Category: Audio Club

Yesterday the fiancee picked me up from work, and we were driving home, the radio playing. Suddenly Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days” started up, and I of course was mindlessly singing along, when I suddenly thought, “These are the dumbest lyrics ever.” Look:

Take your baby by the hair

And pull her close and there there there

Take your baby by the ears

And play upon her darkest fears

What? Oh, well. I’m nothing if not agreeable, so I did in fact grab my fiancee by the ears and then poured a cupful of live spiders down her shirt. Well, in my mind I did. But there’s more:

So take your baby by the wrist

And in her mouth an amethyst

Hot damn! So I released her ears and pried open the fiancee’s jaws. Jackpot! A shiny amethyst! I knew I had me a great gal.

Of course, these are not actually the stupidest lyrics ever. They’re just pretty damn stupid. The worst lyrics ever is of course going to be a pretty subjective topic, and everyone will have their own opinion. While thinking about this, I rejected the obvious choices, like Alanis Morrissette or (as was suggested to me) Leonard Nimoy just because their lyrics are so obviously witless and bad. I also passed over things like “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”–which I consider to be the most heinous song ever perpetrated on an innocent public–as well as skull-clutchers like the entire oeuvre of the Indigo Girls. So it’s all kind of arbitrary, but I just thought for a while about the relative terribleness of certain song lyrics that I think have gone unremarked on.

But before I leave off the Wanging Chungers, I do want to point out that I found a fucking great Mondegreen that someone had about that song. Someone posted somewhere that they had always heard the lyrics this way:

Take your baby by the ears,

and play upon her doggie spheres

Which is, you know, the best thing ever; it’s going onto my tombstone to baffle untold later generations. It’s like something out of the i ching.

Anyway. So I just was kind of free-associating with the idea of bad lyrics, when I remembered an old song from college days by that deathless old bastard Malcolm McLaren called, wrenchingly, “Something’s Jumpin’ in Your Shirt.” McLaren at his most winsomely affecting, don’t you think? Check out the lyrics:

No matter what I do, no matter what I say

My t-shirt’s changed since yesterday

I look into the mirror and my t-shirt’s got a mark

I guess it’s just because my life is falling apart

But I felt something hurting

And a boy said,

There’s somethin jumpin!

Jumpin in my shirt

Something’s jumpin, jumpin in your shirt

Something’s jumpin, does it really hurt?

Something’s jumpin, my hearts on red alert

Walk the body! Walk the body!

Oh my god! It’s like . . . Faulkner! I really, really like the t-shirt-as-life-barometer or whatever the hell it means. These lyrics are so awful, they really just make me very happy. Walk the body! Okay! I don’t even know what the fuck that means, but I’ll try it! Something’s jumpin’ in your shirt! Is it your heart? No, I think it’s clear that we’re talking about boobs. God, what a great, great bunch of horrible lyrics.

But that’s a pretty obscure song. How about MOR mainstay Toto? They had a pretty big hit with the chugging, faceless “Africa.” Read on!

I hear the drums echoing tonight

But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation

She’s coming in 12:30 flight

The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation

I stopped an old man along the way,

Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies

He turned to me as if to say, “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you”

That’s not so bad. I mean, it’s insipid and meaningless, but not the worst ever, though you can see where Mr. Mister was getting inspiration from. It makes no sense, of course: if she’s flying in, why are the moonlit wings reflecting the stars guiding him towards salvation? Or is he on the plane? Is that where he stopped the old man “along the way?” Never mind, no time! Hurry, boy!

It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you

There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do

I bless the rains down in Africa

Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

The wild dogs cry out in the night

As they grow restless longing for some solitary company

I know that I must do what’s right

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

Oh, what dizzying poetic heights! I particularly like the total creative surrender implied in the “hundred men or more” line. Hmmm . . . what’s a big, big number? More than a hundred! Brilliant. What the fuck do the rains in Africa have to do with anything anyway, and why would you bless them? All you’re doing is irritating those wild dogs (huh?), restless for whatever “solitary company” could possibly be. I’d be restless too. But the final line brings it all home. You know what a beautiful mountain is like? Another mountain.

I know I’m not exactly going after big game here, but hey, like I said, I’ve just been brain-dumping. But I must say, it’s time to bring out the big one; I’ve been waiting to find something that competes with the next song in terms of sheer fucking awfulness. It so clearly shoots for straight-faced Bukowskian hard-knuckle poeticality, and so spectacularly fails, I really find it kind of breathtaking. It’s worth quoting the entire mind-ripping thing, starting with the ass-tastic title. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the lyrics of Live:

“Insomnia and the Hole in the Universe”

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

and i sang the dirge song

my brother never missed a beat

my brother kicked his feet to sleep, sweet feet

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

and i sang the dirge song

Angel, don’t you have some bagels in my oven?

