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Music is essentially the most important thing in my life. It's been that way for decades, and I cherish thousands upon thousands of songs, bands, and albums. Of course, that means that as an angsty teen, I was insufferable. My formative years were from roughly 1997, when I received my first album (Everclear's 'So Much For the Afterglow") to my freshman year of college (when I bought Boards of Canada's 'Music Has the Right to Children', Bonnie Prince Billy's 'I See a Darkness', and the Super Furry Animals Singles Compilation in one outing). This was the heyday of not just Total Request Live, nu-metal, emo, cheezy R&B, shiny suit rappers, post-post grunge dickheads and the boyest of boy bands, it was also the Napster/Aimster/Kazaa Era. This means I could fill up countless blank CDs with the worst mixes you could ever imagine. For every one song I still listen to from that time, there are about 3,000 that make me shutter with the force of a million Fukushimas. Not only did I have the worst taste in music, I considered myself some kind of 13 year old tastemaker. This next statement is 100% true. I once told my classmates that I had discovered Eminem after seeing the 'My Name Is' video two weeks before everyone else in my VERY SUBURBAN grade school in Ohio (and I must once again stress that Ohio is not this desolate taste wasteland everyone that's never left Park Slope insists it is. That said, this grade school was because it was a grade school). Long story short, I have countless musical skeletons that no one should be proud of.
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All that said, I think it's important to be brutally honest with yourself. I could bury this stuff forever, but at one point quite a lot of this music meant something to me, and countless other hapless kids that knew they had a passion for music, but weren't exposed to anything better or in some cases not ready for the IMPORTANT STUFF yet. That time is really important to a kid/teenager. Everything sucks, you're angry and you don't know quite why, and you don't realize that there's something outside of you're own awful, self-indulgent bubble of you. Also, if you still love the music I'm going to be talking about, that's obviously cool too. The world's hard. You need to have something to love no matter what anyone else thinks about it. With that in mind, don't take it personal when I rip most of this music to shreds, because A.) it's going to happen shortly, B.) it's never a personal attack (at least with me), and C.)it's staggering the amount of 'trashy', 'derivitive', 'boring', 'soulless', and 'idiotic' music I listen to. Hell, I just professed my love of that fucking Farrah Abraham album, so take that for what you will when I start lacing into Hawthorne Heights.
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These are all going to be songs released in that 1996-2003 range, which was not only the worst time in modern music history (arguably), but gave us a huge glut of said awful music. This is the peak of the record companies' stranglehold on popular culture, as well as the beginning of it's precipitous downfall. I've also assigned a rating system to the songs I'm going to talk about. It's your standard five star ranking. Five stars means I would listen to this today and enjoy it. One star and it's unlistenable. Pretty simple. But to start out, I'm going straight for the most humiliating bullshit that I listened to REPEATEDLY. These are the worst songs I listened to dozens of times. This is going to hurt. BAD.
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Alexisonfire - '44 Caliber Love Letter'. From the 2002 album 'Alexisonfire'.
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All that said, I think it's important to be brutally honest with yourself. I could bury this stuff forever, but at one point quite a lot of this music meant something to me, and countless other hapless kids that knew they had a passion for music, but weren't exposed to anything better or in some cases not ready for the IMPORTANT STUFF yet. That time is really important to a kid/teenager. Everything sucks, you're angry and you don't know quite why, and you don't realize that there's something outside of you're own awful, self-indulgent bubble of you. Also, if you still love the music I'm going to be talking about, that's obviously cool too. The world's hard. You need to have something to love no matter what anyone else thinks about it. With that in mind, don't take it personal when I rip most of this music to shreds, because A.) it's going to happen shortly, B.) it's never a personal attack (at least with me), and C.)it's staggering the amount of 'trashy', 'derivitive', 'boring', 'soulless', and 'idiotic' music I listen to. Hell, I just professed my love of that fucking Farrah Abraham album, so take that for what you will when I start lacing into Hawthorne Heights.
