Sloganman houdt van muziek. Zijn knieval voor Elvis viel niet toevallig samen
met de ontdekking dat hij alles behalve kerkelijk was. Zijn liefde voor Mahalia
Jackson ontstond iets later, toen hij ook Jacques Brel en –onvergelijkbaar,
maar toch- Jaap Fisher mooi begon te vinden. En zo groeide langzaam maar zeker
Sloganmans liefde voor muziek. The Beatles, maar vooral John Lennon, Led
Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, Neil Young, Guns n’ Roses, Tom Petty, Joe
Jackson, Jan De Wilde, Ramses Shaffy en ook heel wat minder bekende artiesten …
Op zoek naar soulmates
die z’n muziekvoorkeur bijtreden en eventueel kunnen verrijken stuitte
Sloganman op een merkwaardige blog.
Ene Ben Shapiro haalt 10
classic rock songs onderuit met stuk voor stuk sterke argumenten waartegen
niettemin heel wat in te brengen valt, zeker als blijkt dat hij zijn
afbraakwerk met republikeinse gelijkhebberigheid inkleurt.
Waarom vinden we met z’n
allen –Sloganman incluis- Bob Dylan zo’n grote meneer? Een held? Een God bijna?
En waarom vindt een jonge kerel van 30 dat helemaal niét? Op z’n minst
merkwaardig, deze Top 10
Overrated Songs Of All Time.
Ben Shapiro:
Some songs need to be taken out of
circulation. Forever.
That’s what this list is about. In the past,
I’ve defined “overrated” in the typical way: a piece of art may be good, but
it’s not as great as everybody seems to think it is. In this list, we’ll go
with the more colloquial definition: everybody thinks these songs are great,
and I think they absolutely suck, and should be force-fed into the great maw
of historical obscurity. With that said, let’s begin.
10. Anything By Lady Gaga.
She is the worst. The absolute worst. There is no excuse for her. Her songs are
awful. Her dress-up nonsense is awful. Her persona is awful. She’s a bad
knockoff of Madonna (who sucked to begin with) and has no vocal quality. When
your most famous lyric (from “Poker Face”) is “mah-mah-mah-Poker Face
mah-mah-Poker Face,” you’ve got a huge problem. But now she’s our problem. Our
unsexy, autotuned, annoying, androgynous, self-righteous problem. I hate you, music industry.
9. One, U2. U2 is
second only to The Beatles in the pantheon of overrated bands. Pretentious,
whiny, boring. This is the kind of stuff you expect to hear Phoebe playing on
her off-days at Central Perk in Friends. It’s rock
for people who want rock to sound like white noise. Bono always sounds like
he’s slightly drunk and/or has a cold, but he’s just so profound, because he has an earring.
The lyrics are over-the-top non sequiturs,
just broad enough to sound meaningful, but just vague enough to make no sense.
“Have you come here for forgiveness / Have you come to raise the dead / Have
you come here to play Jesus / To the lepers in your head.” Wait a second – if
you’re here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head, isn’t Jesus also in your
head? Are you schizophrenic? And what about the Holy Ghost? Where does he come
in? What do dead people have to do with anything? Why am I trying to understand
a song designed mostly to get Bono chicks?
8. My Generation, The Who.
Aside from being the perfect set-up for “Who’s on First,” which is eminently
more entertaining than most of the Who’s music, the Who have provided us with
very little of value. Tommy is the
least of their sins (and that’s a pretty damn big sin). Try
on “My Generation” for size.
They’re talking about their generation. But
you don’t know what they’re saying, which makes it difficult to understand
their generation. Repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. And the lyrics are dumb,
dumb, dumb, when you can actually decipher them: “People try to put us d-down /
Just because we get around.” Interjection: enough of the near-rhymes! Rockers
are so damn lazy. “Things they do look awful c-c-cold / I hope I die before I
get old.” If only.
7. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen.
Yes, everybody loves the Boss. I don’t mind some of his stuff. But this song is
not good. It’s perfectly mediocre. Take away the yelling, and it’s elevator
music.
Man, that’s some ‘80s stuff. Nice
hair, dudes. Nothing actually happens during this song. It is repetitive and
unexciting. It takes Springsteen sweating profusely to generate any sort of
mild excitement for the crowd. There is no development section, as per the
usual rock arrangement. Now that he loves Sweden, I feel less bad
about ripping “Born to Run.”
“But,” you say, “it has woodwinds! Woodwinds!”
Yeah. Great.
