Do You Realize?? by The Flaming Lips

 

This song is a slice of white bread soaked in skim milk.

It is bland, soggy, and would only appeal to people who think flavor and texture are too extreme.

After a decade and a half of making interesting, unique and bizarre music - and making ends meet by working at a Long John Silvers - Wayne Coyne said ENOUGH IS ENOUGH and set out to record a song so boring and generic in sonic dynamics and theme that it might just sell enough records to help him escape slinging hush puppies for good. And it worked.

The philosophical depth of the lyrics is too insignificant to be measured by any tool ever devised by humans. It can be reduced to YOLO, YOU PURDY! This is clearly pandering. Coyne had previously explored far more complex and compelling existentialist, absurdist, and surrealist themes over the years. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to explore such superficial examinations of being except to sell music to people who have never liked your music.

I'm not even sure what to say about the musical aspects, except that they mirror the lyrical torpidity almost perfectly. It's elevator music for people who are afraid of elevators and need to be lullabyed into a semi-conscious trance just to survive the ordeal.

A lot of great bands of the 20th century became unlistenable mush after the turn of the century, and along with the previously mentioned Modest Mouse, the Flaming Lips were one of them. And while I can certainly empathize with wanting to make a living doing the thing that you love, is it still the thing you love if you have to alter it to such a spineless form to succeed?

Float On by Modest Mouse

The word 'toxic' has been overused in recent years, to the point of losing its meaning.  Yet I can think of no other way to describe this song than as TOXIC PEP. It is near-lethal amounts of positivity. A zillion times the recommended daily dose of optimism. Whenever I hear this song I have to stab a baby with the sharpened femur of the last baby I stabbed just to balance my world back out. If there aren't any stabbable babies in the vicinity, I have to drop puppies onto kittens from a seven-story building. I don't want to do that. I would never choose to do that otherwise. Yet it is the only way to restore equilibrium in the wake of this overdose of exuberance.

In the previous century, Modest Mouse was a great band. By the time this album came out, they had been transmogrified into a feeble shadow of their former selves. Sonic castrati. Musical muppets.  Children's rock for teacher's pets. 

Float On is a turd glistening in an artificial sun as it wafts down the River of Mediocrity toward the Sea of Shame. Someone should have pulled out a poop stick and sunk it before it ever became radio wormwood.

 

I Love L.A. by Randy Newman

Before the full frontal assault of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, mush-mouthed Randy Newman dropped this bomb of dopey LA worship music.

The lyrics are nothing but a cluster of references indicating familiarity with Los Angeles, so that you know that he is a bonafide resident. He doesn't even bother to attempt clever wordplay or prose. It's just name-dropping with no style whatsoever. 

But that kind of lyrical pandering is barely a concern compared to the musical and melodic mediocrity involved. This song sounds like a commercial jingle. It's the kind of music typically reserved for selling soft drinks and pickup trucks. It's crass commercialism of the most blatant kind. 

 

Fugk The Pain Away by Peaches

This song is a jukebox torture device. Audio-trolling. It is juvenile stupidity masquerading as progressivism. It is the sort of malignant media product that acts as nothing but snarky tit for tat. It is a reaction to sexually repressed people that is somehow considered a victory over them by virtue of being even more hyperbolic and idiotic.

Wikipedia states that it is "sex-positive feminism".

You don't have to be a promiscuous, self-indulgent slave to your lust to have a well adjusted attitude towards sexuality.

Feminism began as rejection of the centralized hierarchies which had historically been used to oppress women, as well as other  subjugated individuals and groups, especially among the poor and working class.

That it evolved to be signified by music that makes Beavis & Butthead seem like Harvard intellectuals by comparison is pretty good evidence that the mainstream version of feminism is a grotesque perversion created by the centralized hierarchs to divert people from a more meaningful form of feminism. It has become a tool of indoctrination for the elites infantilize their subjects, while acting as a marketing scheme.

The lyrics don't make any coherent points which educate the listener in ways that empower them, sexually or otherwise. In fact the lyrics do not make any statements whatsoever. Its just a collection of halfwit shock statements peppered with some pop culture references - all burdened under extreme repetition.

Speaking of repetition, from a musical standpoint, it is even less sophisticated than most dance music. It contains no melodies, musically or vocally. Its just too many minutes, where any portion of a single minute is already too many, of Casio-esque drum beats with some ill-fitted samples that seem to serve no purpose but to add something recognizable.