Lady, don’t you know a man when you see one?

Crazy lady with the shiny shoes, where are you?

Kick you feet and calm the space that makes

you hollow

little swami’s got his bowl to eat

little swami always walks his beat, sweet feet

little swami’s got his bowl to eat

and i sing the dirge song

it’s amazing how they come to see

the little swami with his bowl to eat, sweet feet

the little swami only wears a sheet

and won’t sing the dirge song

anal, tight-assed soldier with that dogged heart

put down your gun

we are ready to explode, we gotta take it smart

and take it slow

Holy fucking good golly! Sing the “dirge song,” brother! I don’t know what other kind of dirges there are, but oh well! Not that anything in there makes any fucking sense at all anyway! “Angel, don’t you have some bagels in my oven?” I think we’ve all asked this at least once in our lives.

I mean . . . jesus. I really don’t know what to do with all that. What’s the cross-reference foot fetish going on with his brother and the hungry swami? Who’s the poor soldier that gets sucker-punched at the end with the anal stuff? Maybe he should have kicked the space that made him hollow.

I fold. I mean, I just can’t do any better than what Live has already done. I take my baby by the wrist. I sing the dirge song. Where have all the cowboys gone?

Africa.

Saturday night, a friend celebrated her . . . mumble . . . something-or-other birthday, so we did what actors tragically often do: we gathered at a bar and performed the ancient ceremony known as karaoke. Different people have different reactions to this activity, usually ranging from “I want that person singing to burn to death right now,” all the way to “I want everyone else in the world to burn to death right now.” I understand. My own position is, “Singing in public is a scrotum-tightening ordeal of sheerest panic not unlike being attacked by rabid knife-brandishing gibbons.”

But you have to understand that it’s a little different going out with a bunch of actors (if you haven’t already, in which case, you should do so if only as a bold anthropological experiment). Actors are, famously and correctly, known for characteristics like deranged binge-drinking; an almost pathological lack of shame; a desperate craving for attention, even of the most negative sort, which is unfortunately at odds with a gnawing fear that at any given moment, someone somewhere nearby is being slightly more entertaining than themselves; and finally, in some remarkable cases, actual singing talent. That last trait is of course subjective when brought to bear on karaoke, whose arrangements of any given song have been anesthetized, splayed open, gutted with a baling hook, filled back up with chewed cardboard, and then hastily half-revived and sent reeling back out into the world. Karaoke arrangements are like Gorey’s doomed tatterdemalions: wan, utterly without hope, and about five seconds away from an awful death.

There are ways to deal with all this. Some actors are wonderful; their voices are perfect, and they rise above the insipid tripe oozing from the speakers behind them; they perform the song. But there are other people who take a different tack: they attack the song as if it had punched their kid sister in the face, and destroy it utterly. These are the people to be feared and locked cages and poked with sticks until science finds a way to understand them and then fuck with their brains cruelly, Clockwork Orange style, so they may one day be stopped.

Guess which group I’m writing about? There were some lovely performances that night, I’m sure, but their memories have been destroyed by the following people, all of whom I am, I should add, very fond of. Lest it seem otherwise.

First out of the gate on Saturday was T., who, evidently feeling that the world wasn’t quite Hobbesian enough for his liking, lit into an eye-popping rendition of Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” It actually started out okay, which is to say as okay as conceivably possible, for about four lines, when he mystifyingly substituted “karate” for “karama” in the lyrics, and then started stalking the tiny stage making frightening karate moves, kicking the air and leaping around like a frog on a hot plate. Since T. is about nine feet tall and ganglier-than-thou, he looked an awful lot like the muppet Animal after a thorough macing. He continued singing, exhorting everyone to madly karate “ALL! NIGHT! LONG!” and, because the rest of us have a tender spot for such awful things, we sang along. By the end, he had an awful lot of people in the bar staring into their drinks, wondering what fiendish thing had been slipped in there by the clearly malevolent bar staff.

