c-c-c-cucumber, c-c-c-cabbage

I was struggling to find a suitable topic for today when the Boston Globe’s webpage dropped this gem into my lap. I don’t really get the point of these “worst song” lists as they’re executed at the above link and in places like Blender. Apart from the same targets being hit over and over again (I hear airline food is horrible, by the way) by the various listmakers, there is something else at work that irritates the fuck out of me.

My maternal grandfather served with the occupation forces in post-war Germany, and my grandmother went with overseas with him to live in what was left of Frankfurt. Every German male my grandmother came across -- the postman, the butcher, and so forth – admitted that they served in Hitler’s armed forces but never fired a shot at the Americans. Honestly. One wonders where all those white crosses in Normandy came from.

I get that same sense of guilty personal revisionism from the folks who put together the “worst song” lists. “I was listening to My Aim Is True in 1985! I never lip-synched along to the video of ‘We Built This City’!” Most of the songs listed were huge hits. Someone must have been buying the records. Just not them, unless they were being ironic. Irony: the guilty conscience spackle for the po-mo generation.

Even worse than the folks who insist on hiding pop skeletons in their closets are the 20/20 hindsight hipper-than-thou crowd who have permanent residencies on VH-1’s unending torrent of nostalgia and list shows. Exhibiting toxic levels of smugness, they pass marginally witty judgments on the follies of previous decades. It takes a very ballsy man to mock eighties fashions while wearing a faux-retro, artificially distressed t-shirt with an Alpo dog food label on the front. You said it, one guy who was on two episodes of the final season of Caroline in the City, big shoulder pads are indeed “whack,” but you’d better hurry if you don’t want to miss the DVD release party for Snakes on a Plane.

I’m not trying to pull a Klosterman here and posit a passionate defense of crap. I’m perfectly fine with seeing K-Fed get a critical beatdown, and I’ve argued many times that “My Humps” is the actual manifestation of the first trumpet blast from Revelation:

"The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." - Revelation 8:7

There ought to be more to a “worst songs” than simply dragging out a bunch of vapid pop ditties (preferably recorded by overreaching celebrities) and that one Journey song. Personally, I have a hard time picking either “best” or “worst” songs. My moral objectivism doesn’t extend to my entirely relativistic personal tastes. I acknowledge only two categories: stuff I can listen to and stuff I can’t. There are some songs and bands I enjoy more than others, but the pool is in a constant state of flux, with The Clash being the only constant (and even they have stuff I don’t care for much). My wife, though, is far more sanguine in her musical tastes, and has helped me pick out some painful tracks for today. It’s a little game we call “sacred cow-tipping.”

Shampoo – Trouble (from We Are Shampoo, 1994) – The twisted underbelly of Britpop. I put this track on a recent driving mix CD. Here’s a timeline of my wife’s responses:
Week 1: Bemused “Huh.”
Week 2: “Ugh, I’m going to have this stuck in my head! Their accents are horrible!”
Week 3: Having memorized the CD playlist, she hits the skip button before the song can begin.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Crown of Thorns (from Ocean Rain, 1984) – This one’s a real tragedy, marring an otherwise perfect album. Imagine enjoying the most wonderful hamburger on earth, then getting an undetected human hair tangled on your tongue three bites in – that’s what it feels like when you’re listening to Ocean Rain and this track starts playing. There is a time and a place for vegetable-themed stuttering – no, wait, there isn’t.

Joy Division – Atmosphere (from a 1980 single, collected on Substance, 1988) – I like Joy Division a lot, but I won’t even try and defend Ian Curtis’s vocal stylings. For the most part, his angst-ridden croaking meshed well with the band’s cold, minimalist sound. On this posthumous single, though, his limited abilities fail to the match what the material – a haunting and beautiful synth ballad – requires, and the results are pretty painful to listen to. It’s like attending a drunken karaoke night in some Manchester punk dive. Sacrilegious as it may be to say this, but imagine if The Damned’s Dave Vanian, who has a similar vocal range but better set of pipes, had handled the singing chores.

The Smiths – Girlfriend in a Coma (from The Singles, 1995) – Between this track and the last one, I guarantee I’m going to make some folks’ shit lists. Here’s a question for you: What’s the difference between one teenager sulking to this track and another getting all maudlin over Journey’s “Separate Ways”? Answer: Their parents’ annual incomes.

Some Morrissey-loving friends of mine insist that the whole miserableness thing is a big shtick, a sign of some deep sense of humor that Moz supposedly possesses. But if a joke lands in a forest of creative writing majors, and it’s taken dead seriously, is it still amusing? Not from where my Winnebago is parked, chum.

The Cure – Close to Me (from Staring at the Sea: The Singles, 1986) – As far as my wife is concerned, the Cure’s career ended with The Top, a drug-fueled foray into quasi-psychedelia that pretty much laid the band’s melodic post-punk roots to rest. It was at that point that Robert Smith the musician became Robert Smith the caricature. His hair (and waistline) got bigger, his makeup got thicker, and his melancholy warble became insufferably exaggerated and precious.

“Close to You,” with it’s lazy keyboard noodling and proto-emo lyrics, was the first step on a road that would lead to places I’d rather avoid entirely. It also doesn’t help that I can’t hear the song without confusing it with George Michael’s 1987 hit “Faith.” The two songs are only a half-step removed from each other musically, if you think about it.

I’ve been waiting hours for this/If I could touch your body/I’ve made myself so sick/I know not everybody/I wish I stayed/has a body like you…

So hop to it, mashup maestros, and while you’re at it, could you put together one combining Smashmouth’s “All Star” and the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”? I know someone just dying to hear it.