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Lou Reed "Transformer" [1972]

Those who suspected in the 60s that the Velvet Underground were the most talentless group of miscreant druggies propped up by their vague association with Andy Warhol and nothing else -- assuming you even heard of the fucking Velvet Underground before Lou Reed went solo -- were proven so incredibly, profoundly correct upon the release of Reed's solo breakthrough album "Transformer" it's impossible to exaggerate. This time he gets propped up by David Bowie as these two speed-freak zombies in pancake makeup and eyeliner race to the bottom of the realms of bad taste. And Lou Reed wins. Still struggling to hold a tune with his nasal quiver of a voice and with no ability to figure out an interesting chord progression, it takes Bowie's hyperactive session-wonk studio taskmastering to get "Transformer" out of the toilet, however briefly. But even Bowie is helpless beneath the most insipidly absurd lyric sheet ever printed -- retarded gender-bending mixed with amphetamine-fueled idiocy that makes "Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear" seem like Longfellow. It's probably very fortunate Reed likely remembers none of this period of his life, and because he's not yet dead from embarrassment it's a good indication he's never been curious to revisit it. Because even if you tried, you couldn't remotely approach this level of lowlife, unintentional comedy -- Lou Reed was the biggest clown rock music has ever produced, even bigger than Gene Simmons.

Tame Impala "Lonerism" [2012]

Wow — you’d think “futurism” this ridiculously lame would have been over as of the original “Flash Gordon,” or at least Shat-man Era “Star Trek.” The year 2012 must have been a very tough one for music critics whose job it is to find something interesting to say about new music; by this time 20 years ago, the entire landscape had been re-done from coke-B.O. leather to flea-riddled flannel. But between Tame Impala’s “Lonerism” and things like Frank Ocean’s “channel ORANGE” — the difference here being the guy named after a body of water virtually drowned onstage at the Grammys — indie rock in the 20-teens is about as nutritious as eating smoke. When Tame Impala (which I guess translates from pretentious rockstar-ese to “dead meat,” otherwise “underperforming Chevy”) stops dicking around and gets to some actual songs, they tend to sound exactly like John Lennon’s heroin nods (all of them — they all sounded the same, which is why his 70s output was so shitty). Basically, Tame Impala exists on the same airy plane as MGMT — young kids engaging in unapologetic multi-track abuse (“What do you mean, people used to not record music on computers?”) and stumbling into “psychedelia” simply because they can’t stop themselves from drenching everything in too many effects. It’s beard rock for people too immature to grow beards. Apparently this spaced-out aesthetic has flown all the way down-under, from where Tame Impala hails. Sound like CO2 won’t be the only major issue concerning our global atmosphere for the next decade or so.

Leonard Cohen "I'm Your Man" [1988]

OK, the contest is officially over -- no matter how big an ass-head Bob Dylan ever was (or big a washout he'd have become by the late 80's) -- at least he never stooped to cheap Euro-disco synth bullshit to push his egocentric lyrics on the music-buying public like Leonard Cohen does on "I'm Your Man." Who the fuck rescued this guy from obscurity, and why the fuck did they do it? Cheap, phoney Georgio Moroder backing tracks with a trio of session-hack sisters as backup singers, Cohen proves he really has no level of depth he won't sink to -- his tuneless basso voice is a perfect testament to this, as well. He sounds like Nick Cave fronting Donna Summers' studio band after burning them out on drugs, probably the way Cohen was able to seduce all those starlets in the 60s, when he was still a pedestrian talent but mercifully only carried around an acoustic guitar with him instead. Even though he's approaching Viagra-taking age during the "I'm Your Man" sessions, his lechery has not left him. Every Barry White was able to suppress the drool coming out his face hole while in front of a microphone. Maybe Serge Gainsbourg wasn't -- and that's clearly what Cohen's going for here: an aging scumbag Jew trying to get in the pants of the most amount of pseudo-sophisticated hot babes in the cheapest way possible -- but what the world really needs is fewer Serge Gainsbourgs, not more of them who speak in different languages.

Nirvana "In Utero" [1993]

The rise of the Seattle grunge movement was remarkably swift and relatively long-lasting, proving the music industry had already organized itself in reaction to the Warrant "She's My Cherry Pie"-led movement of LA hair metal, and apparently threw a dart to decide which group would be deigned their movement's "leader" and it hit Nirvana. So it's noisy, obnoxious, simplistic major-label debut "Nevermind" became anthemic of the early 90s -- so much so that their follow-up, "In Utero," could be any old piece of shit and still be considered a classic work of genius, and it was (any old piece of shit, that is). Here Kurt Cobain has made a choice very few people ever get to make: treat yourself seriously and branch out into bold new musical real estate under the spotlight at the risk of coming off too full of yourself, or just snort a lot of junk and go through the motions like a bitch. It becomes apparent upon revisiting "In Utero" not only which decision he took but why he couldn't wait to off himself. Some cynics claim he killed himself for the publicity, because he was a junkie with a one-way ticket or because his cunt of a wife had him murdered. Listen to this album and feel the weight of Cobain's fucked up decision to let Steve Albini produce him; I'd feel not only compelled to kill myself but Albini as well. In a way, I wish "In Utero" had come before "Nevermind;" that way Pearl Jam could have been the grunge poster boys and the movement would've lasted far less time.

Kid Creole and the Coconuts "Tropical Gangsters" [1982]

Every time you book a beach vacation, you fantasize about all the trouble-free bliss you're going to have -- but once you arrive there's always this one charming local in a Panama hat who fucks up your good time by flirting with your wife and offering to take her to all the popular tourist sites. Now imagine that guy with his own pop-calypso band and then consider how much you're going to hate Kid Creole and the Coconuts' "Tropical Gangsters." As if music fans in the early 80s didn't already have enough to contend with -- between the Boy George-led second British Invasion and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" coup still in blitzkrieg stage -- here comes a jive-ass Cab Calloway Jr. in Miami Vice pastels. Tempting as it is to call the sound of "Tropical Gangsters" simply Prince at Club Med, it's actually a lot less sexy and a lot more petty than that. Ripping off a "1999" beat to sing a song about other people ripping him off, Kid Creole clearly has a lot of nerve calling the kettle high-yella. Besides which, his grooves (if you can call them that) and his raps (which absolutely can't be called that) do a good job of making Huey Lewis & the News sound funky. What the Coconuts offer to the act must be in their no-doubt campy-as-hell live show (meaning they probably all have big tits, otherwise they would have been named something else), because they don't bring anything to this album the Pointer Sisters sleepwalking couldn't manage. Easiest way to tell this is a band of hack frauds, however, is to notice they're not even from the islands at all -- they're New Yorkers who have to take the 6 Line like every other schnook.

Richard & Linda Thompson "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" [1974]

Be forewarned: Richard and Linda Thompson's "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" is what happens when even studio hacks can't get anybody to finance their music project and they go ahead and do it anyway. Apparently recorded in the living room of their London flat, Fairport Convention survivors the Thompsons (not to be confused with the Thompson Twins -- these two were married until their lack of success drove them apart) offer a relatively useless glimpse into what Eric Clapton would have sounded like had he kept an old lady for more than five minutes. What was likely much more useful about this record was doubtlessly picked up by partners-in-crime Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who'd already pitched their tent in LA and were just looking for a huge void to exploit; they found it in this failed experiment of what I'll for now call "burb-rock," and built the entire kingdom of melodrama that were the Buckingham-Nicks years directly on it. White as a bedsheet soaked in Clorox, "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" countrifies British MOR rock and Britifies anything that may have previously existed as originally American (and worthwhile), progressing at a mild, anti-aggressive tempo throughout, with plenty of show-offy accompaniments that fit right into the mix. These two are nothing if not well-trained mutts, after all. But just as Fairport Convention was unjustly lauded in the 60s, so its remnants are bestowed undue praise -- did one of these people perform the Heimlich maneuver on Jann Wenner at a dinner party or something?

Soundgarden "Badmotorfinger" [1991]

You can't spell "Badmotorfinger" without "bong," nor "Soundgarden" without "dude." This album has the musical appeal for most women that setting your farts on fire does. Drop-tuned trailer guitar and bass playing, screech-metal 80s-style Sammy Hagar singing, ham-fisted prog-rock time-signature switcheroos and a Seattle-centric lyrical landscape of waste and depression were what A&M thought were going to break through in the marketplace for this foul group of stoner lumberjacks. That they may have partially succeeded is to lay much of the blame of the glum 90s Gen-X attitude directly before their scuffed-up Doc Martens. Sluggish and pulverizing, Soundgarden set out to make Tool sound like Milli Vanilli on "Badmotorfinger," which helpfully illustrates the album as a classic case of reverse-reaction overkill. It's no wonder music fans were still clinging to Madonna at the time; they didn't want to be trapped in this jockstrap-reeking locker room one second longer than they had to. They clearly learned how to play their instruments listening to Aerosmith 45s at 33 1/3, knowing that smackheads could care less if anything was being played at a danceable tempo, just so long as the low-end was loud enough to turn your vital organs into mush. Between Nirvana and Soundgarden, the next five-plus years of indie rock were set in stone: it was to be a miserable, bleak, rainy place even though the economy was on solid ground and Americans were prospering. Hmm -- perhaps the Seattle grunge movement was a big conspiratorial set-up by the political wing of the Republican party.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles "Going to a Go-Go" [1965]

Almost two full decades after Henry Ford kicked the bucket, somebody in Detroit finally had another good idea: music audiences liked female voices, but because the pre-sexual revolution 60s was still sexist as fuck, the music industry needed a guy who could sing like a girl (and preferably not a fairy). They struck pay-dirt with Smokey Robinson, a young Sam Cooke knock-off who sang like he had a clamp on his testicles. Motown chief Berry Gordy hadn't yet established himself as the totalitarian task-master (substituting Armani for typical military garb, like dictators from most second-world regions [upon which Detroit most certainly qualified] normally did), but he did already have a sweet tooth for strings, horns, vibes and other gooey sentiment. Smokey then employed this syrupy overproduction in his singles that make you feel like you're sinking into tacky 60s living room furniture at someone's home who don't really like all that much -- listening to "Going to a Go-Go" holds the same sort of awkward guilt. Don't be fooled by the puppy-dog looks of this album -- Motown meant serious business, and they were going to have everyone in America buy their 45s, even if you had to hide them from your racist parents. Thus, the operatives of this record company were early and fully conscious sell-outs, hell-bent on buffing the edges of the black American experience in the name of turning a quick buck. Not exactly honorable, but at least no one sicced any German shepherds on Smokey Robinson's ass.