Not long after this fearful spectacle came C., who ominously prefaced his performance with a suspiciously sincere bit of spoken dribble: “This song is about America.” Then the dire plonking strains of Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” started polluting the air, and C. whipped his vocal cords into a frenzied yelping that approximated human noise. C. paid very little attention to the actual melody–itself a mixed blessing–and opted instead for the Kamikaze approach: he’d lift his voice up into a stratospheric whoop and then come divebombing down in a murderous assault on the helpless notes lying far below, which burst into flames and screamed piteously and C. shot past them straight into the ground. Occasionally, he would totally unneccessarily howl, “This song is about homelessness!” Actually, the way C. performed it, it could have been about autocannibalism or cataclysmic viral spread.

Not long after C. finished his clumsy autopsy on Mr. Collins’ pithy social ruminations came the birthday girl, V. V. is one of the masters of this art form I’ve described, and I can honestly say that on one past occasion, her grim chemical-peel version of Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” lifted me to another plane of existence; it was so otherworldly and horrific, it had me holding my sides laughing, otherwise I would have surely rushed the stage and impaled her on many forks. On this night too, she was mining the 80s, with her frontal assault on Pat Benetar’s interminable “Love is a Battlefield.” You knew where she was going almost immediately with the initial “Whoooaaoooaaaooo” banshee wail, because she already sounded like Diamanda Galas stuck in a taffy puller. V. continued along in this vein, paying absolutely no heed to the song’s meter or rhythm, instead opting for a kind of Paul Harvey vs. Eric Bogosian dramatic interpretation: “Heartache to heartache . . . . . . . . . . WESTAND!” Her eyes bulging like Don Rickles undergoing electrotherapy. In the audience, the drinking rate redoubled itself, and the regulars in the bar were looking decidedly twitchy and haunted, like sentient lab rats, aware of their fate, but unable to do anything about it.

The last one I remember, however, is K. K. is also legendary for his talent for eviscerating perfectly good songs, though he didn’t pick one on Saturday. No, again Mr. Phil Collins was selected for the old artistic cornholing, this time “Against All Odds,” which, for terrible reasons known only to himself, K. began singing with the most offensively ridiculous and overblown Cajun accent imaginable. “Teee-aa-iike a lwoook a-et me NYAA-OOWWW!” he bleated, clutching the mic in both hands, eyes closed and head thrown back as if delivering the finest of gospel standards. “Thyeeeh’s juzz’an EEE-OOMPTY SPYUZZ!” It was just ghoulish, the aural equivalent of diving into a swimming pool filled with dead dogs.

There was more that night, but those are certainly the highlights of horridly good fun. We had predictably emptied most of the rest of the bar by the time I left, and they weren’t even done yet. So there’s an idea of what you can expect if you go out singing karaoke with actors, or at least actors who are my friends, who are all troublingly disturbed individuals, and who wants it any other way?

There are, I hope we can agree, certain places in the world where one feels comfortable: home, of course; perhaps the library; a favorite cafe; or maybe just in the arms of someone you love, or alternately, someone with vast amounts of money. Conversely, then, there are other places in the world that have the opposite effect: they make you uncomfortable, awkward, or, in the case of, say, Olive Garden, suicidal. These are some of the places that make me intensely uncomfortable, for varying reasons, and I think about them a lot, because I pass an example of some of them every day on my way to work.

First on the list are vinyl shops. That is to say, record stores, but you don’t say that any more: vinyl shops. It’s just as well not to call them “record stores,” because those barely exist any more. When I think of “record stores,” the mental picture I get is sort of like out of High Fidelity; a kind of run-down fucked up sort of broken-homey place owned by man-boys who don’t particularly care if you wander around the aisles for six days at a stretch so long as you don’t do something stupid, like talk to them. These are going the way of the dodo, and what’s replacing them are . . . awful. They have baffling, specially coded store names designed to give a minimum of information as to what they could possibly be selling: “Set Oscillator” or “Cathodella” or “David Cronenberg’s Icy Touch of Retail.” Now I’ll admit that these are at least a bit more euphonious than, oh, “Sam Goody,” but look at what a paltry statement that is. You can at least manage a warm feeling at the prospect of stealing CDs from something so lame as “Sam Goody,” but you suspect if you try anything of the sort at a vinyl shop, they will somehow impregnate you with angry, pinching nanobots in the night, and you will die a shuddering mass of broken nightmares.