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These are all going to be songs released in that 1996-2003 range, which was not only the worst time in modern music history (arguably), but gave us a huge glut of said awful music. This is the peak of the record companies' stranglehold on popular culture, as well as the beginning of it's precipitous downfall. I've also assigned a rating system to the songs I'm going to talk about. It's your standard five star ranking. Five stars means I would listen to this today and enjoy it. One star and it's unlistenable. Pretty simple. But to start out, I'm going straight for the most humiliating bullshit that I listened to REPEATEDLY. These are the worst songs I listened to dozens of times. This is going to hurt. BAD.
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Alexisonfire - '44 Caliber Love Letter'. From the 2002 album 'Alexisonfire'.
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I told you I was going to be brutally honest. Jesus, this album was so important to this beautiful little snowflake. Seemingly super-underground, screamo self-righteousness with two Catholic schoolgirls in a switchblade fight on the cover? Yeah, I was the twat this album was made for. Oh, I openly rejected the emo lifestyle, but I was a ball of directionless rage and high energy that needed to be the center of attention AT ALL COSTS, so this album hooked me through my sub-consciousness' back door. I listened to this album repeatedly, especially driving home from football practice (CONTRADICTIONS!!!) with my friend Andy and my brother. I thought I was the paragon of emotional depth and complexity. Windows down in my RAV4. Sleeveless weightlifting shirt flapping in the open air. Alpine bumpin' something so BEAUTIFULLY GODDAMNED TRAGIC you'd think it was written in tears of blood. It was quite a sight. Alexisonfire are from Canada, and formed only ONE YEAR before releasing this momument to being different in an inconsequential way. They futzed around doing whatever the fuck this is from 2001 to 2011 without making much of a dent in popular culture before disbanding without much fanfare. The band's guitarist went on to form folk group City and Colour, which is odd. The rest of the band hasn't done much. The other guitarist formed a band called Black Lungs, and the drummer joined a band called Cunter, which is pretty great. Also, the band's official website was theonlybandever.com, which is unforgiveable.
BLITZ GIVES THIS ONE CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRL JUMPER OUT OF FIVE.
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American Hi-Fi - 'Flavor of the Weak'. From the 2001 album 'American Hi-Fi'.
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Everything about this video is a lie. An obvious parody of the 15 minute idiot masterpiece 'Heavy Metal Parking Lot', American Hi-Fi is so thoroughly not metal that it makes Britny Fox sound like Pig Destroyer. This all screams, 'Give us some completely unwarranted street cred, please!'. The hot lady in the cut off Saxon (!!!) shirt, the whiskey guzzling, the pixelated middle fingers, it all comes accross as trying WAAAAAY too hard for a band fronted by a dude who looks like a less threatening James Van Der Beek (That dude, by the way, is Stacy Adams, former drummer for Veruca Salt and Letters to Cleo. That's batshit crazy). This was the first song I ever burned onto a CD. That mixtape (dubbed 'The Arby's Pirate Mix' because I'm a fucking idiot) had some mind-numbingly idiotic stuff on it, and this now seems an appropriate lead-off cut to my inaugural slapdash collection of jackassery. GIRLS DON'T FUCKING GET IT, MAN! THAT GUY'S A DICK AND I'M ALL SORTS OF AWESOME WITH MY POLITE CHARM AND MY RAV4 COVERED WITH 311 AND ALKALINE TRIO STICKERS! HI-FI FORUUUURRRRRVUUUUR! It really set the pace for what was to come. Am Hi-Fi released a follow up to this album that I didn't even care about back then, but they're still together according to my intense research on Wikipedia and are maybe making their fifth album this year. Bully on ya, Stacy.
BLITZ GIVES THIS TWO TRANS-AMS OUT OF FIVE.
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Bloodhound Gang - 'Mope'. From the 1999 album (SIGH) 'Hooray For Boobies'.