Them Crooked Vultures "Them Crooked Vultures" [2009]

This makes it official: Josh Homme clearly must have pushed Dave Grohl out of the way of a speeding bus at some point. It's the only thing that remotely justifies not only Grohl's Jay Leno-like installation of himself into Homme's band Queens of the Stone Age earlier in the decade, but his impetus for cobbling the phony Led Zep tribute band Them Crooked Vultures together -- with himself playing Bonzo, Homme noodling like a cut-rate Jimmy Page (and for some reason crooning like Jack Bruce; somebody was confused what the game was) and John Paul Jones himself, who apparently had never picked up golf as a retirement activity. That they could get this group signed to RCA was a no-brainer, but of course neither it nor the album went anywhere. Led Zeppelin was instrumental in stomping the guts out of prog rock even before the band became a shell of its former self -- and that was 30 fucking years before "Them Crooked Vultures" was released. Jesus Christ, talk about clueless. Maybe Homme needed the money after a decade and a half of busting his ass to become a complete unknown on the contemporary rock scene. Maybe Jones' royalty money finally ran out? Fat fucking chance -- it's entirely possible Them Crooked Vultures owe Zep even more in royalties due to having ripped off their licks at every turn. Ultimately, it's fine if rock stars want to dress up like other rock stars once in awhile, but to expect that anyone would be interested in listening to it means either guys like these don't actually live in the real world or they just don't give a fuck what anyone expects from them.

The Doors "Morrison Hotel" [1970]

It's likely Jim Morrison always had a screw loose, but even after he stopped dropping acid it was clear his brain was cashed anyway. Following the monumental "Doors-in-Vegas" flop of the previous year's "The Soft Parade," Morrison's band of hack-lackeys -- who'd already put up with the most asinine and infantile behavior from their front man (at least until Elvis got back into music full-time) -- retreat back to however close they could get to garage rock while simultaneously existing as worthless, coddled rock stars. And still the Englebert Humperdinck conceits are there in "Morrison Hotel," in between Morrison's drunken rants about how shitty the world outside is, and how critically deranged he'd allowed himself to become. Amazingly, his poetry only got worse -- and he hadn't exactly set a high bar in the first place -- and still no one had bothered to tell Ray Manzarek his comicly horrid circus organ had to go. So here the Doors were, stuck as fuck with nowhere to go but down. I'm sure Elektra Records was fed up with them by now, too, especially now that Jim was turning into a fat-ass before their very eyes; they probably advised him, "Hey Jim -- yeah, just go ahead and whip it out next time you're onstage. Let's see what happens." I guess they felt maybe the liability of burning down "Morrison Hotel" with the Doors still in it might have come back on them somehow. Much easier to set Jim up with a flat in Paris and a smack dealer, and let things work themselves out.

My Bloody Valentine "Loveless" [1991]

Ever wonder what Enya's music would sound like if she was forced to live a tool shed for an entire Irish winter? That would be My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," an album that actually achieves what had long been thought impossible: it made Sonic Youth sound somewhat palatable. Dour creeps The Jesus and Mary Chain have more dynamics -- and more fun -- than My Bloody Valentine does here. Call these slo-mo sad-sacks Tangerine Nightmare. Aural corrosives gross out the stretched-out soundscapes of disinterest and petulance, with the overall effect coming off something like Beth Orton dying at the bottom of a well. By all means crank the "Loveless" CD at your apartment if you never want to meet any new people. And if you do, it'll be those types of hopelessly miserable schmucks who are drawn to walls of moody noise. Apparently there were plenty of them around in the early 90s, when the new era was eager to shed their boat shoes and pastel sweaters tied over their shoulders. But settling here in what is pretty much the sonic version of what the pissed-on Blarney Stone looks like under a microscope reeks of unnecessary haste and extremely bad taste. Perhaps My Bloody Valentine is engaging in a similar action to what the local drunks relieving themselves are; by listening to "Loveless" the joke's on us as we pucker up and give ourselves a hideous face-full of germs.

Squeeze "East Side Story" [1981]

If you're looking for the oldest-sounding new wave album of all time, you've just found it -- these tunes fart dust. White people -- especially the English -- always tend to water down the styles of music they play, but on "East Side Story," the faceless gang of pastey, verbose pub-rock lame-asses named Squeeze (as in "we can only ever get to second base, even though we're in a band") set themselves miles apart from the mild genre-faking of even the second-most boring group in the UK at the time. The Zombies as watery gruel, the Kinks as a tasteless lollipop, George Jones with a bullet through his head, "East Side Story" has everything one needs to know about how someone as rigid and visionless as Margaret Thatcher could come to rule that country. Largely produced by Elvis Costello -- as most sub-par efforts were in the early 80s -- Squeeze sounds like nothing so much as Paul McCartney if he'd had no talent and never made it. And that's before the flat, low-voiced putz gets a crack at singing lead, at which point it becomes pretty clear Squeeze is ultimately a mean-spirited joke band, parodying all the torturous mediocrities of their time and place. Add to the mix arrangement experiments that flop repeatedly, and all you really need to know is that "East Side Story" is one book you'd be wasting your time checking out.

The English Beat "I Just Can't Stop It" [1980]

Somebody traced the Specials and came out with a lame, sterilized approximation of two-tone ska. Some revival. Whatever fun ska music had to offer in the first place was always laced with the bitter pain felt by its artists, who were forced to live as second- and third-class citizens, at least until the Caribbean turned into a tourist trap. The Beat merely gives British white kids a reason to spill their pints while jumping around like jerkoffs as they're being spared the brawling dickheadedness of the punk movement. So it's just a re-hashing of pub rock with sax solos and guitar up-strumming on the "one-and." Which would have been fine as a minor curiosity, but not taken as a serious movement, unless by movement you mean "defecation." Even the dub-reggae passages here are weak tea; Lee "Scratch" Perry could've swatted these poseurs down with a simple flick of one of his dreadlocks. But this isn't Jamaica, it's England -- nobody chooses to visit there for the weather. Not only that, but if you suck in front of a black crowd, it'll likely be rudely suggested you leave the stage immediately. But white kids never seem to learn their lesson, generation after generation. England is, after all, where all new, legitimate forms of African American music go to die.

Van Morrison "Astral Weeks" [1968]

Before shameless white men in the 70s vented their spleens to try and prove they've got as much soul as black singers, there was Van Morrison, a shameless white man who got his start in the 60s. But on "Astral Weeks," this Irish barking frog employs his fat voice not in service of the latest rock single about the newest girl he's banging, but in this weird stringy and reedy series of extended vignettes while reading from the journals he wrote while obviously stoned. He's backed up by a bunch of faceless jazzers who work their asses off trying to wring some dynamics out of Morrison's persistently pitchy emoting; I hope he paid them a lot of money, but none of them ever worked with him again so he probably didn't. It's just as well he went from "Astral Weeks" to a more typical front-man for a pop-soul outfit, though I'm sure the reason he could never pull off the Otis Redding red suit was because he'd look too much like a singing fire hydrant, which would have tripped out far too many people back in the day. Back to "Astral Weeks," there is plenty of supple improvisation between the players, actually. The violins and the upright bass tend to mesh well with the simple keyboard and vibe figures, especially when they bury that lame acoustic guitar. The only thing this album needs is a decent singer.

Kool & the Gang "Celebrate!" [1980]

Tempting as it would be to blame Earth, Wind & Fire for the flaccid funk-pop that was to usher in the pre-Michael Jackson "Thriller" Era -- meaning ball-less white pop-rock groups like REO Speedwagon now had their black counterparts -- ultimately it was Stevie Wonder's "Songs in the Key of Life" that softened spirited grooves and church music until they resembled so many fluff-dried kittens, with pretentious jazz modulations and squeaky-clean horn sections. Even after disco was taken out to the woodshed, jive-ass groups like Village People and Kool & the Gang, especially on "Celebrate!," somehow persisted with their saccharine beats and vacuously generic positive sentiments. Kool & the Gang had been around for years by this time, but they were by now so edgeless they made Chuck Mangione sound like Miles Davis. Black pop had already taken a slick and greasy turn for the worse once Quincy Jones got his hooks into the Brothers Johnson, but Kool & the Gang take it another large step more neutered (another couple inches taken off the "brothers' johnson," if you will). Goddamn, it's hard not to be provoked to serious anger listening to this musical goosh; Kid Creole's even like, "toughen your shit up, fellas." I wonder if smooth jazz radio programmers simply plugged in "Celebrate!" on an endless loop instead of whatever crap they usually play that even one person would notice the difference.

