1. "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood - Can someone please make this song go away already? I cannot seem to do my laundry or go to a supermarket or fucking step outside of my damn apartment without hearing that woman bleat about her Louisville Slugger and both of those headlights. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAKE IT STOP!
2. "Believe" by Cher - Again, another laundry room staple. I'll be the first to admit that upon its sickly debut in 1998, that little synthetic vocal effect that finally revealed Cher to be the evil, soulless replicant we all suspected she was to be momentarily intriguing, but enough is enough. If this is what life after love is like, I want no part of it.
3. "You're the First, the Last, My Everything" by Barry White - I'm still blaming "Ali McBeal" for this one. Look, I have nothing against classic soul. I own my share of Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield albums, but if I never heard this shlocky, wheezy exhortation from the late Mr. White ever again, that'd be just peachy with me. Along with being slimily tentacled to the afore-mentioned sit-com, I think my ire towards this song dates back to my endless nights manning the TIME Magazine News Desk. On Thursday and Friday nights, there was an irritating ersatz Barry White of dubious repute who set up shop at Rockefeller Center right on 6th Avenue. Said impersonator would ply his vile craft right in front of the McGraw Hill building, across the street from my then office, singing two or three specific songs in endless rotations. He must have picked my exact shifts for his performance window, as his ham-fisted butcherings of the late Love Walrus' catalog would come echoing up through the concrete canyon with maddening inescapability. It made me want to go down there with a bowie knife and cut him into filets.
4. "Deacon Blue" by Steely Dan - This band was never my cup of tea. Coffee table jazz-rock for people with patches on the elbows of their corduroy blazers, hanging out in 70's wine bars. I heard "Deacon Blue" positively blasting in St. Mark's Books earlier this week, and it immediately drained me of my desire to buy anything there ever again.
5. "Captain Jack" by Billy Joel - I mean, really. I know it's an American classic rock radio staple and all (admittedly not necessarily an accolade by any stretch), but have you ever really listened to it? Sure, it's dressed up in robust pomp and circumstance, complete with elegantly simple piano figures and elegiac, Procol Harumesque organ augmentation towards the end, but ultimately it's simply a portrait of some lost Long Island xenophobe with poor social skills and a personal hygene problem. And what exactly is sage-like William espousing here? It doesn't really sound like too much of a cautionary tale (despite the warnings against not keeping in style and feeding your head -- the same advice Grace Slick gave us in "White Rabbit" -- and allowing your mother to make your bed past the age of 21). His constant invocation of Captain Jack's services in the chorus (ahh, the myriad cure-all that is marijuana) sounds like a hearty, solace-giving thumbs up, despite the fact that he derided his protagonist's world as being "so dead" merely a verse before it. So which is it, Billy, feeding one's head, keeping in style, not picking one's nose and needlessly masturbating or catching Captain Jack's "special island" ferry? Surely they're mutually exclusive, no? What is the bottom line? No matter how much of a lazy slob with no ambitions you are, it's okay `cos you can get high on the weekend?
I was feeding my kids breakfast this morning, inexplicably listening to yawnsome local "classic rock" station, Q104, they wheeled out this old warhorse (for the quadrillumpteeth time this week, undoubtedly...classic rock stations, despite the vast wealth of material to choose from, only seem to play the same fifteen songs). Again, I believe conventional wisdom has dictated that the "character" of Captain Jack that Joel alludes to in every chorus is indeed the demon cannabis (slyly personified as the jovially accomodating sea captain assigned the task of secret island escorting). That's fine and good and poetic license and all that -- but being the Devil's Advocate for a moment here -- why, then, in the forth stanza of this punishingly endless, Bataan-death-march of a song does Joel croon...
So you play your albums, and you smoke your pot
and you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot...
..abandoning the salty dog metaphor entirely. COULD IT BE that "Captain Jack" does not stand for simple marijuana after all but actually represents some other narcotic intoxicant (the "little push" before smiling Joel sings about being the push of the syringe plunger?)
I know, who cares, but the mind considers these things whilst feeding one's toddlers.
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