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There's no reason to like this band if you're not thirteen. Good thing I was thirteen when this came out, right? Even though 'Hooray For Boobies' was WAAAAAAY more famous for the single 'The Bad Touch', this was always my favorite song from the album. It's a pastiche of really childish bullshit. The Falco, Metallica and Frankie Goes to Hollywood breakdowns (that seem to come out of nowhere) were a revelation to me at the time. As was the ridiculous Pac-Man breakdown, which I would quote CONSTANTLY. This hit me around grade 7 or 8, and this was almost tailor-made for my idiot friends and my sensibilities. In a sad and strange way, this could be one of the most important songs I ever heard. It's dense with pop culture in-jokes that made me curious to seek out what they meant. The album brought together (in a very basic way) several different genres of music that I was inspired to check out. They were also one of the first band of straight dudes to address the homosexuality issue. Granted, it was due to perceived homophobia, but lead singer Jimmy Pop went out to write for a gay porn magazine (of course it was a porno mag) and come out saying that he was pro-gay. Sure it's INTENSELY childish and often played for laughs, but to a kid in the late nineties surrounded by intense homophobia (look, Ohio's cool, but some things are accurate about it), even that kind of childish affirmation was huge, especially to a straight kid that was frankly afraid to support something that could cause you to be instantly shunned by your classmates. I know how insane all of that sounds, that's because it totally is. That doesn't make it any less tragically truthful. Bloodhound Gang continue to this day, and actually just got into an international incident when they descerated the Russian flag while on tour in the Ukraine, something I'm sure none of you care about. I shouldn't still like this song. It would be humiliating for someone who champions Riot Season Records and John Hodgman and Mikal Cronin and The Holy Mountain and other ultra-chic, hip, insightful artists and generally thinks he's above dick jokes to love this song. But, I then again...
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG FOUR PAC-MEN OUT OF FIVE.
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K-Ci and Jo-Jo - 'Tell Me It's Real'. From the 1999 album 'It's Real'.
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It's about time to touch on my obsession with schmaltzy-as-fuck R&B. NAME ONE HUSKY WHITE KID THAT OWNED K-CI AND JO-JO'S FIRST TWO RECORDS. You can't? Because I certainly can. K-Ci and Jo-Jo represents the most over-the-top, dripping with earnestness R&B of this time, and I fucking couldn't get enough. Listen to that shit. That angelic-as-fuck string section soaring over the raw emotion emoting from those two men. Fucking glorious. What can I say? I was a hapless romantic. Not anymore though. Now I'm a sexless automaton, pistons firing on pure confidence and a metric fuckton of American Spirits. Not unlike the hair metal bubble that popped when the world realized Nirvana existed, this type of buttery-smooth crooning disappeared out of nowhere one day. Probably the day Sisqo left Dru Hill and made 'Thong Song'. This burst bubble hit K-Ci and Jo-Jo hard. They released an album in 2008 that only came out in Japan, which is appropriate and depressing. Now, since this entry isn't nearly humiliating enough, I'll say this: I once tried to serinade a girl to their hit 'All My Life'. It didn't work, mostly because I tried to do it in my bedroom, with my brother just outside the door, as well as both of our parents in our kitchen. For something so thoroughly planned out, it was SOOOOOO poorly planned out. Oh, also K-Ci was arrested for indecent exposure for exposing himself onstage in front of both adults and children. HE'S LIKE THE BLACK JIM MORRISON!
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG THREE EXPOSED COCKS OUT OF FIVE.
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Bad Ronald - 'Let's Begin (Shoot the Shit)'. From the 2001 album 'Bad Ronald'.
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This one's particularly painful. I don't suffer bad rap anymore, but Bad Ronald is proof that I not only suffered it at one time, I fucking loved it. There's nothing redeeming about this awful video. The video is Pre-Crank Yankers/Wonder Showzen/Avenue Q, so the dirty puppet/kid show thing was new to me at the time, but even then I knew that it was a dumb idea. But easily the worst thing about the video would be the girls. Whatever the fuck THAT is isn't sexy. It's infantilization to the point of being almost pedophilic. It looped itself around and became an ouroboros of upsetting. It's not surprising that these guys weren't around long. This was their only record, and there's been nary a word about them since they folded up shop. Probably because of the creepy fucking video. Just a guess. But there's an odd catchiness to the beat, and I am mesmerized by that turtle furry kick-sliding on the dance floor for some odd reason.
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG TWO ONESIES OUT OF FIVE.
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