Black Flag "Damaged" [1981]

Back in England around this time, family night at the pub had already gone completely to hell with the onset of prole-centric punk rock, turning places Grannie used to feel welcome in into noisy, aggressive shitholes. Southern California has never had any such tradition of "pub night," so when Black Flag brutalized their way onto the scene, they just turned everywhere they went into their own noisy, aggressive shithole -- the world became their personal disgusting toilet. About the only redeeming quality about their seminal (yes, semin-al as in "jizz") hardcore album "Damaged" is that it's recorded so poorly neither Greg Ginn's scratchy, shitass guitar nor Henry Rollins' scratchy, shitass vocals make anywhere near a deep impression. It's a good thing for everyone who's never had the displeasure of this third-rate assault, but also fortunate for Black Flag themselves: their lunkheaded attempts at satire might have been taken at face value by the immune-to-irony U.S. crowd and turned into "hip" new slogans for prime-time network TV, Budweiser and major Wall Street banking firms, had any of their tunes been the least bit palatable. To say these guys were a cut-rate Motorhead is to insult how quickly Lemmy would be able to dispense of these idiots with his facial warts alone.

The Hold Steady "Boys and Girls in America" [2006]

Got a much better title for this: "Dad and His Alcoholic Buddies Are Making a Huge Mistake Taking All Those Springsteen Albums to Heart." The Hold Steady are like college profs who pretend to be the E Street Band on the occasional Friday night at the local watering hole; their students show up and everyone has a harmless laugh... that is, until the group starts taking itself way too seriously and writes its own tunes, at which time the kids realize the joke's over and things have gotten very sad very fast. For The Hold Steady, though, it was just the beginning; "Boys and Girls in America" isn't even their first album -- yes, somebody for some reason let them make more than one of these. Having a better sense of humor than Graham Parker (hey -- call The Hold Steady "Graham Parker & the Humour"!) means about as much as saying you dress better than Jack Johnson. And just because your vocal delivery is overtly verbose and you dabbled in some drugs once upon a time, that doesn't make you Phil Lynott (and honestly, how much of a compliment would it be if you were?). These guys sound like Bill Cosby on mushrooms fronting the Counting Crows, writing endless vignettes about outdoor rock festivals for some reason. In a suitably hokey Weird Al context it might even have worked, but these guys' E Street pretense is a dead end with a brick wall.

Happy Mondays "Pills 'n Thrills and Bellyaches" [1990]

The Manchester rave scene produced easily the most boringly repetitive dance music of all time, and the pathetically atonal Happy Mondays were at the top of the slag heap. (Clearly, no rock sub-genre more desperately needed all the drugs they took.) On "Pills 'n Thrills and Bellyaches" they pulverize their two-chord vamps into snortable dust (that turns out to be mostly dirt) while Shaun Ryder neither can sing nor rap nor generate anything comprehensible but still makes a lot of noise with his fart-gun of a voice. And I don't care if he's so far whacked out he's beyond control -- even that chickenshit felon Jim Morrison could manage to carry a tune at least as far as the end of the stage, and he was blotto 24-7. Overall, Happy Mondays are a sort of hybrid between indie suckmeisters Dinosaur Jr and pastey whiteboy approximations of James Brown grooves. As progenitors of the "Madchester" scene, it may be the first time in history a musical style's barriers to entry consisted of an actual hole in the ground. Thus, stumbling into the marketplace were plenty of other joke-of-a-bands, like the Stone Roses and Charlatans UK. Key here is probably that these bands aren't from anywhere you could call worldly; Manchester is in the middle of fucking nowhere, and sheep make horrible music critics -- especially ones who take a lot of ex.

Barry White "Can't Get Enough" [1974]

"Can't Get Enough" -- enter Barry White fat joke here. Ultimately, it's hard to fault this hippopotamus in a leisure suit from trying to get over on the ladies any way he can, so naturally he leads with that deep, deep speaking voice. But singing-wise is another matter: he sounds like he just ate Lou Rawls. We got into a seriously gross glossiness in mid-70s soul music, and not only "Can't Get Enough" but pretty much all Barry White albums typify this cotton candy lewdness that took over the genre until record labels could figure out how to sell disco without using homosexuals. White is very, very hetero, even though his vast and ridiculous orchestrations sound like Isaac Hayes under three tons of birthday cake frosting. In retrospect, it seems very difficult to believe people actually did the nasty to this record without doubling over with laughter. The strings, synths, backup vocals, et. al. have more goop all over them than whatever Barry processed his hair with, and his lyric sheet reads like a series of overly sentimental wedding anniversary cards for male numbskulls who have zero ability to articulate themselves. And if women think the soundtrack men have in their heads while contemplating the women they love sounds anything at all like Barry White music, then their disappointment with the opposite sex is extremely well-deserved.

The Yardbirds "Five Live Yardbirds" [1964]

Being a music fan in the 60s must have really sucked. Nobody seemed to be able to get out of the way of the 1-4-5 chord progression; what the hell were you supposed to do if you were sick of the blues -- listen to goddamn Broadway soundtracks? Frank fucking Sinatra? Delta Blues sharecroppers played 1-4-5 for decades because they had no formal edumacation, but what the hell is the Yardbirds' excuse? Slipshod in both execution and recording method, there is zilch anyone could possibly glean from "Five Live Yardbirds" that might help inform why Eric Clapton would go on to have such a high-profile career. For instance, their pedestrian take on Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" drones on an excruciatingly long five and a half minutes, and you know what you get? Several -- several! -- Keith Relf harmonica solos while Clapton rings out tonic chords in the background. In fact, there are crappy harp solos infesting almost every track on this record. Unreal. As weak as the early Stones were as a rock 'n roll house band, the Yardbirds are a freaking joke by comparison. Second-rate rock 'n roll standards by a completely dispensable group of white London nobodies -- and when Clapton does finally get a solo, it's four bars long and buried way back in the mix. So who the fuck wrote "Clapton Is God" on that men's room wall? Knowing what we know about the guy today, Clapton must have written it himself.

Lauryn Hill "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" [1998]

It used to be that soul music -- if it was possible to find something to like about it -- felt immediate, greasy sweat and all. But by the time Fugees refugee Lauryn Hill gets around to releasing her solo debut, "The Miseducation of...," things were much different -- meticulously fussed-over vocal overdubs in the late 90s now attempt to mask the boring, stoner-tempo ballads and raps as if piling up voices is going to somehow amplify the humanism of the tunes. Fucking wrong. Somewhere D'Angelo can be heard complaining how many times Lauryn Hill harmonizes with herself on this CD. Add to this the bush-league-caliber urban poetry slam vignettes -- a passing fad that didn't pass anywhere near quickly enough -- and the typical blunt-smoker's inability to end a song in a reasonable amount of time. Also, there are plenty of interviews with inner city public high school kids talking about "love" for some reason, even though they add no particular insight save for the fact I'm happy I didn't have to attend school there myself. This album is basically an overworked version of the bare-bones Fugees album from a couple years before; between Hill and former bandmate Wyclef Jean, they decided to branch out with solo albums like they're members of Kiss or something. Overly self-righteous and with more gross jazz-flute that ever necessary, it's clear after revisiting this album that Hill's "miseducation" mostly consisted of her being too baked during music class.

N.W.A. "Straight Outta Compton" [1988]

Apparently eager to undo all the social consciousness from relatively intelligent East Coast rappers like Chuck D. and KRS-One, the self-named Niggas With Attitude (hey, don't fucking blame me), aka N.W.A., released its insipid, vulgar debut "Straight Outta Compton" celebrating the most violent and misogynistic fringes of ghetto life. As a result, progress for African-Americans was set back at least 30 years. Figures LA would go this route for contemporary black music; Hollywood had been stereotyping black people as criminals, thugs and pimps for decades. While white people were starting to dig The Fresh Prince, this album was a gangsta rap ambush; it's less a sub-genre than a plague akin to ebola, and helped spill blood in the projects for more than a decade, past when Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. got tooken out. As offensive as pretty much every second of this album is -- even Dr. Dre offends with his monotonous use of the 808 machine and the infinitely ripped off "Funky Drummer" --from Ice Cube to whoever the fuck else, it's squeaky voiced Eazy-E who most clearly, cartoonishly represents the self-deprecation and female disrespect that so deeply permeates the black lower class -- he's Alvin the Chipmunk with a life sentence. Not that the Reagan/Bush people paid this crap any mind -- to everyone's detriment. Had they, perhaps we could've seen the LA riots coming, maybe even OJ's bloody rampage. Basically, ignoring the warning signs of this album ruined everything about the 90s that grunge music failed to affect.

Deerhunter "Monomania" [2013]

How many effects are too many? Listen to Deerhunter's "Monomania" and find out conclusively. These guys sound like The Vines working at a haunted house (hmm -- might actually be what those guys are doing nowadays). Things here are so drenched in studio noise, even the singer from The Strokes is like "Check out the douchebag with the affected vocals." But these comments are probably still overselling what's going on here: perhaps all Deerhunter really is (Jesus, what's with that name, BTW? thought I was about to listen to a Ted Nugent tribute band) is a strummy little group of miscreants playing everything through the same broken amp speaker and recorded at the bottom of a canyon. It's possible the intention here was to -- especially via music biz groupthink (so you know what's coming next is a bad idea) -- combine the aggressive retardedness of The White Stripes with the suck-ass reverb and jangle overkill of MGMT. What ultimately sinks "Monomania," however, is right there in the album title: for all the plunky echo and noisy fuzz, the tracks soon start sounding the same. After all, there are only so many funky microbrews you can be willing to swallow before switching to something more palatable, especially if you thought the first one tasted like swill in the first place.

