AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Bad Music

A while ago, Blender magazine published a list of the 50 Worst Rock Songs of All Time, a list that either operates with a radically different sense of the word “worst” from any with which I’m familiar, or misses the point of worst-ness by a very long chalk.

First of all, I can’t imagine a worst-songs list that doesn’t include in the top five “I Am, I Said” by Neil Diamond, “Horse With No Name” by America (a band which contended for a worst-ever list with every single they released), and “Chestnut Mare” by Roger McGuinn. This is a sine qua non for worst-osity. No singer ever uttered syllables more inane than

or

or

No one. Ever.

Fisking song lyrics is easier than shooting fish in a barrel (did people ever really try to shoot fish in a barrel anyway?), and one listener’s evocative catachresis is another listener’s abominable nonsense. Still, these worst songs attain remarkable lows in lyric communication. Let’s take these in order.

Dave Barry has done the expostulative legwork on “I Am, I Said”; indeed, his complete oeuvre in the field of Bad Songs stands at the fore of “worst” analysis. Still — Neil Diamond deserves obloquy not only for the couplet I featured above, but also for his deplorable attempt at stylistic variation in the line that follows those two: “ ‘I am,’ I cried, ‘I am,’ said I.” He seals his championship by asserting, “I’m not a man who likes to swear, but I’ve never cared for the sound of bein’ alone.” What does swearing have to do with the following clause? Let’s grant him the characterization of loneliness as a sonic phenomenon (it did well for Paul Simon in another portentous pop oracle), but is Diamond disavowing oath-taking about his loneliness? Or refusing to cuss about it? Oh well, at least the chair isn’t worried by what it hears.

With regard to “Horse With No Name,” I need first to confess that I always thought that the last word of my call-out couplet was “fame,” which at least made sense to the extent that renown might serve to keep one’s monicker in one’s awareness. Now that I find out that America proposes a causal link between the absence of pain-givers and forgetfulness of one’s own identity, I’m not sure whether I find the song grimly fascinating or even more detestable.

I hate to pick on Roger McGuinn for “Chestnut Mare,” a song I for a long time conflated with another top-ten bad song “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphey; what is it with horses and bad songs? — but even an admirable rock’n’roll stalwart drops a leaden one from time to time. This re-entered my consciousness a few years back when Margaret and Nate heard it on the radio, and burst into the house demanding if I had ever heard it. “He says he wants to the horse to be just like his wife,” they cried; “He wants to brand her!” (For some reason Margaret and I omitted this portion of the wedding ceremony when we married; this highly meaningful, moving ritual observance must have fallen out of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.) By the way, lest people think I’m inordinately uncharitable toward songs with horses in them, I’ll volunteer to like anything Doc Watson sings or plays about horses, with names or without, so long as he doesn’t marry them.

When I compare my own worst-songs list to that produced by Blender I find a few overlaps, but the one’s they think of as “worst” tends to reflect lapses on the part of otherwise reliable performers (Roger McGuinn-style), where I categorize “worst” in a more nearly absolute sense: What songs that won airplay and popular affection were, really, unbearably, terrible songs? I could add to the three litmus-test clunkers above. Throw in “Wildfire,” MacArthur Park,” the entire catalog of The Captain and Tenille. I don’t listen to enough radio to name alt-rock or hip-hop losers, but I’ll trust others to know which smell worst in those categories. But Blender’s Worst 50 falls far short of definitive putrescence.

On the other hand, they caught the theological offensiveness of “From a Distance,” so I give them a heap of bonus points. Then I take away some bonus points for the gray-on-white text, the function of which may be to prevent old geezers like me from reading the article, but which risks the effect of turning young pre-geezers who read Blender into prematurely bi-focalled geezers.

By the way: whenever I do anything apart from straight text in this column, I’ve probably cobbled it from Meg at Mandarin Design, whose page provides a spectacular resource for people like me who know there’s a way to do something with CSS, but who can’t recall the tags to do it. My only complaint about Meg’s generous goodness actually reflects on my own laziness: because I can count on her, it takes me longer to imprint in memory how to accomplish the design goals she describes.