I don’t even contemplate going into these joints, not the least of which is because I have no interest in their products, despite the fact that I own a turntable. I don’t know who the fuck any of these groups are, or when I do, they are unrecognizable. Hey, Basement Jaxx, “Where’s Your Head At”! I know that! No, you don’t. Pick it up. “12 Inch Gass Huffer Bitch Remix featuring Gwen Stefani.” WHAT? Who wants that? Judging by the sheened, leathered, incredibly hip people all standing around listening on brushed-steel headphones, they do. The thing is, they never look like they’re enjoying what they’re listening to. They look more like pathologists, trying to discover some malignant pattern buried in the sounds they are hearing. GUYS! I can tell you that: it’s Gwen Stefani.

Speaking of cool people and terrifying music, that brings me to dance joints. Now I don’t want to sound like a total curmudgeon, because I really, really do understand why people would like dance clubs: well, they like to dance, right? And it always looks pretty cathartic for those out there on the floor, making with the air-fucking and sweating it up and generally just cutting loose. That’s cool; I get that. But it’s reaaaally not my bag. For one thing, I dance like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and for another, I can only take the whump-whump-whump for so long before I feel like I’m caught in a gigantic ventricle of some alien beast, though probably of European heritage.

I should also confess that the last time I was at one of these for an actual entire evening, it was pretty miserable. It was many Halloweens ago, and someone had lent me a Star Trek: Next Generation uniform replica, and with a little makeup and hair gel, I made a pretty outstanding Data. The plan was to go to Neighbors, a gay-oriented dance club with a bunch of friends, which we did. I was apprehensive but willing as we went inside, but I knew pretty much immediately that this was Not For Me. There were people everywhere, and I don’t do crowds well at all, and the music was almost supernaturally loud; as my friends all ran screaming to the dance floor, I excused myself to the table farthest in the corner and sat. Because of this, everyone else shoved their bags and purses and wallets on me, a logistical puzzle I solved by dumping all the smaller bags into one large bag. Now I looked like Data Clampett, waiting forlornly for the rest of the family to strap his shit on top of the car. This was, by now, clearly going to be intolerable without a drink or nine, so I left a coat on my chair and went to the bar.

Now I began to see the error of my costume. It fight tightly, and now I was wending my way through hordes of mostly men, some in costumes still illegal in Georgia, and the obvious began happening. They grabbed me stupid. I mean, they just mauled me, and why not? It’s Halloween, it’s a gay bar, and here’s a kid who wore skin-tight Lycra: I might as well have put a sign on my back reading FRESH MEAT. I finally made it to the bar, where I waited for the most current geological age to end before being served. Noticing this vast temporal span involved in getting one lousy drink, I did the obvious, and ordered six. The bartender made them, and screamed something in Farsi at me. I yelled, “GABLAPPA!?!” Or at least that’s what he heard, because of the deafening din. After a bit more of this silliness, I finally realized that he wanted money for the drinks; he was screaming, “FIFTY-FOUR DOLLARS!” Jesus Christ on a skateboard. The drinks were nine bucks apiece. I had exactly twenty-five dollars left after the cover charge, and didn’t feel like howling this dire information back to the already impatient bartenders. Then I remembered that I had everyone else’s wallets, those deserting bastards! So I merrily robbed everyone and bought my drinks, reasoning (correctly) that they would be too blasted to notice later. Then I made my way through the dread Gauntlet of Probing Fingers, thinking dourly that at least if I had raging testicular lesions, someone would at least notice and tell me, allowing me an early treatment that could save my life. And I sat there the rest of the night, getting utterly bombed on ill-gotten, watery drinks.

So maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. But it certainly didn’t make me want to go back. I certainly know I don’t want to go back now: I’m much older. Probably nobody would grab me. And that, ironically enough, would probably depress me even more. Then Gwen Stefani would come on, and I’d think, “Jesus Christ. I’d rather be at the Olive Garden.”

First album ever purchased: Abba’s Greatest Hits

First album ever quiescently listened to purely because a girl I liked enjoyed it, which was torture, because I found the music so terrible, and the artist’s name so mockable, but you undergo these things when you like a girl and hope that maybe something will happen, but needless to say nothing ever did: Peabo Bryson (title forgotten)

First album bought with at least dim understanding that though I enjoyed it, I knew somehow that it was really total garbage: Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Flaunt It!