It starts out in promising fashion, actually,
but quickly goes off the rails – or rather, slowly goes off the rails,
Titanic-style. The same four bar sequence essentially repeats for the vast
majority of eight minutes. This was not a
musical idea that required eight minutes of development. LSD may make things
more interesting, but it can’t make them
that much more interesting, can it?
5. Satisfaction, by The Rolling
Stones. It’s got a memorable bass line. That repeats 100,000 times,
in Led Zeppelin fashion. The big question here is whether the Rolling Stones
can or cannot get satisfaction. If they can’t get no satisfaction, that means
they can get satisfaction. It is maddening that so many rockers think that
simply because they have no musical training, they
need not apply basic English.
While the Stones later suggested that the
lyrics were supposed to rip on the commercialism of rock (and they do), the
main thrust of the song (pun intended) is clearly frustrated horniness. Most
teenagers would have the good grace to get a Playboy and work this out for
themselves. The Stones decided to inflict “Satisfaction” on us instead.
The song itself goes nowhere – which is a
problem with most rock songs, admittedly. But Rolling Stone named this the second-greatest rock
song of all time. Which speaks to the shallowness of rock.
4. London Calling, by The Clash.
Two notes. The entire song is essentially two notes. A more annoying song has
never been penned. If
London calls, don’t answer.
3. Smells Like Teen Spirit, by
Nirvana. No wonder Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Sadly, his music
lives on. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – what exactly is teen spirit? – is both
musically jarring and lyrically painful. The kooky two-note leitmotif (can you
call it that when it’s in an alleged song like this?) is less Bernard Herrman
than the three-year-old who discovered your guitar in a closet, then also found
your shotgun and became a Brady Campaign statistic (which, come to think of it,
is sort of similar to Cobain’s life story). And
Cobain’s raspy whine is enough to put anyone on heroin.
Then there are the lyrics. If you’re going to
bother writing lyrics at all, don’t do it right after spending a drug-fueled
night with Courtney Love. “Load up on guns and bring your friends / It’s fun to
lose and to pretend.” At least he’s attempting to rhyme. Unfortunately, he
forgot the part where lyrics are supposed to make some modicum of sense (or,
for Meghan McCain, emoticon of sense).
When you’re living in Seattle making millions
off your nihilism and absolute lack of talent, you don’t get to complain about
your ills. At the end of this song, if you don’t feel “stupid and contagious,”
feel lucky. This song is aural herpes. And, by the way, Andrew Breitbart hated
Nirvana with the fiery passion of a thousand flaming suns.
2. Like a Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan.
The fame and fortune of Bob Dylan make you question the presence of a
benevolent God in the universe. He sings like a cat being run over by a
nail-studded steamroller. His lyrics are lazy and stupid – he doesn’t bother
for rhyme scheme (“home” and “unknown” do not rhyme), or even that the words
scan with the music. The song itself makes no sense. What is a “mystery tramp”?
Why should you “turn around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns”?
Are they sad clowns? What does a “Siamese cat” have to do with anything? And
then he articulates these nonsensical lyrics as though he has no front teeth.
It’s not just “Like a Rolling Stone” that
sucks so much that Paris Hilton is jealous. “Blowin’ in the Wind” is awful;
“Times’ They are a-Changin’” is hipster crapola; “Hurricane” is a falsification
of history, and awful. His songs are endless. This song runs over six minutes
long; “Hurricane” runs over eight minutes. Eight minutes. The
first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony runs less time, and has more than
four chords.
Bob Dylan makes life meaningless, and makes
man curse nature for the gift of eardrums. Listen, Baby Boomers – I know you
were all high when you listened to Dylan. But please, for the love of God, stop
inflicting him on future generations.
1. Imagine, by John Lennon.
There are no words for how truly evil and terrible this song is; Kurt Schlichter has done a
masterful job of epically fisking this small shard of utter and complete
rubbish. First, the aesthetics. It
begins with some pretentious piano chords to set the mood: this will be a deep song. Lennon sings it in
cloyingly whiny fashion, like a schoolgirl who has discovered that there are
starving people in Africa for the first time. It’s vomit-inducing bad. And the
music itself is not just unspectacular, it’s blasé. It commits the worst musical
sin: it is completely boring.
But that’s not what makes this song so
horrible. For that, we have to examine the lyrics, which are not just ignorant,
but Soviet-style ignorant. It’s a communist, atheist song, pure and simple.
This could be the Barack Obama campaign song – but it would express too clearly
what the redistributionist left wants for the world: no borders, no God, no
meaning, no values, and no wealth. And it’s being penned and sung by one of the
richest people on the planet. Despicable as art; despicable as politics.
Imagine the world without it. Aren’t you smiling yet?
