize in public, I must admit to these musical sins. They have weighed on me for years--indeed, there have been times when I listen to Woven Hand or Belly where I have felt like a fraud. I have worn the mask of music snob, but behind the disguise lurks an uncouth man with a taste for cheese.
This is where I apologize for my errors and where, in the tradition of useless apologies from American public figures, I hope we can just move on.*
Barry Manilow It was 1977 and I was just a small boy and through some trick or machination I had earned enough money to buy my very first album. Did I buy AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock, presaging the bulk of my high school musical taste? Of course not. How about David Bowie’s “Heroes", an even better indicator of the directions my musical tastes would lead me? Nope. How about something by The Clash or The Damned--first albums that would have cemented my musical coolness forever.
No.
I went for Barry Manilow Live. Instead of howling the lines from “Heroes” or “London’s Burning”, I sang along with “Weekend in New England” and “I Write the Songs”. I’m pretty sure that this lapse in taste went on my permanent record.
Laura Branigan I was blinded by her beauty. Or, maybe, it was deafened by her beauty. Because, for one moment in high school I thought that her voice was a beautiful instrument. One taste now of “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” is enough to set my teeth on edge. The syrupy lyrics, the irritating voice, the bland production.
I feel guilty singling her out--it feels as if I’m attacking the deceased--but honesty compels me.
Cinderella I listened to Ozzy and Sabbath and Priest. I loved Metallica and Megadeth. But then there was that hair metal moment where I thought that maybe Whitesnake wasn’t so bad (I blame Tawny Kitain strategically placed on a Jaguar) and the Cinderella actually had something to offer the music world.
In fact, this isn’t strictly about Cinderella. It’s about every hair metal band and treakly power ballad that I ever loved. It’s about imagining that “Nobody’s Fool” was actually in some way related to heavy metal and that “Don’t Know What You Got (Til It’s Gone)” really wasn’t anything other than a cliche set to mediocre music. This is for every Ratt song that I tortured my parents with and every Bon Jovi song that wasn’t on the Young Guns soundtrack.
REO Speedwagon It hit me when I accidentally listened to “Can’t Fight This Feeling”: holy crap, this band sucks. Then I searched and listened to more from the inexplicably sizable REO catalog, and I realized that they were one of those bands that thrives on mediocrity. They weren’t precisely bad (although a few minutes spent with “Here With Me” might convince you otherwise), they were just not really so good.
I’ll admit that I can still listen to “Take it on the Run” or “Time for Me to Fly”, but it’s only with a certain sense of cynical joy, a knowing smile, and a shake of the head. I can’t even work up that much enthusiasm for “Riding the Storm Out.” Like Gilligan’s Island, REO is just another memory betrayed by revisiting the reality.
Genesis It wasn’t all bad for Genesis, but after the prog rock sound of “The Chamber of 32 Doors” and “Visions of Angels” came the Phil Collins years. Whatever good will those early years may have called up was destroyed by “There Must be Some Misunderstanding” and “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”. The transformation of the band from one sound to the other is almost as dramatic as Ministry’s drift from light euro-pop into the world of industrial throb--but not as successful.
I can still listen to “Abacab” but it is hard to forgive “Follow You, Follow Me.” It was a slow descent from progressive to banal, but they made it so completely that their later work overshadows the earlier stuff in the worst possible way.
Styx Aside from “Too Much Time on My Hands”, there is nothing from the Styx catalog that I can still listen to. The thing is, though, that putting them on the list almost feels like a mistake. Sure, “Babe” and “Lady” are ridiculous, “Come Sail Away” and “The Best of Times” suffer from serious over-exposure, and “Mr. Roboto” sounds so dated as to be almost unlistenable; but the band was actually good. Even though I can’t listen to them anymore, I’m not sure they count as embarrassing. Update: On the advice of Mr. Lady, I link up someone who might not agree with my thoughts on the subject. It’s a good read.