This song is the equivalent of one of those old beer commercials that is nothing but 30 seconds of bouncing breasts and jutting asses. It is a commercial jingle for itself. It is musical pornography that will zap points off your IQ with every listen.

Fuck this song away, forever, please!

 

Bodies by Drowning Pool

 

VIOLENCE IS COOL

THIS SONG IS ABOUT VIOLENCE

THIS SONG IS COOL

That is the maximum amount of artistic sophistication that Drowning Pool is capable of. Feed into the aggression fantasies of dumb young men...profit.

The official story is that the song is about moshing, but in the sparse verses we are introduced to the idea of somebody who has reached the end of their cool, and is about to blow their lid. And then the choruses make their eventual explosion of violence sound like something cool enough to write a nu metal anthem about. The band have tried to sell the mosh story, but also claimed it is innocuous enough for listener interpretation, which is to say, they really want you to interpret it for exactly what it is, an idiotic celebration of machismo aggression.

Musically it is nothing but rhythm and sound effects. There is no melody. The hooks are not about musical expression, but only about serving the goofy high five to violent tendencies. In some sense it is incredibly successful in sounding like what it is about. But what it is about is the most juvenile admiration of aggressive self indulgence.

This song is Limp Bizkit on testosterone and bath salts.

Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy by Big & Rich

 

This next entry is going to be a struggle for me. When I think about this song I become irrationally angry. I feel a deep sense of pain and existential dread. I begin to actively hope for an end to it all for everyone always.

The year this song was released I was working at a hotel bar in very rural Iowa. Seriously, it wasn't even in a town. Just a weird German-themed waterpark/hotel/restaurant surrounded by a few other small businesses, on a quiet stretch of Interstate 80. Because it was local, and fairly inexpensive, there were a lot of weddings held there, and I often worked them as a bartender. And at every single one of them (for two years) I had to hear this lemon-juice-enema of a song.

Two things happened as a result.

1) I understood that mainstream country music had become hopelessly irredeemable.

2) As an expression of regular people, country music was a sort of barometer for where we were at, and it became clear that domesticated humans were also hopelessly irredeemable.

The most obvious problem with the song is just how dumb it is. This is not a statement of personal taste. If you were analyzing popular music over the last century with a baseline for lyrical achievement set by Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Marvin Gaye, Neil Young, D Boon, Sam Coomes, Chuck D, etc. - and then you come across this song, you would thereafter be following a downward curve of literary and conceptual prowess in favor of the dumbest and most materialistic, egotistical, hypocritical and nonsensical bullshit possible.

And it is not like the song tries to hide the shameless genre exploitation and crass commercialism. It tells you right up front that they came to Nashville and started greasing pockets to get a break. Because these guys are not musicians nor artists, they are celebrity-seekers. Vapid, greedy little fugkpeople for whom the world is nothing more than a platter for self indulgence and excess.

And in the twenty years since this shit first went down the entire cultural system has been hijacked by celebrity-seekers, and art has been swallowed whole and spit back out as a term to describe a certain type of potentially profitable commodity. Perhaps this song was not the genesis, as culture has been heading this way since the inception of mass media, but it does mark the point in time when pop stars no longer had to be ashamed of, or try to hide, the blatant opportunistic pandering which is only a vehicle to fortune and fame.

*Frito cheers as his car explodes*

The Devil's Bleeding Crown by Volbeat

 

Volbeat is music for people who think Disturbed are too intellectual. Fronted by a man in ex-convict cosplay who sings like a cartoon drill sergeant, Volbeat are what transpired when a group of suburban heshers who shared the opinion that Load and Unload are Metallica's best albums decided to form a band in order to torture music.

The Devil's Bleeding Crown is a song about...I dunno, the devil, I guess? Its pretty impossible to work out any sort of meaning in the lyrics. It is generically about Satan in a way which seems completely opportunistic, as if they wanted to seem much darker and edgier than they actually are, so they just slapped some words about the devil together without any concern for literary coherence. 

The instrumentation is also a gaudy mish mash of hard rock tropes. It sounds exactly like the sort of music you would hear on radio stations that play this kind of music, but it doesn't stand out in any way. This song meets the criteria to be this song, and that is about it. Fodder for unfaithful fathers to head bang to at the bar on a Friday night as they try to pick up women who share their STD history.