Moon Cat wrote:
I Just Called to say I Love You - Motown genius cruelly inflicts one of the worst Butlins-band/karaoke/wedding-song songs upon the planet. Why, Stevie, why?!
I think you might have been there, but that this actually elicited non-ironic lighters in the air at Glastonbury was...disappointing.
Others, Eric Clapton's non-Yardbirds repertoire, let's say Tears In Heaven and Wonderful Tonight in particular. I find it hard to sympathise with a dude's emotive ballads when they've been known to make pro-Enoch Powellian anti-immigration rants on occasion. I know that's got little to do with the songs themselves, but they're pretty much little more than drippy, contrived puffs of ugly nothings so there's that, too.
I find blues rock in general, like many of the songs mentioned already and that one recently cited as "the best 9 minutes you'll hear this month", actively irritating in its blokey naffness. And yet I adore Les Rallizes Denudes. Must be they're either two very different strains, or I like my Blues mixed with a bit of Yellow.
I think maybe with Barbie Girl it's the fact that there's an insidiously memorable song underneath its eurotrashy aesthetics that makes people hate it so much. I like that campy, soulless europop stuff in short spells me'sen so it doesn't bother me- that song alone has more melodicism in it than the entirety of Deep Purple's career; the type of timeless simplicity which songwriters spend years fruitlessly trying to extract from their pianos- but I can still grok people who hate it as it's so damn upfront and unavoidable.
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