Kansas I don’t ever need to hear “Carry On Wayward Son” again; it’s so burned into my brain that I’ll probably hear it in some hellish medley of overplayed songs when I die. It will have a place by “Smoke on the Water”, “Stairway to Heaven”, and “Dust in the Wind” in tortuously ushering me to my final reward. The people around me will be weeping, somehow imagining that I fear that final step; in reality, the tears will be because those overplayed songs keep going round and round in my head with no sign of stopping.
The Cosmic DJ has a nasty sense of humor.
Aside from “Carry On”, Kansas was best known for another (previously mentioned) wildly overplayed song, “Dust in the Wind”. Aside from those tidbits, this pretentious band put out a bunch of laughable, overwrought songs like “Cheyenne Anthem” and the irritating “Point of No Return”. I used to like this band?
John Denver Yet again, I find myself speaking ill of the dead. My biggest problem with Denver has nothing to do with his musicianship. Indeed, a listen to “Annie’s Song” proves that he had a beautiful voice and knew how to write songs.
No, my problem with Denver’s music revolves around that overbearing sense of sincerity that surrounds almost all of his songs. That sort of 70’s era Alan Alda sensitive guy gaze brought laboriously to an album filled with things like the hokey “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and painfully bland “Sunshine on My Shoulders”. It’s only when Denver let loose on “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” where he still sounds good to me. A few notes of “I’m Sorry”, though, and all goodwill is shattered.
I spent a good portion of my youth with John Denver. My parents listened to Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Abba, John Denver, and the Carpenters almost exclusively. In a way, that makes this more about their taste than about mine, but it stayed with me long enough that I feel some of the shame.
Yes I still like “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, but that is hardly representative of the bulk of the Yes catalog. I embraced Yes for a few years--a late convert convinced by songs like “Shoot Hight, Aim Low” and “Owner of a Lonely Heart”. It was almost unfair, really, both to me and the band. Because those songs sounded almost nothing like “Starship Trooper” and “I’ve Seen All Good People” (a song that, while I’m listening, I’m pretty sure will never actually end). Prog rock fans will always love Yes, but I’m not really a prog rock fan.
Mudhoney had a song on the Singles soundtrack whose title pretty much sums up my feelings about Yes. That song was called “Overblown.”
The Doors I loved the doors. I really did. Jim Morrison had me convinced that he was a (dead) tragic hero with an artistic vision that towered over pretty much all of his contemporaries. And I can still handle “Roadhouse Blues” and “People are Strange”. The rest of their songs run somewhere between overplayed and overdone.
On some of their songs, the sense of self-importance and pretentiousness piled up on idiotic lyrics and lounge act keyboards are laughable. “The Changeling” and “L’America” for example. What I thought was meaningful turned out to be an extra-special dose of a junkie’s narcissism; The Doors may well be my nomination for most overrated band of all time, surviving only because they can tap into either nostalgia or that sense of reality distortion that exists in our teenage years--where “The End” has a spoken word interlude that might actually seem meaningful.
Of course, teen years lead up to, hopefully, adulthood where we can all sit back and giggle at the drama queen that was Jim Morrison.
Dishonorable Almost-Mentions
Metallica and Queensryche
Both bands, on the weakness of their recent albums almost made the list. Only a few albums stand between the Ryche and me being embarrassed to admit that they have a place in my CD collection. Rage for Order and Mindcrime will always hold a place in my heart--even when I’m grimacing over Q2K and Tribe.
For Metallica, it is impossible to ignore their contribution to heavy metal. They were a brilliant, loud, fast, hard band that played some of the catchiest hard core ever; that their later albums can’t even come close to the near-perfection of, say, Master of Puppets, is sad. But re-visiting “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” and “Damage, Inc” convinced me that I can still say I love the band. It just comes with an asterisk.
* And if you didn’t notice the sense of self-deprecation in the art snob comments, at least consider that my tongue was at least close to my cheek during the entire writing of this post.
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