EAGLE-EYE CHERRY

Pop music is often unreasonable, especially when it comes to love. Pop singers are always making statements like “I ain’t got nothing / If I ain’t got you”, when they actually have a sextuple platinum album and a working relationship with Kanye West. They make wantonly hubristic statements like “There ain’t no mountain high enough / To keep me from getting to you” when they have virtually no mountaineering skills and would probably have great difficulty negotiating even a medium-sized peak.

But as unrealistic as those statements may be, consider this request from Swedish-American singer Eagle-Eye Cherry:

Save tonight
And fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow
Tomorrow I’ll be gone

This Billboard #5 hit comes on all earthy and sensual, like a badger yoga instructor, and then hits you with this doozy of an ultimatum: “Pause time,” says Eagle-Eye Cherry. “Find a way to postpone the dawn, and if you’re unsuccessful, I’ll leave you.” What kind of man would make such a request? Who would make their lover interrupt the fabric of space and time instead of just cancelling their trip? Worse, who would reward such behaviour with worldwide sales of more than four million?

Largely the UK, Sweden and France, as it turns out, although the United States deserves some of the blame as well.

Check the vid for this staple of the Woolworths Radio playlist:

The Save Tonight video

PAPA ROACH

Cut my life into pieces
This is my last resort

Ever get so mad you feel like the only way to deal is to shred an abstract concept? Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix can relate.

Suffocation
No breathing
Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding

Ever get so confused about the verb “cut” you need to first define “suffocation” and then declare your nonchalance about the entire scenario? He can relate to that, too. Heck, look at the guy’s motivation.

3 DOORS DOWN

Whenever someone comes up to me with big fucking teary eyes to bitch about how much they hate Fall Out Boy or Kings Of Leon or whatever I tell them to grow a big fucking pair of testicles and suck it the fuck up because it could be SO MUCH WORSE. I’m not here to argue in favour of either of those bands, although I’m thankful to Caleb Followill for his representation of what Michael Hutchence’ singing voice in the final throes of auto-erotic asphyxiation might have sounded like. I just remember the early noughts, when 3 Doors Down were jostling with Papa Roach, Fuel and Lifehouse for the top of the charts. Forget the “Tech Wreck” and the “Millennium Bug”, the wind of Armageddon we were sailing so dangerously close to in the year 2000 was actually just really shitty music.

Here’s the video for 3 Doors Down’s signature travesty, Kryptonite:

WHEATUS

I don’t wanna be one of those people who hits their mid-20s and starts bitching about how much better music was ten years ago but I really feel like I owe Wheatus some respect. It’s a very small amount of respect, and if I was expressing it in some sort of official documentation there’d be asterisks and shit flying off all over the place with the conditions, limitations and instructions for how the respect should be administered. Still: in between buying the Teenage Dirtbag single in year nine and reviving it as my signature karaoke number last year, I did a lot of hatin’, and it was undeserved hatin’. Check out the cover of the Teenage Dirtbag single:

SUGAR RAY

Everything at the moment is ‘90s this, ‘90s that. Everyone’s all about checked shirts and Pavement guitars and Pavement reformations. WELL, GUESS WHAT, WORLD? The ‘90s weren’t just about power-chords and upbeat, jangly melodies. They were uglier than that. They were about dreadlocks, and raving, and bondage clothing in public, and actually, most of the good stuff about music in the 90s was nicked from ‘70s power-pop. Here’s the cold, hard reality: if there’s one sound that was unique to 1990s rock, it was jock-funk.

Sugar Ray might not have slapped their bass guitars as hard as, say, The Rage Against The Machines or Incubus, but they took the pretty-boy appeal that Incubus’ Brandon “Shirtless” Boyd had going on and jocked it up with tatts, bucket hats and goatees. BOOM. Instant commercial appeal. How could they go wrong?

BAHA MEN

OK, so. It’s been brought to my attention that I may have been a bit harsh to certain bands on this blog. Maybe I was a little quick to make accusations of “worst rhyming couplet EVER”. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to declare consistent awfulness. I can’t vouch for any claims made in the comments that Barenaked Ladies are credible and worthwhile musical act, but I know this: while they may be both annoyingly energetic and Canadian, their musical crimes are minor compared to the atrocities committed by the Baha Men.

PUDDLE OF MUDD

Definitely my favourite part of the whole nu metal schtick was their boner for misspelling words. As a genre, it was pretty heavy on gimmicks: not just the really obvious aural ones, like superfluous turntables and drop-D tuning, but also the visual ones, like sunglasses with coloured lenses, red baseball caps and porn star girlfriends.

The misspelling thing was their badge of pride, though. It started with the granddaddies, Korn, who took a humble cereal grain, added a K and flipped that R backwards. They passed on their Midas touch to Limp Bizkit, who sired the likes of Staind and Puddle of Mudd.

Cutest couple ever!

This tactic helped the already ridiculously popular rap-rockers bag extra fans. Those who weren’t drawn in by the fat-with-a-ph beats could dig the high Scrabble scores they racked up with letters like k and z dropping all over the joint*, or the fact that their out of touch, middle-aged parents thought they were listening to Corn and Limp Biscuit. (*FACT: the only time you can play a proper noun in Scrabble is when it’s the name of a nu-metal band.)

SHAWN MULLINS

The inauguration of Barack Obama was a glorious occasion for Americans of all walks of life. FACT. Not just because the United States scored itself a capable and inspiring black president, although that was pretty swell, but because 1.5 million people in Washington D.C.’s National Mall got to gently rock out to Shawn Mullin’s “Lullabye”.

In case you haven’t listened to commercial rock radio lately, “Lullabye” was the falsettoid abortion that Shawn Mullins hit paydirt with in 1999:

The “Lullabye” video.

Basically, it’s a song about some Hollywood brat with rich parents who gets a little bummed about the “devils in this angel town” snore snore. Big fucking deal, right? Living in Los Angeles and having too much money is an easy fix. It even gets you out of jail.

BARENAKED LADIES

Canadians are a pretty easy target. After all, they’re moose-lovin’ yokels who comically mispronounce their vowels (what’s that all aboot? LOL). But don’t feel sorry for them; they made their bed when they bought the records and went to the shows of the Barenaked Ladies, a band so consistently awful that even uncontacted tribes in the deepest Amazon roll their eyes when they hear the word ‘Canada’.

An uncontacted tribe reviews the latest Barenaked Ladies album, Snacktime!

To get just a little bit poetic, Barenaked Ladies had their roots in crap, were fertilised with a nutritious crap formula and grew into a mighty crap maple tree in 1998, before wilting into a gnarled and decomposing crap shrub from 1999 onwards. They’re the band responsible for the empirically-verified worst rhyming couplet of all time: “Chickity china the Chinese chicken / You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin’.”

BLESSID UNION OF SOULS

Supposedly everyone has one good song in them or some shit. Interestingly, when I was googling the origins of that ridiculous statement, I clicked on a link to this amazing website about “CORRUPT DEVIL ROCK MUSIC”. THEY HAVE TEXT IN THREE COLOURS. AND ITALICS.

Anyway, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is a one-hit wonder. There’s certain criteria that have to be filled in order to fit the description of a one-hit wonder, and the most important is how annoying the big song is. Other factors, like whether the band had more than one hit, aren’t that important.