The Black Keys "Thickfreakness" [2003]

Just in case you ever wondered how someone would reinterpret 70s FM album-oriented rock after listening to it in a coma for a year, the answer is The Black Keys' "Thickfreakness," an album so sludgy it sounds like all the instruments were dipped in motor oil. Imagine if Paul Rodgers was even more drunk and played guitar himself the whole time -- it might have been enough for Jimmy Page to shake his skag habit and fire him from Swan Song. But in the early Aughts, it was the most thrifty (i.e. "cheapskatednest") time in music biz history; they all knew Napster was driving them into bankruptcy so set a limit of no more than two- or three-piece rock groups. Thus, Lynyrd Skynyrd had more personnel than an entire triple-bill of The White Stripes, The Black Keys and Wolfmother. To call them the "lean years" would be a drastic understatement; they were positively anorexic. So "Thickfreakness" therefore comes off as a discarded basement demo tape of whichever Black Crowes members (speaking of anorexic) weren't too stoned to show up to rehearsal. That means, just like the way Jack and Meg White trip over themselves trying to keep a groove from collapsing from sheer lack of talent, it's the same thing inflicting The Black Keys. Perhaps the record companies were too cheap to even allow for second takes? "Thickfreakness" is a painful reminder just how far a once-mighty genre has fallen.

Warren Zevon "Excitable Boy" [1978]

Welcome back to 1978, ladies and gents. We've been waiting for somebody -- anybody! -- to revisit a pop landscape so flat and overrun with LA session musicians it actually allowed people like Carly Simon and Steve Martin to have hit singles. Basically, the place was a barren wasteland following the twin nukes of "Hotel California" and "Rumours," yet somehow Warren Zevon's deadpan baritone elbowed its way into the mix with a lyric sheet that should have never left whatever high school misfit's bedroom it came out of. Werewolves as rock stars, absurd revenge fantasies and depressing fiction that illustrates he must have been stoned while reading Graham Greene and Jerzy Kosinski, Zevon was maybe somewhat original here but he's still terrible enough to gross out even Randy Newman. But far worst of all, however, on "Excitable Boy" he shows an utter willingness to give himself up to the sell-out trainwreck of lush, sappy ballads and embarrassingly insipid white disco that was Boz Skaggs' "Silk Degrees." If LA wasn't a disgusting town for the music biz before this time period, it most certainly was afterward. And for all Zevon's unlikely lyrical subject matter, he must shoulder a substantial amount of the burden for helping that town become a most unlivable place.

The Sonics "Here Are the Sonics" [1965]

So if you always thought The Troggs were too intellectual, you're in luck: The Sonics' debut, "Here Are the Sonics," comes off like a horribly ill-advised, pastey-white Little Richard cover band with big, dumb guitar. Why they weren't laughed out of the industry right away was because they were from the absolutely inconsequential Tacoma, WA. (Let's put it this way: even during Seattle's heyday in the 90's nobody gave a shit about Tacoma.) Apparently they built garages there, however; I'm sure the city planners would like to have that decision back after hearing this screaming, sloppy collection of mostly rock 'n roll standards which was recorded with the VU meters so far into the red they'd have made Leslie Kong throw up. Track after track these guys can barely choke down Hamburg-era Beatles, with the overall effect very reminiscent of the principle of cloning generating stupider and stupider renditions of the same thing. But wait -- this Pacific-Northwest train of misfortune doesn't end there: eventually the Black Keys found these numbskulls and managed a further rendition of this remedial rock yet even more stupid. It boggles the mind that anyone besides lumberjacks who couldn't access anything else to listen to back in the day would subject themselves to this.

The Verve "Urban Hymns" [1997]

Face it -- rock bands have never known how to handle samples, and they never should have tried. Anyone who's listened to The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" -- and that means everybody -- knows exactly what I'm talking about: they took that slow, sucky violin concerto loop and bopped everyone over the head with it mercilessly until we were begging for the Spice Girls to come save us. Yes, it was a very bleak way to end the Millennium. Elsewhere, the Verve keeps the same laconic groove throughout their breakout album "Urban Hymns" -- no rap songs, by the way, so someone probably should have re-thought that title -- apparently subscribing to the Charlatans UK newsletter, only the Verve sound like the hangover after the rave party. They also go for the stadium-lighter ballads of Oasis, but they're so glum they sound like they're ready to curl up under a blanket while onstage at the arena. Aerosmith in the late 70s gave better concerts than that. Apparently, these guys are under the impression that minor-key progressions innately have depth; really they just sound like lazy guys trying to sound like they have depth. Even Radiohead's like, "C'mon, chums -- buck up!" Just goes to show: if you do tons of drugs before you finally make it, you're bound to just bore the shit out of everybody when your time comes.

Earth, Wind & Fire "That's the Way of the World" [1975]

Beware of this album unless you want to hear what the Temptations would have sounded like if they'd gotten their asses kicked by Chicago (the band, not the whole city). "Prog-soul" was a sub-genre destined for disastrous failure; the only reason people let Stevie Wonder get away with it was they felt bad dissing a blind guy. But Earth, Wind and Fire are nothing if not shameless, allowing Philip Bailey to sing an octave above any of the Pointer Sisters and making the Spinners sound like punk rock by comparison. This album is the musical equivalent of synthetic cocoa butter. If the Ohio Players weren't such drug casualty fuck-ups, they might have been able to slap some sense into Maurice White, but it's possible the music industry wouldn't have cared anyway -- the cat of glossy smoothness was now out of the bag, and it was only a matter of time before label execs would conjure KC & the Sunshine Band to capitalize on the catastrophe with a suitably white group. Thus, instead of letting the raw soul of James Brown acolytes forge a new path, we were relegated to black Vegas' aural version of the Doug Henning magic show, which eventually was to create a wide opening for Lionel Ritchie, the black Barry Manilow. Yes, the 70s were a hideous embarrassment for everyone, but in no way did the coke-and-quaaludes crowd deserve anything as sentimentally sinister as this.

Crowded House "Crowded House" [1986]

OK, I get it -- apparently Loverboy started listening to some Alex Chilton tapes. No? Actually, Crowded House's self-titled debut album is the offshoot of Aussie/Kiwi (difference? anybody?) new wavers Split Enz (great name... if you want to make girls self-conscious about their hair), given a phony American heartland treatment. It actually worked. Because in the 80s they allowed pop groups to display the sunshine shooting out their asses (see: Waves, Katrina and the), nobody at the time found this cloying collection of smiley-faced boy pop the least bit offensive. Just when you thought the Reagan Era couldn't have gotten more clueless! Crowded House tries to win points coming off like Spandau Ballet without all the gay glitter, but ultimately this is dorm music for dweebs. Nobody's gonna knock on your door when you crank this crap unless it's to tell you to grow some hair on your nuts. Brothers Neil and Tim Finn do their utmost to try to approximate INXS, but they struggle mightily to free themselves from all the rainbows and unicorns. Let's assume you find something interesting about Elvis Costello (I don't see it myself, but whatever) -- take that away and it's what "Crowded House" delivers. Geez, I never thought I'd clamor for the plastic edge of Howard Jones until I listened to this.

Various Artists "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" [2000]

Here it is -- America's shameful history, in musical form. Imprisoned black folk, white drunks strumming guitars on the porch, sad love songs performed by a gross circle of dirty folkies, and a whole bunch of yakkin' about Jesus. All in the service of some campy prison escape movie employing a charm offensive to cover its bleak ruminations on class warfare, vanity and racism, with this soundtrack as one of its weapons. The reason it worked is the same reason folk music came to popularity a half-century before: the contemporary music scene at the time was absolute dogshit. It took Elvis and Little Richard to rescue society from the milquetoast abominations of the Weavers and Woody Guthrie, and it took a bunch of drugged-out, obvious garage rockers like the White Stripes to blast us out of this lame farmers' market of an album. Does anybody actually enjoy listening to the banjo, or is it just because it's the only thing poor folk could get their hands on -- like the way vegemite is big in Australia? This album is a lot like those "world music" albums from the 80s, where amateur musicians from distant lands like South Africa or Kentucky struggle to plunk out their little tunes on instruments they can barely handle and voices they scarcely are able to comprehend the overall effects of; it's not quaint or charming, it's actually just kind of hideous and pathetic.

Prince "1999" [1982]

There's a good rule of thumb that if someone's been an unbelievably obnoxious freak just to get your attention, you shouldn't believe them when they tell you they've changed. Prince, after years of disgusting everyone on the R&B scene with his itchy, hyper ditties about fucking his sister, makes his first lewd move toward mainstream crossover success with "1999." We all should have known better than to let this pint-size Rick James in through the front door. But no -- he's changed, he tells us here: instead of all the songs home recorded and under two minutes, in this album he puts a big, keyboard-heavy band in the studio and runs his simplistic lust-pop songs well past their pain threshold. Basically, he's still putting out the same number of tracks, but on double-album "1999" he's watered them all down with a lame 12-inch-single treatment. This gives him plenty of room to revert back to his true colors, where he's persistently trying to stick his purple wiener in your ear. The grooves are pretty much all interchangeable, too: stripped-down Kool & the Gang mixed with two-dimensional second British Invasion synthesizer. And if you're still somehow seduced by this midget pimp, keep in mind that once he's done sexing you up like a zoo monkey on Viagra, he's going to bend your ear about a lot of fundamentalist Christian bullshit. I mean, even Michael Jackson knew enough to keep that crap to himself.

Rolling Stones "Beggars Banquet" [1968]

Aaaaaaand then the serious narcotics set in. Prior to the release of "Beggars Banquet," the Rolling Stones existed as any other gang of unwashed limeys who did a face-plant every time they tried to copy the Beatles (which was often). But now the endless vamp repetition and slovenly performance of unmistakable smackheadedness marks a new era in Stones lore -- that of entitled, feckless junkies so mean-spirited they make John Lennon look like Bob Hope. Keith Richards has already begun to unravel as a guitar player, especially as a soloist, and one gets the impression he's found himself playing country licks quite by accident, as if the required mojo to play rock temporarily left him on his last nod and his limo's lost somewhere outside Nashville. Brian Jones is really out there for this record -- apparently flying around on his spaceship, because he barely shows up in the studio for any of this. Of course, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman are too amateur to even pretend they're not still trying to play like the Beatles, and Nicky Hopkins is forced to pick up all the chords the rest of the guys are too stoned to find. But on "Beggars Banquet," it's Mick Jagger who's really transformed -- from a misogynistic pub barker to a full-blown Satanistic rock star and underage groupie rapist... when he isn't faking Delta Blues singing so brazenly you can hear the brown shoe polish on his face. He should have been slapped to his senses right about this time, but who was going to do it? Hendrix and Morrison were even more fucked up than he was, and Dylan was just as lost on the country backroads as Richards.

