Flashes of Panic

Someone on a discussion list posted links to Blender’s 50 Worst Artists in Music History and an excerpt of their 50 Worst Songs Ever (incomplete because it’s in the current issue, unlike the Worst Artists.)

I read it with a sort of sick fascination, because although I agree with them on many counts (I can do without Celine Dion, for example,) like probably nearly anyone else who reads it, I actually like a few of the songs/bands mentioned.

I’m not personally disturbed by this, of course. I know the kind of person who works for a Felix Dennis publication like Blender, and I know that they derive a lot of personal pleasure and self-validation from trashing the pleasures of others. (The level of self-loathing in, say, Stuff can be downright alarming if you read it the right way.) They also sell a lot of magazines this way, flip-flopping month by month between “Radiohead: Greatest Innovative Geniuses in Rock History” and “Radiohead: Pretentious Art-Rock Wankers.” (I notice what they’re playing, of course, is oh so cool.)

It’s certainly fair to say that pop music has produced more than its fair share of trash. It’s probably also fair to say that I own copies of some of that trash, or once did. It’s also fair to say that otherwise good artists can produce some lousy stuff (Concrete Blonde just wasn’t the same after “Bloodletting”) and that some awful bands can produce something that resonates in your soul. (No examples here.) People can even be derivative, but sheesh, does everyone with a recording contract have to have the sort of groundbreaking impact of Nirvana?

Now let’s also add in the idea (raised on the same discussion list) that in the last century, recorded music has decimated the old model of music, which was personal performance. People compared themselves to the near-perfection of execution they were hearing in recorded music (“I’m taking checks and facing facts/that some producer with computers/fixes all my shitty tracks,” sings Ben Folds in “Rocking the Suburbs”) and they quit trying. You don’t often see a bunch of folks get together with instruments and just have a good old time pickin’ and singin’ anymore, do you? We hear the perfect music on the radio, and we pick out the ones that speak to our hearts on iTunes, and the guitars (mine, at least) gather some dust.

Well, even if I’m losing the live-vs.-recorded battle, I’m damn well not going to give up my Toad the Wet Sprocket CDs to some black-clad magazine editor in midtown Manhattan because he’s decided all they ever produced were “R.E.M. readymades.” Probably he listened to “All I Want” (their radio hit) and missed “Stories I Tell” or “Jam” or the ones that never made it to singles. Or maybe I should just stick to below-the-radar bands like The Church which get ignored, great or awful, by the Blenders of the world.

Maybe what I need is to make my own list: “1,000 Worst Magazines.” (Having worked in the magazine industry, the list of those I consider worthwhile is significantly shorter. Probably I could number them without taking my socks off.) Somewhere on there will be an entry for Blender: “Conceived on a night of drunken mistakes between Maxim and Spin, and got the worst of both parents.”