hrow your dreams away and join the frightened world"
Embrace, "You Should Be Ashamed"


"This corny shit is somebody's dreams and hopes and aspirations. Don't be so hip."
Sun Ra to his bandmates, after playing them Donna Summer


For someone who professes themselves to be attuned to the considerably more worthy pleasures of great music and great art and, yes, great literature, I spend an awful lot of time watching television. In addition to the arguably mediocre yet consistent shows I watch along with most of you, though, I've sometimes found myself ineluctably drawn to spending long, long afternoons and evenings and nights watching extremely bad TV-when I say "extremely bad," I'm trying to conjure up the precise valence of true, indisputable awfulness, i.e. Three's Company or Seventh Heaven or Dismissed or Lawrence Welk on PBS. This presents a number of paradoxes, naturally, the foremost of which could best be stated as, "Why watch this crap when you could be reading, going to a movie, etc?" Even though it is usually present in some form or another, the gunmetal-gray monolith of depression doesn't seem to be much of a factor here; I can immediately determine this, since we've all spent a month's worth of Friday nights, Sunday mornings or Tuesday afternoons (depending, I guess, on one's disposition) lying on our beds in headphones listening to Slint, Mogwai, Joy Division, Low, or whatever band strikes the indie fan collective as possessing great and inescapable utility when one is, classically, depressed. And even before my musical taste developed to what many would consider these more marginal groups, there seemed something noble about immersing yourself in the relatively uncomplicated gloom of certain classic-rock (or classic-rock-inspired) desolation opuses, i.e. The Wall, which I owned on cassette.


Why, then, watch shitty TV, or listen to shitty music? I'm afraid that there's no easy answer. Originally I'd thought it had something to do with kitsch-and, indeed, it's a part of the equation I can't necessarily discount wholesale. Maybe kitsch collides with a certain pseudo-academic mindset I've adopted in the past few years, producing the urge to dissect, to explicate, which satisfies the need for distance: suddenly I can imagine that the reason I'm watching largely unfunny sitcoms and sketch-comedy shows or tedious documentaries that intend to make us feel (if only for a moment) the plight of Hall and Oates when America seemed set in its belief that they were gay lovers, or David Cassidy's inability to transcend the limiting wholesomeness of the Partridge Family ghetto, is that I'm in some way fascinated in what makes them unfunny and tedious. This is essentially true, but one needs to be careful of echoing one of my favorite Onion headlines, "Ironic Pornography Purchase Leads to Un-Ironic Ejaculation."


Bad television, or bad music, after all, threatens to corrupt our essentially even-handed and careful taste. It hardly seems likely that our kitschy taste for, say, Motley Crüe could rupture some barrier that exists within us all and lead to unabashedly pathetic worship of the you-just-paid-$600-for-a-rare-interview-picture-disc-with-Tommy-Lee's-spandex-clad-ass-prominently-displayed-on-it variety, yet caution still needs to be exercised. A common fear-and one I've certainly had of late-is that bad music and other entertainment usurps the primacy demanded by good art. What I suggest we do, in considering bad music through trained ears, is apply the aesthetic of "tragic realism."


Brought up by author Jonathan Franzen in an essay dealing with the seemingly diminished importance of the social novel-that is, a novel that by definition has inherent worth in dealing with our society and our roles in it-in an age of electronic media, tragic realism is a philosophy in the making and criticism of literature that gives it a depth, often informed by authors' depression, a sometimes unbearably gloomy worldview that they have come to accept as part of the truth of existence, lest it otherwise destroy them if denied limitations-seen in the often harsh and painful realities literature manages to at once confront and assuage-other forms of art would wish to avoid.


It's long been understood that when society presses us to turn to pharmaceuticals or technology or pre-packaged lifestyle trappings as an antidote to the dilemma of existence (all of which are addressed in Franzen's satiric yet moving The Corrections), it is in a sense wishing we avoid the tragic implications of our consumer culture, of our own insignificance and, yes, probable doom. Turning a critical perspective to bad music, we can see this mechanism as it works-cf. any song that's come up on TRL in the past several years-but at the same time hear the voice of human frailty, a slight protestation amidst the grinding of AOR cogwheels. We hear this, of course, in the often tragicomic humanity of artists who, say, make self-important gestures doomed to collapse under the weight of the sheer ridiculousness to all but their intended audiences (and, often, by their intended audiences; cf. some of the sillier, more art-damaged music videos in recent memory), and in the very badness of these songs that seem bad to us. Bad music, you know, hurts.


The point is that, despite our efforts to avoid exposure to it, bad music, and bad art, will always exist. Imagine it for a moment as a great, shifting mass imbued with all the sinister aspects bestowed upon it over the years: walk into a supermarket where Styx's "Come Sail Away" and not only are your brains first melted, then sucked out via a cranial fissure as the person next to you's stricken with instant diabetes of the saccharine-vocal-stylings variety, but both of you are transported, through the horrors of time and memory, to your own individual nightmares: maybe for one of you it's a crystal-clear evocation of some awful summer vacation, probably, in the backseat of your parents' Toyota Corolla as you wait at a stoplight in Wisconsin en route to the Museum of Dairy Farming Technology, wondering if you're ever, ever going to kiss a member of the opposite sex and feeling Dennis DeYoung's longing and sorrow more strongly, perhaps, than you ever had before. Feel the ache and you'll understand why so many of us feel the way we do about bad music, why so many of us hasten to call it depressing: it's got us in its awful thrall, where we're bound to end up someday. Maybe even our favorite songs will slide into this barren category and end up, to paraphrase Ian MacKaye from Embrace's "Dance of Days," objects of our own disgust. Tragic, check. Real, check.