Nas "Illmatic" [1994]

On Nas' supposed "breakthrough" CD "Illmatic" -- "breakthrough" is in quotes because nobody cared about this album when it came out -- the New York rapper does what was previously thought impossible: he makes the Geto Boys sound reasonable. Not much here but tales of drug-running in the 'hood that sound like they were left on the cutting room floor from the "Menace II Society" soundtrack. Then again, by this time the criminal element of hip-hop had migrated in droves to Compton; Nas probably couldn't get arrested on the streets of Queens in '94, try though he might. More claustrophobic and with sadder jazz passages than anything The Roots ever bummed anyone out with, "Illmatic" couldn't get anyone to even point a gun at Nas, let alone see him "get got" like Biggie Smalls did. About the only static Nas ever experienced publicly was in his beef with Jay-Z years later, and even though many lyrics were spilled in the back-and-forth rap feud, to this day nobody knows what the fuck either of them were talking about. But at least Jay-Z knew that strictly representing for the projects was no way to get rich. Then again, if Nas really smokes as many blunts as he brags about throughout this album, that he managed to get himself off the goddamn couch in the first place is at least somewhat noteworthy.

Katy Perry "Teenage Dream" [2010]

Yeah -- they had to call it "Teenage Dream" because "Sticky Sheets" was too vulgar, even as the reference was only technically provocative to the extent Katy Perry lies topless on a cloud of cotton candy on her album cover. Far less innocent is the cheaply conceived and expensively churned out production of the album's contents, all overblown party anthems barely concealing Perry's profound insecurities -- or, more likely, the highly researched profound insecurities among her high school fanbase demographic. How terrible it must be to have to exist as a female underclassman around this time: the bitchy cheerleaders have now become the pop stars, coldly ignoring their un-hot classmates and provoking older guys to text them pics of their dicks. (In retrospect, people like Katy Perry not only terrorize their schools but get to ruin politicians' careers, as well. How wonderful for all of us.) And for all the assertions she's really a responsible young woman just trying to maximize her youthful party years, her glossy, Autotuned lewdness was to lead directly to the otherworldy evil rise of Ke$ha, and for that Perry deserves a good, un-erotic spanking. Besides which, any high school bimbos content to follow her lead are going to eventually be subjected to morbidly embarrassing questions like: "What's that in your hair -- bubblegum or jizz?"

The Slits "Cut" [1979]

A back-of-the-envelope calculation that might indicate whether you're listening to punk rock or new wave goes something like this: a new waver brings his/her song to the party to hopefully keep the fun going; a punker brings his/her song to close the joint down immediately. That said, I still have no fucking idea what The Slits are trying to do on "Cut," the weird, manic debut from 3 British junkie chicks, one of whom actually has a German accent. Screaming, noodling, fucking, shoplifting and cooking up drugs is just some of the "fun" that's in store here -- it's almost like they're trying to get their listeners in trouble with the cops simply by playing this record, as if we're somehow complicit with these itchy, neurotic, often nauseating tunes and their reeking insubordination. Jesus, they even named themselves The Slits -- how can they or any of us have an ounce of self-respect any longer after knowing this? Musically, everything's just as bizarrely whacked-out: it's a combo of disorienting pop jangle and reggae grooves dismembered and disfigured like so many abused Barbie dolls. Lead freak Ari Up might be maliciously evil or she might be a complete moron; even after listening to this whole album it's impossible to know which. Basically, most strange girls you don't know might spell trouble, but usually it's because you want to fuck them. The Slits are serious trouble without it even passing your mind to want to kiss them.

The Coasters "The Coasters' Greatest Hits" [1959]

For some reason, people thought it was a good idea to take doo-wop and turn it into one big cartoon -- probably the same people who thought rock 'n roll in its uncut form was going to ruin America's youth. Not that there isn't a pretty good point to be made here, but why was this unserious, watered-down group of clowns considered in any way a viable alternative? Further separating The Coasters' sound from anything naturally derived was the inclusion of wiseass songwriters Lieber and Stoller, who'd earlier scored a hit getting Elvis to (likely unknowingly) sing a song about prison sex. These guys wrote campy, routinely stereotypical (heck, The Coasters could've been called The Stereotypicals, if it weren't for the fact records were still being recorded in mono back then) and lewd ditties with all the depth of Saturday morning TV, as if Chuck Berry were Captain Kangaroo. The music industry, for all its self-congratulatory "progressiveness," was actually quite myopic and cynical even back in the late 50s, when they apparently felt they couldn't sell a singing group like The Coasters without first turning them into a vaudeville act. They also brought in punchy, goofball sax solos that lead one directly and unfortunately to the theme song of "The Benny Hill Show." So yes, in retrospect, it's pretty clear this band and their handlers were trying to defuse rock 'n roll by continually pointing everything in the direction of The Catskills -- an ingeniously evil plan that just may have worked if The Coasters themselves were at all popular.

R.E.M. "Automatic for the People" [1992]

In the very title of R.E.M.'s "Automatic for the People," the band is confessing in plain sight they'll just put out any crap as long as their fans will buy it. Half-assed rip-offs of David Essex and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," among other random embarrassments, solidly mark R.E.M. fully ensconced in their middle sell-out period -- after major label disasters "Green" and "Out of Time," but before Michael Stipe shaved his head and turned himself into the biggest fool in arena rock not named Billy Corgan. This album absolutely crawls at a snail's pace right out of the gate, indicating exactly how willing they are to not rock out. I mean, these guys always sounded like old farts, even when they were young, but they really go for the porch swing here. What else could explain renting out Aerosmith's orchestra (from that band's old-balls comeback/sellout phase), if not to oblige Warner Bros with a new release while at the same time copping out with the most flaccid "effort" of R.E.M.'s entire career? Stipe even admits he can "always just sleep standing up;" not really a problem here with all the ball-less strings and electric piano all over the place. That it remains the band's most successful album in terms of sales, however, actually says less about the quality of the songs and execution than it does about how unbearably shitty most grunge music was at the time.

The Sugarcubes "Life's Too Good" [1988]

Among the many, many inexplicable things about the late-80s indie music scene was that there was a celebrated American band called Pixies. Apparently something was lost in translation on the way to Iceland, because it becomes obvious within the first few minutes of The Sugarcubes' debut "Life's Too Good" that this young band thinks their purpose is to behave like actual pixies. I guess irony isn't real big on that isolated, freezing cold island. Fronted by an apparent eskimo girl named Bjork with a bizarre holler that may have been developed to clear fjords, The Sugarcubes clambered onto the barren London scene at the time as if they were some sort of approximation of the B-52s from outer space, complete with an understated Scandinavian stiff male carnival barker giving intros to Bjork's performances like the circus freak she is. Yet you'd be mistaken for thinking the culmination of this odd, post-new wave sound amounted to anything more remarkable than an increasingly grating novelty. Bjork in particular presents herself as a schizoid mountain yodeler in a dog collar on a very short leash, and the longer her Euro MC goes on, the less I'm convinced his performance is suitably tongue-in-cheek. This band simply may have been completely unaware of how foolish they were coming off; perhaps bothering to listen to this album at all is nothing more than a mean-spirited act of being amused by the (much) less fortunate.

The White Stripes "Elephant" [2003]

See what happens when the wrong people get encouraged? They just come back and do the same things all over again. In The White Stripes' case, they took their obvious, uber-amateur garage rock redux sound from "Der Stijl" and "White Blood Cells," turned up the volume, increased the nasal singing tone and cheap effects, kept many of the same actual chord progressions (like Jack White thinks he's Chuck Berry or something), and coughed up "Elephant" on all our asses. Appropriate title, however -- this album is big, smelly and shiftless. Meg White adding her own pedestrian lead vocal passes (and who the fuck is Holly Golightly? was she never sued by Truman Capote's estate?) does nothing to improve upon Jack's obnoxious/pathetic bleat, which is equal parts woefully insecure lame-ass and parts shameless rock star, albeit of the "douchebag in the full-length mirror" variety. All you have to know about how terrible the music scene was back in '03 you can find listening to this album, which was greatly revered despite its lack of new ideas (their old ideas weren't new, anyway) and Jack's preponderance to sing verse lines like they're tumbling down a flight of stairs. In short, there would be no "classic rock" today if 70s FM radio had been as inexpertly conjured as The White Stripes barely manage here. I suppose it might be argued that digging up and reassembling the bones of Badfinger and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion has its place in finally putting a tired genre to bed, but I doubt it -- especially if people keep applauding The White Stripes for their "efforts."

Jim Carroll Band "Catholic Boy" [1980]

Another in a long line of desperate attempts by the music industry not to be completely crushed by the weight of disco, Atco Records managed to shake famed former teenage reprobate Jim Carroll out of his heroin-induced stupor long enough to fake a Graham Parker & the Rumour-style album, complete with pedestrian nasal vocals and nondescript bar-band arrangements. But the joke was on all of us; Carroll was apparently confused which decade he was in and thought Max's Kansas City was still a relevant venue -- either that, or he'd been holed up in his Manhattan tenement for so long after writing "The Basketball Diaries" that he'd finally gotten around to discovering punk rock. And this was after the Ramones were already off dicking around with Phil Spector and Blondie was cutting disco singles. The most remarkable thing about Carroll is that he was still relatively upright in 1980, which was a lot more than could be said for Tom Verlaine or Richard Hell at the time, but all he could manage to do with his newly-found career was apparently try to find out how long it was going to take everybody to finally get bored with his exploits about copping dope and staring up at the stars. That he couldn't really cut it as a rocker should surprise nobody; he outlived his uselessness upon exploiting the deaths of seemingly everybody he grew up with, then releasing it as "Catholic Boy"'s first single.