First album listened to obsessively that has no rational explanation in the context of my personal tastes: Soundtrack, Jesus Christ Superstar

Second album listened to obsessively that has no rational explanation in the context of my personal tastes: Switched On Bach

First song ever sobbingly and drunkenly requested of a radio DJ to be played at 2:30 am in the wake of a horrible breakup, and which was indeed played, after which I called the DJ back to even more sobbingly and drunkenly thank him for playing, a memory which causes me searing psychological agony: Phish, “Fast Enough For You”

First album ever bought by an unknown band, a decision which was viciously mocked by my friend Nick because he thought the band members had idiotic names, which they did, but I turned out to be prescient, because they went on to be horrifically popular, and hey, it’s a pretty good album, so I got to eventually viciously mock Nick right back for years, and pretty much just lorded it over him for being so short-sighted: Guns ‘N Roses, Appetite for Destruction

First album listened to which actually, literally, made me feel like at that moment my life was changing in some undefinable way: Who’s Next

First album purchased in a frenzy of sudden need because of one single song playing over the store’s stereo even though I had never heard of the band because I grew up in fucking Idaho where popular culture is anything but: New Order, Substance (For the record, the song was “Ceremony,” which interestingly, many years later, in another record store, was again playing over the stereo, only this time it was a cover version by Galaxie 500, and I was again consumed with need, and immediately bought their 4-CD box set on the spot, basically because I am hopeless.)

First album bought for only one song on the baseless assumption that the rest of the album would be as great as the hit single, but of course was terrible and now this band is a punchline: T’pau

First album to ever provoke a friendship-threatening argument spanning many weeks, ultimately culminating in an uneasy truce where I realized, simply and sadly, that I now felt that the friend in question was somehow diminished by failing to appreciate it: XTC, Skylarking

First album ever purchased, and subsequently enjoyed until one day, out of the blue, I was struck with the sudden surety of the notion that it actally fucking sucked, bad, and was in fact, unhealthy to listen to, and was summarily violently destroyed: Billy Squier, Emotions in Motion

First song to start playing in the unstoppable jukebox in my mind after writing that: “Everybody Wants You.”

Since the fiancee and I bought a (used, tired) car last June, things have been superb. She doesn’t have to take two buses to get to work and I . . . get to feel happy that she doesn’t have to take two buses to get to work. No, of course I’m being a doink; it’s very handy to have, and has spared our friends many ride-pleading phone calls.

One less salutary effect it has had on my life, however, is via the tape deck. Car radios are unpredictable and potentially life-threatening. One can be tooling along innocently only to be suddenly assaulted by the awful VOICE OF A DJ, and what happens? You burst into flames. Or worse, you could really fuck the dog and stumble onto a talk radio station. There you are, haplessly trying to avoid, say, Carly Simon, when this comes loping out of your speakers: “Liberals are all a bunch of Commie hand-wringing fairies!” (I may be paraphrasing.) What do you do then? There’s not much you can do: you pull over and quietly die.

And who needs that? You can’t just die whenever. How’s that going to play with the boss? “Where were you yesterday?” “I inadvertantly listened to talk radio and died.”

So hence the tape deck. But since all my tapes date to circa 1981-1989, the listening choices are thin. And horribly catastrophic: I stared down at my old collection with mounting horror a while back. Flesh for Lulu? The Screaming Blue Messiahs? Voivod? What the fuck? This was ghastlier than I had anticipated. The Woodentops? I fold. The idea of trying to listen to even a few songs, much less an entire tape, by any of these awful bands was inconceivable.

But then I hit on it: mixed tapes! I made many mix tapes while in college, and they are composed of a whole bunch of terrible songs by a revolving set of terrible bands! I can handle that. Or so I thought. Here’s a sampling of some songs off of a tape I was listening to recently. Notice how well they all hang together stylistically.

Clan of Xymox, “Phoenix of My Heart”

Nitzer Ebb, “Lightning Man”

Paul Simon, “The Coast”

Jesus Jones, “Lost in Space”

Revolting Cocks, “Attack Ships on Fire”

Danielle Dax, “Whistling for His Love”

The Smiths, “How Soon is Now?”

Lou Reed, “Fly Into The Sun”

Durutti Column, “Red Shoes”

What a depressing list. Not that there aren’t some good songs in there, but they should never share the same car. Fuck, they shouldn’t share the same freeway. Also, there are some fabulously awful songs in there: Jesus Jones? Better, a Jesus Jones song that nobody ever heard of? What’s wrong with me? Oh, and the Xymox song? It’s a terribly squishy synth-mope song that sounded dated about fifteen minutes after it was recorded in the studio, but it takes the Uncontrollable Crying and Vomiting Index sharply upwards at the end, where it segues, bafflingly and hideously, I shit you not, into a gooey, cooing cover of The Troggs’ “Wild Thing.” It really must be heard to be believed. And then never, ever heard again.

Much like talk radio.