What follows, then, is my take, as a listener informed by tragic realism, on ten of the worst songs I can possibly think of. In presenting these songs, I hope to consider them in a larger context, and to question their place in my life. And, I would wager, yours.


Paula Cole, "I Don't Want To Wait"

No other song-with its chilly, reticent voice-major's attempt at an expansive chorus, its attempt to co-opt WWII-era signifiers of human persistence under suffering-is so unknowingly aware of its own limitations, and, because of this, so evocative to me of the sad grandeur of high school and all its static, boxed-in failure. Even though its cultural ubiquity took place after my own graduation, I still can't help but be tortured with thoughts of yearbook quotes whenever I hear it; it never fails to make me embarrassed and miserable. For that, it should be worth something.


Supertramp, "Logical Song"

Junior high; friendlessness; a scourge of acne and welts; listening to this on my bed; weeping. Someone understands! (Nicely used in Magnolia, I thought.)


Doobie Brothers, "What a Fool Believes"

The mystifying, dinky keyboard hook that propels this song makes it intensely difficult for me to imagine that anyone ever took it seriously; the same holds true for the vocals. Like Hall and Oates' hackwork, it's so far-removed from soul music as to give the impression that a music teacher recorded it. A hallmark of cluelessness and incompetence.


America, "Horse with No Name"

A wheezy, weary minor-key anthem for self-important, mustachioed loners the worldround, a paean to a world that's certain to forget you, if it in fact ever knew who you were.


Michael Jackson, "Heal the World"

The very essence of terrifyingly insane (or, to be somewhat kinder, woefully misguided) would-be messianic horseshit, Jacko's urge that we can heal the world and indeed make it a better place, but only through accepting him as our personal savior with all the kindness of our hearts-it's this pernicious sort of logic that really makes me feel sorry for him, makes me mourn his lack of sanity and at the same time admire it, the way you might in the case of some fey, hyperactive members of your high school's Whiffenpoof-derived chorale that have the balls to sing an a cappella You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown medley during lunch break. I can't help but associate it with several consecutive dentists' visits where it kept coming on their muzak. At least I didn't get a Walkman with a tape of George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 hot-glued inside, as someone I knew did.


Billy Idol, "Cradle of Love"

Smug, flaccid bad-boy posturing about which little else needs to be said. A horrifyingly bad (and unfunny!) video, too, closes the deal on making this intensely unappealing. I tend to stay far, far away from anyone who claims to like songs such as this and, say, those of Ratt or Poison under some hipsterish pretense. Granted, my generation-famous for cracking jokes about 1974 sitcoms we'd never even seen in syndication-engaged in its share of wish-we-were-there aping of Generation X's irony, but I can't help but feel that the ghastly, sprayed-into-place stasis of the Eighties isn't anything to pay imitative tribute to, even if it is something we can claim as having occurred within our lifespans.


Andrew WK, "Party Hard"

This one knocked Limp Bizkit out of the top ten, I'll have you know. I suspect that its inclusion may strike some of you more circumspect NME readers as odd, but I think this song's ostensible conceptual-art roots make it even worse. I'm sure the group are kidding-just watch the ridiculous video clip, Ugly-Kid-Joe-meets-Vegas-meets-Meatloaf production values-but it doesn't mean their crime is any less severe. If the bloat of Eighties sports-metal heard today on Jock Jams wasn't bad enough to serve as an Ipecac, the would-be-deconstructionist irony of hipsters posing as metal heads certainly is: the idea of one breed of smirky, coked-out moron dressing up as another breed of smirky, coked-out moron is one I find pretty nauseating.


Foreigner, "I Wanna Know What Love Is"

Lots of the worst songs contain "wanna"s, managing, somehow, to stretching them past the limits of garden-variety human desire into something that first registers with the listener as obsessive and creepy, then manages to hammer home-most tragically of all-how obscenely foolish our unrealized needs, so often destined to remain so, can be. There's something so desperate and pathetic in this epic yet somehow insincere-listen to how the lyrics try to proclaim some weight-of-the-world, yearbook-quotes profundity, how the singer claims to have scoured the globe in search of that obscure object of desire-cry of loneliness that it's downright compelling in the grim, ugly way that the actions of guys who just want to get laiiid are.


Nas feat. Puff Daddy, "Hate Me Now"

By the time this track hits its pre-verse interlude of "Die motherfucker die motherfucker die / You don't give a fuck I don't give a fuck / Go down any way you want it to go down," it seems like we're listening to an operatic parody of all the excess-based criticisms that have been leveled at hip-hop; would that its lyricist had anything else to offer besides orchestra-loop overkill and pitiful squawk-box nihilism. It's because of this that it's one of the saddest songs I've heard, as witless, spiteful and devoid of joy as its video clip, which manages to conflate images of crucifixion and Cristal-spitting.


Dan Hill, "Sometimes When We Touch"

"At times I want to break you / And drive you to your knees," goes what is perhaps the most unsettling-appalling, too-line in this passive-aggressive, blood-curdling wimpier-than-thou-and-in-that-there-is-magnificence ballad. It always sounded to me like the kind of incoherent voicemail a drunken, emotionally stunted accountant would leave the woman who's just terminated a loveless affair with him, set to fern-bar budget piano-and-strings accompaniment. Can I borrow a feeling?