Simon and Garfunkel "Sounds of Silence" [1966]

Only in a musical wasteland so boring that Joan Baez got to be famous could such a profound snoozefest like Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" actually go anywhere, but a year after Dylan gave the folk music community the finger, the meek acoustic stylings and harmonies of these two presumptuous young New Yorkers not only got released, but were revered. Perhaps the amateurish buffet of various arrangements, Byrds rip-offs and cheating off Leonard Cohen's paper was considered wide-ranging at the time, but in retrospect it's pretty easy to hear why Paul Simon would generally steer well clear of anything resembling the Beatles, let alone the Stones: he writes white-bread-and-mayo tunes -- even when he's killing off his characters like some lame paperback writer -- and performs them like he's got a migraine. On those unfortunate occasions where he does try to push past his vocal comfort zone, he does no one any favors. As for the other mama's boy, Art Garfunkel, his high, weak register sounds like so many tea kettles announcing the chamomile is ready. Because this was the mid-60s, 10 short songs were all that were generally required of recording artists, and even then this album has lots of filler. Milquetoast 60s rhythms and music recital finger-picking do not great tunes make; between these guys and Neil Diamond, they must have set back Jewish American contemporary music 15 years.

Sweet "Desolation Boulevard" [1974]

This album almost sounds like Mickey Dolenz having completely lost his shit after The Monkees fell apart, but Sweet aren't even that interesting. Campy beyond the pale, only Kiss' kabuki makeup rivals the desperate and moronic stylistic choices that pile up for this band's breakthrough album "Desolation Boulevard." But in the 70s, things were so ass-backward that popular rock music only went further in the regrettable and preposterously overbaked directions of this record, from Queen to Rocky Horror. The harmonies stack up so ridiculously high they sound like a hard rock parody performed by the Chipmunks. For sure, it was an era of exceptionally bad taste in British rock -- the false magic of T. Rex, the brain-dead pub chanting of Slade and the dumb teeny-bopper bait of Bay City Rollers, to name but a few -- but Sweet takes the cake on this album. Amazingly, in just over a year this godforsaken wasteland of soulless harmonizing and shameless arena guitarwork would actually give way to something even worse -- Queen's "A Night at the Opera," quite possibly the worst album of all-time -- so "Desolation Boulevard" and Sweet itself found themselves kicked to the curb. It's a justifiable fate for them, but certainly not in favor of an even more-overblown clusterfuck. Then again, even Queen never released anything as transparently bubblegum as "Fox on the Run," so maybe the arbiters of taste in the era were only mostly asleep at the wheel.

Cocteau Twins "Heaven or Las Vegas" [1990]

If you should ever get bummed out that you missed out on when they used to put codeine in cough medicine, all you have to do to reach a similar affect is put on the Cocteau Twins' "Heaven or Las Vegas" CD -- a blurry, synthey echo chamber with a double-shot of estrogen which comes off like some simplistic hodgepodge of Kate Bush and Enya covering Julee Cruise versions of Abba's greatest hits while under heavy sedation. Scottish elfin soprano Beth Orton cashes in her indie cred by singing actual words this time, just like when everyone could tell that Michael Stipe had sold out. But everything she sings is still so covered in the sticky gauze of cotton candy on "Heaven or Las Vegas," she may as well been still spouting gibberish. Harmonizing with herself elsewhere, Orton sounds like if The Roches were soft-serve ice cream. You'd really need to try in order to find something more annoyingly angelic as this album; Orton finds herself backed here by a catatonic New Order floating on a cumulus cloud. Listen to "Heaven or Las Vegas" long enough and you'll begin to feel yourself drifting off and blowing away -- popping like so many bubbles in the bath, and each of the songs on this endless fake Wyndham Hill composition has a similar emptiness inside each one.

Daft Punk "Random Access Memories" [2013]

Too bad Daft Punk wasn't around during the actual era of disco -- it would have killed the movement dead in its tracks, sending the Bee Gees to the thrift store to trade in their white leisure suits for a pair of chest-hair clippers. The late-70s would have then been a Travolta-free zone, and Sylvester would have likely turned out straight. Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories" is so blandly redundant and bubble-gummy -- featuring an aged Nile Rodgers with the musical equivalent of erectile dysfunction -- it sounds like Boz Scaggs converted into elevator Muzak. Whereas this band used to provide aggressive, anonymous danceclub flatulence -- thus legitimizing both the "Daft" and "Punk" in their band name -- here they've simply gone straight-up Hall & Oates filtered through a rudimentary disco robot. Jesus Christ, this shit is really unbearable; Daft Punk makes Massive Attack sound like Beethoven. And for good (heinous) measure, they go heavy with the Autotune, just in case you thought Jay-Z and Kanye choruses haven't been irresponsibly annoying enough over the past few years. Serge Gainsbourg had more interesting diabetic comas than this album. Throughout track after track, "Random Access Memories" has this vague, antiseptic, creepy futurism about it -- like if North Korea were to take over the world in the next 20 years. And the longer I endure this snooze-fest debacle, the more being governed by Kim Jong-un sounds like a decent alternative.

The Pogues "Rum, Sodomy & the Lash" [1985]

Just when you thought Irish music couldn't get any drunker. Traditional-sounding tunes with typically lame-ass Irish folk instrumentation like fiddles and the pennywhistle played with such slipshod execution as to infer something resembling the ineptitude of punk rock, The Pogues' "Rum, Sodomy & the Lash" is fronted by a dead-toothed wretch named Shane MacGowan, easily the most hideous casualty of self-imposed debauchery this side of Courtney Love. Somehow his growling brogue wins him points for authenticity, but I'm not too sure who this says less about -- the fan-base of such lice-riddled cretins or the Irish experience in a general sense. That said, otherwise The Pogues simply sound like a poor backwoods version of The Cranberries, and that one might be more drawn to the blathering of MacGowan's drunken lout gimmick does not exactly give a winning endorsement for the rest of the band. Yet they somehow climbed onto the world music bandwagon that emerged in the mid-80s -- a remarkable feat for a gang of such losers who'd likely never kept on any sort of wagon previously. Only the Irish can get away with behaving this unattractively atrociously and still get to tour the States. You think if Ladysmith Black Mambazo wandered around in such a wasted stupor they'd ever be allowed to leave South Africa?

Bob Marley "Legend" [1984]

Sometimes, posthumous releases are so overbaked and underwhelming, the artist would gladly die again upon hearing it; there's no better example of this than Bob Marley's "Legend," a collection of tracks that Chris Blackwell apparently felt didn't have enough studio graffiti attached, so put plenty of extraneous horns and other shit everywhere so he could milk a few bucks from 80s liberals who were feeling especially guilty they'd mocked "Babylon By Bus," now that Marley was dead. Where the "producers" of this album were ahead of the game was in capitalizing on the stoned, laconic grooves that the Grateful Dead would pick up like a loose football in the next few years, helping foster a potheaded sect of the Republican party, along the lines this album had established. Thus, "Legend" is a lot more toxic than your average "greatest hits" collection, and listeners had ought to treat it as such. That Marley himself thought he could pop so much shit about the corruption within Western society and somehow get away with not dying at an early age only steels one's understanding that he was a naive and overly hopeful schnook; why this should win him lauded reviews and the status of "legend" seems only to foster the same dumb-ass conceits Marley himself had. Come on, folks -- time to wise the fuck up already.

The Decemberists "The Crane Wife" [2006]

I know it wouldn't be nice to describe The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife" as sounding like Green Day on their period, but I honestly don't think anyone has every described this album's sound more accurately or succinctly. This Portland-based group of post-collegiate stoners -- I know most of this may be redundant -- touch down on every folk-rock conceit from every rainy backwoods country; they're lucky that affecting the occasional fake Irish brogue hasn't gotten their ass kicked yet... by Neko Case. But it's likely most people tougher than The Decemberists -- shit, who does that leave out? -- haven't ever heard this, anyway; Irish music, in particular, is probably quite unlikely to approximate jig-fiddle music with synthesizers used by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or at least it has for about the last 40 years. The rain-soaked barn in which "The Crane Wife" was no doubt recorded seems like one murky, sad place; this album makes fellow glum Portlanders The Shins sound like Madonna. They do rock harder than Belle and Sebastian when they want to, but that's like saying they take fewer steroids than Lance Armstrong. And even where the male-female harmonies seem to want to inflect a gaggle of geese soaring through the air migrating toward nicer climes, ultimately all The Decemberists can manage is the affect of hundreds of goose turds all the way around the pond.

Humble Pie "Smokin'" [1972]

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Steve Marriott's singing style was a mean-spirited parody of lowlife white druggies aping the stylings of black soul singers, like he's lampooning Janis Joplin or Robert Plant at their respective Dean Martin Roasts. But no -- he's for real, and on "Smokin'" he gets even worse: instead of just pretending to be a fiery black gospel dude, he actually brings real ones into the studio with him. Even Peter Frampton couldn't fucking stand it any longer (and with all the shit he was to foist onto an unsuspecting listening public in the next few years, that's pretty remarkable). But Humble Pie's milieu remains intact here, however unfortunately: dragging tired blues covers across the bong-water-soaked floors of the recording studio while Marriott shamelessly wails over the top like he's the runt twin of Joe Cocker. And even after years of this band egregiously murdelyzing any tune that stands in their way with the same sledgehammer-meathead approach, they really outdo themselves on this album; by the end of the first four tracks, one becomes indignant that neither rock-soul wailing nor the wah-wah pedal has yet been banned from existence. Imagine if everyone in the Stones catered to every last one of Keith Richards' worst instincts -- that's this album. And you might think that sounds delightful, but I guarantee you it's the musical equivalent of narcotic smoke and chicken grease B.O., and it will suffocate you with the nastiest pair of aural ass-cheeks ever.

U2 "Achtung Baby" [1991]

Dusting themselves off after collapsing from the top-heavy pretentiousness that was "Rattle and Hum," U2 begins to set the table for new self-inflicted calamities in a new decade with their release of "Achtung Baby," putting the onus on other rock groups to issue each new CD with enough material to fill a double LP -- no matter how lame that material is. These self-proclaimed God-fearing rock gods give their insipid fan base the whole enchilada here: ready-made commercial jingles (you can't tell me "Even Better than the Real Thing" wasn't created by Pepsi's ad department), overt spiritual shamanism (yick -- is there anything less palatable from our rock stars?), recounting Jesus stories (um, yes -- yes there is) and echoey arena grandstanding designed to cause involuntary lighter-flicking. The rest is all filler -- aping formerly successful rockers like John Lennon, David Bowie, Echo & the Bunnymen... except only those guys when they were under heavy sedation. That the members of U2 seem to have remained relatively drug-free only makes this laconic execution all the more inexcusable. Perhaps U2 is just tired of all the bombast themselves. If so, it seems a helluva way to deal with it -- pumping out more and more, as if it'll expel from their collective body like so much spooge. I guess deep down, all rock stars really do think the same.

The Go-Go's "Beauty and the Beat" [1981]

If there ever was an ominous sign that American culture in the 1980s was about to do a decade-long face-plant, it's "Beauty and the Beat," the debut album from LA all-female group The Go-Go's. Immediately, this band strikes the rather sickening verve of The Cars as performed by the Brady Bunch girls. This is the contemporary music version of a pillow fight; essentially they're arresting their own development in order to turn a buck in the music biz. Wouldn't be the first time, but that's no excuse. Because they follow the dumbed-down blueprint of new wave -- bare-bones, jangly rock 'n roll -- The Go-Go's (with that annoying, ever-present possessive apostrophe) were able to get over as a more-feminine Cure with sunshine and rainbows shooting out their asses; they're the B-52s as Republicans. The industry by this time had gotten so good (i.e. "reprehensible") at exploiting the dipshit impulses of high school kids, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. And The Go-Go's themselves, even after predictably imploding after another record or so, nevertheless begat a goldmine just as the MTV blitzkrieg was getting underway: Madonna's annoying nasal vocal delivery comes straight from Belinda Carlisle, and the band's pedestrian vagina-rock gave birth to a Jewish version called The Bangles. Jesus, no wonder people actually considered Chrissie Hynde something special back in the day.

Richard Hell & the Voidoids "Blank Generation" [1977]

As far as monikers go, "Richard Hell" overrates himself; at best, he should be "Dick Purgatory." The only album he stayed competently sober enough to record, "Blank Generation," is a failed approximation of where punk rock music was headed -- overly fussed-over with extensive modulation and most definitely the only punk album ever to incorporate the word "perpetual" repeatedly in its lyric sheet. Likely because he was booted from fellow CBGB band of vermin Television, Hell scrambled to find the nearest thing he could to pinheaded musicians to fill the void(oids) until he settled on the misanthropic Robert Quine, among others. Then, instead of professing some sort of simplistic nihilism that might have been appropriate for the punk rock milieu, Hell opts to write tunes about premature ejaculation and mooching drinks off his groupies, exactly like the frontman of any Rod Stewart tribute band would. That he insists on singing in a vocal range exactly where his voice cracks unfortunately gave The Cure's Robert Smith the brilliant idea to do the same thing, and for that Hell loses even more coolness points. About the only thing that survives from "Blank Generation" is the self-deprecating view of himself and his fellow 20-something nobodies, but even there he gets it wrong: it became Generation X in another dozen years; even dipshits like Billy Idol got that much right.

John Mayer "Room for Squares" [2001]

Good God, not this. As unapologetically wonky as he is wanky, John Mayer's debut "Room for Squares" set the table for a whole group of new fey teeny-bopper molesters, as if they're the Birkenstock-wearing contingent of Mickey Mouse Club alumni. Next time you curse the fact you know who Jack Johnson or Jason Mraz are, blame this douchebag. Mayer could have enjoyed a perfectly soulless existence playing backup guitar on studio singles for Death Cab for Cutie, but no -- he had to put on his teddy-bear whisper and try to seduce every underage girl in American suburbia. If he were a black dude, he'd still be in prison. And, to be fair, recording "Room for Squares" the way he did (hey, nice title, BTW -- was "Dorksongs" already taken?) pretty much already played to his bland sessionist instincts, except he got paid more and got to bang all of Adam Duritz's female TV star leftovers. Even worse, Mayer branches out into fake yuppie stoner pop-disco, a la Dave Matthews Band; apparently college kids at the the turn of the Millennium hadn't been paying attention to how bad their parents' Sting and Seal CDs were sucking. In fact, if anything, Mayer probably was every bit as attractive to menopausal swim team coaches as he was to his Hello Kitty target market. It all makes so much sense in relation to Music Biz 101, but outside that, the only sense "Room for Squares" makes is in justifying Limp Bizkit's indecipherable rage.

The Who "Tommy" [1969]

Pete Townshend may be the biggest asshole in all of 60s rock, and that is really saying something. At the exit door to the 1960s music scene he left the biggest steaming dump of pretension anyone -- including the Beatles -- could possibly muster: the first "rock opera." So instead of allowing rock music to branch out naturally, independent of other previously discarded forms of music, this ugly bastard had to graft the arch, melodramatic, predictable and incredibly out-of-date opera form onto his and his band The Who's "Tommy." (They should have changed their band name to The Why right then and there.) You'd think Townshend could have spent all that time hashing out overtures and reprises learning a new way to play a tonic chord, or teach himself how to execute a fucking solo for once. But not Townshend -- he'd somehow ordained himself to make rock music "important"... with the narrative about some fictitious Helen Keller boy playing great pinball, defeating a wizard and becoming world famous. Geez -- so much for being taken seriously. Why his band members didn't pin Townshend down until he came to his senses none of us can know for sure, but probably he assured them "Tommy" would work. They even played it at Woodstock. And then -- voila! -- the era of Andrew Lloyd Weber was upon us! How Townshend's been able to live with himself with that on his conscience these past 40+ years I can't possibly fathom in the slightest.

Tracy Chapman "Tracy Chapman" [1988]

When the 60s counterculture was emphatically celebrated in the 80s by baby boomers being sold their youth via nostalgia, there were plenty of seriously terrible outcomes. Topping the list was the re-emergence of talentless hippie drug-addict hacks Grateful Dead, but not far behind was this idea that protest-folk rock could and should make a comeback. So A&R reps scoured coffee shops the nation over and emerged with Tracy Chapman, a sort of hybrid between Joan Armatrading and a nanny goat. They put her in the studio right away with an utterly boring group of session musicians; they let her ramble on with rhymeless "poetry" that comes off like reciting newspaper headlines from the Metro section when she's not advocating some vague and idealistic call to action. That was enough for both the boomers and their kids -- "Talking About a Revolution" is a helluva lot less messy than actually starting one. And like clockwork, Chapman soon found herself at the top of the charts. Faceless production qualities that can only manage to crib cheap tricks from Daniel Lanois and Peter Gabriel when they bother helping out her sound at all at all is the final piece to this incredibly cynical music industry puzzle. Shoot, if anybody knew Tracy Chapman wasn't really going to spearhead a new movement of leftist activism, it was the ghouls who signed her.

Tegan and Sara "Heartthrob" [2013]

Apparently what's emerging in the marketplace, much to my infinite dismay -- now that beard-rock is dissolving like so many hits in a vaporizer -- is former indie chicks cashing in their integrity for a shot at heavy rotation on Z-94. From Yeah Yeah Yeahs to The Kills to Cat Power, it's becoming pretty unavoidable that women can't simply exist forever sleeping in a smelly van with all their band equipment, and are willing to be confused with Miley Cyrus for the next couple years, at least until their crises of conscience makes them give up the game altogether. Taking this strategy to a truly horrendous level, cutesy-poo identical twins Tegan and Sara put their sugar-high harmonies to work in the service of "Heartthrob," where they actually employed Ke$ha's producer to make them sound like Wilson Phillips in an animated version of the kiddie board game Candyland. This is very dangerous stuff; if popsters currently seeing their soccer-chant singles flopping in the stadiums and on the charts decide they need to do what Tegan and Sara are doing, we could be in for a truly insufferable period where listening to modern pop could cause type-2 diabetes. Then again, Tegan and Sara never really belonged on the indie set anyway -- foreign pixies like them should never be relegated to sad college towns to hawk their wares. Thus, maybe they've found their true calling and can actually replace Miley Cyrus now that she's embarrassed herself beyond repair, whereby I can forget about them forever because I never watch The Disney Channel or Super Bowl halftime shows.

Bob Dylan "Blonde on Blonde" [1966]

If you're one of those people who considers the 1960s to have been actually kind of gross, lame and full of itself, you couldn't be more right. And perhaps nothing from that decade illustrates this with more pathetic uselessness than celebrated billy goat Bob Dylan's double album of absurdly long campfire ballads and blues ripoffs called "Blonde on Blonde." Just the fact that this propped-up, nasal-bleating folkie with a loose group of electric instrument-playing stoners surrounding him was so revered is in itself pretty gross and lame, and though this is largely the case with almost every one of Dylan's 700 albums, "Blonde on Blonde" is the exact place where he became a complete caricature of himself. Every comedian who can do even a half-assed Dylan impression cites this album directly, his voice drawn like a magnet to the saaame nooote evvvery siiiingle soooong. And all this without even mentioning he'd clearly abandoned his interest in Vietnam and the political cries of injustice that made Dylan famous in the first place, in favor of boring laments and vignettes about random chicks -- a typical rock star conceit. He does revisit his "Highway 61" dadaist narratives on occasion, and the fact that these come off as relatively refreshing (when they were insufferable on his previous album) heightens one's awareness just how sucky he is as a romantic crooner. Only suitable for playing ironically or for a 60s theme party.

Blink-182 "Enema of the State" [1999]

Even upon revisiting Blink-182's disastrous "Enema of the State," it's hard to fathom how many bad ideas could fit within the confines of a single CD. Pasteurized, trite, cloying and assheaded, Blink-182 plays an overtly, self-consciously faux-hilarious brand of "punk-pop," a sub-genre which can best be described as the aural equivalent of McDonalds french fries: cheap, disgusting, fake and popular only if you're an immature, two-dimensional piece of shit. There were obviously plenty of such people around in 1999, and "Enema of the State" gave them every stupid, overreaching joke and idiotic vignette about girls they could cram up their collective butthole. Fuckin' a -- even Cake never reached this level of supreme punny preciousness. Which would be bad enough had they not sterilized the production throughout like they're performing in their mom's glowing white kitchen. Blink-182 are thus indeed committing pranks, just different ones than were clearly intended. Far from the intelligent insolence they think they're purveying, these guys engage in the criminal act of playing their instruments with anally-retentive precision but absolutely no heart, using cutesy phrases that are the very definition of banal; they're phony, insecure poseurs with a flat and trite worldview injecting aggressive mediocrity into the pop marketplace. In retrospect, we Americans were totally asking to get fucked with at the turn of the new millennium by listening to these guys.

Big Star "#1 Record" [1972]

There are plenty of stories throughout rock 'n roll history of a great band and/or album that somehow gets inexplicably overlooked by the music-buying public of its day. Big Star's "#1 Record" is not one of them. In fact, with this album, it's exceptionally easy to see why it failed: sounding like a demo reel from a post-Ron Wood Rod Stewart backup band with singer Alex Chilton switching from the pedestrian stylings of Keith Carradine to the helium-register of The Sweet and other groups that made the 70s completely unbearable, "#1 Record" was sunk before it ever got launched. Ripping off Beatles sections so nakedly you can hear Todd Rundgren taking out a hit on these guys, a good example of how unsuccessful this record was is when "In the Street" became the theme song for "That 70s Show" and absolutely nobody recognized it. Big Star rocks as obviously and amateurishly as T. Rex, but without any of the mystique. That anyone could prefer a curly haired munchkin who sings songs about cars and fairies over these guys ought to tell you how badly you'd have to go slumming it out behind the gas station in a working class rustbelt state like Ohio or somewhere to get on the same level as this record. Big Star and Chilton did enjoy a bit of success beyond Fox primetime TV when wise-ass Gen-Xers got into irony: both calling themselves Big Star and naming their album "#1 Record" has got this in droves.

Mastodon "Crack the Skye" [2009]

There's a perfectly good reason mastodons went extinct: lumbering aimlessly across the prehistoric plains with no capability to modernize themselves and without brains enough to thrive amid a changing landscape, they died off despite their gigantic size and obnoxious loud noises. As such, the term is a perfect moniker for the band Mastodon, a throwback metal band that cops every tired riff from Metallica, Black Sabbath, Jane's Addiction, et. al. and throws them haphazardly into a big, stinking heap. Taking matters even farther removed from good taste, on "Crack the Skye" Mastodon attempts, for some reason, to tell the story of a quadriplegic being sent back to the days of Rasputin in old Russia, or some such shit. Goddamn -- if they didn't already look enough like 70s wonk rockers Kansas, now they're busting out the junior high lit too? They could have skipped the pretense and simply featured a giant pair of hairy testicles for the cover art -- it would have sold pretty much the exact amount of units to women as it did in its original form. But perhaps such an aggressively stupid narrative was what the band felt it needed to set it apart from literally every rip-off metal band that ever played an all-ages show over the past 40 years. But even if you're OK with unoriginal riffs and hollers because the only thing you're concerned with is "rocking out," you could still no doubt do better than "Crack the Skye." I mean, really -- a quadriplegic? Fucking Rasputin? WTF?

Grizzly Bear "Veckatimest" [2009]

Ultimately, the 20th century is responsible for dissonance claiming a place within the musical experience; before then, people played by rules. Had any of those feckless shitheads the slightest inclination what might eventually happen with all the wrong-changing keys and melody lines that are absurdly off being allowed to exist without apology, they might have feared what came to pass with Grizzly Bear's monstrous mutant of a D-minus music skills collection called "Veckatimest" -- an unapproachably opaque ball of echo and pretension that sounds like Arcade Fire after being hit in the head with a baseball bat. Directly from the school of "what the hell is a four-track, anyway?," these cozy East Coast homeschoolers pitch every half-assed and overworked idea that passes through their stoner brains as if by sheer volume of insipidity they'd have something approaching an actual musical statement. They were wrong, but it's no shocker why once you've subjected yourself to even the first few minutes of this aural approximation of David Crosby's vomit. True, they don't stink up the joint as badly as Flaming Lips do, but that's like suggesting someone is less obnoxious than Gilbert Gottfried. The best way to describe this pile of musical schmutz is by following this recipe: deep-fry Radiohead, then leave the contents in the back of the refrigerator long enough for a gross blue fuzz to grow over the surface. Is anyone going to suggest to Grizzly Bear that there is such a thing as too much hydroponic weed, or do I have to do it?

Brian Eno & David Byrne "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" [1981]

It's amazing to think that with how obnoxious this album of actual tape loops is that the practice of loop sampling ever got off the ground. Brian Eno seems to have completely ruined the entire concept on his worthless experiments heaped together and called "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." Joined by lead Talking (dick)Head David Byrne in his "one step away from wearing an afro with a chin-strap" phase, this high-brow duo from the New York art/music scene of the early 80s made for some incredibly high-octane douchebaggery. They exploited everything they could find that they deemed below their own self-worth -- radio conservatives, Muslim calls to prayers, evangelist huckster broadcasts, an actual exorcism, etc. -- and session-wanked their way through constructing actual "songs" around them. The vaguely dance-oriented repetition beneath the featured banalities sounds pretty much exactly like an aerobics tape for crazy people. For the rest of us, though, this album presents a heavy conundrum: what the fuck are you supposed to do while listening to this? You can't clean your house to it, you can't take drugs to it unless your idea is to be completely disoriented, you can't play it at a party unless you want everyone to leave, and you can't present it to an ethnic studies class without being chewed out over its various examples of abuse. Why Sire Records put it out is a complete mystery, unless they were hoping for a quiet implosion of their entire company akin to setting the office building on fire and collecting the insurance money.

Joy Division "Closer" [1980]

I'd say these were the guys who gave "post punk" a bad name, but come on -- the moniker sucks donkey nuts in the first place. Anyway, not merely content to display their own pathetic morbidity for the world to see, Joy Division was the type of band that wanted to drag you down with them -- within the first minutes of their second and final album during their existence, "Closer," (as in "shut the book" not "get nearer") it's quite easy to hear you're dealing with an entirely different level of asshole. Morosely depressed lead singer Ian Curtis sheds the unintentionally comic Muppet/serial killer voice for something even uglier and more warbly, as if he's attempting to aurally induce nausea and disorientation among his listening audience. That he comes close to succeeding is quite beside the point -- why would anyone allow themselves to endure such disgusting, wretched doom? Why, in fact, would a record label even sign these guys if not based on pure, naked misanthropy? Was "despair" the new "black" in 1980? Not like the rest of Joy Division are a barrel of laughs, either -- this album of simplistic, reverb-heavy repetition sounds like it was recorded in the boiler room of a haunted house. That Curtis hanged himself shortly before the release of "Closer" is the icing on the cake; this guy was basically Jim Jones and "Closer" is his poison kool-aid. Follow this dangerous sad-sack down to Guyana at your own peril.

The Beatles "Rubber Soul" [1965]

Even before "Sgt Pepper's" and all their ridiculously self-aware and spaced-out crap that followed (turning "rock star" into a decidedly negative term in the process), the Beatles -- especially John Lennon -- were already busy poisoning the well of 60s American society as early as "Rubber Soul," the frumpy-covered sour grapes lament that marked the band's descent from popping pre-gig uppers to smoking weed in their pretentious English country estates. Not that American culture didn't deserve to be taken down a peg, but the only reason these limeys got to do it was because they'd already suckered everyone into buying their "lovable mop-top" schtick. What a way to stab Ed Sullivan in the back! As for Paul McCartney, his main crime here is as an obsessive overdubbing creep and showoff, taxing George Martin clearly well past his capabilities, to say nothing of that poor four-track. Basically, had Beatlemaniacs not been so hysterical and greedy in their determination to grab a piece of these guys' hides, the band wouldn't have been allowed to sit back with all this extra time on their hands to preciously craft their overtly sappy harmonies like so many pieces of dollhouse furniture. Nor would Lennon have so completely been able to concoct his mean-spirited selfishness into an actual musical identity... that is, before he told us we all need to love each other. Psshhh -- what a frickin' phony.

Graham Parker & the Rumour "Squeezing Out Sparks" [1979]

Much the way Bob Dylan got booed for going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in '65, so too do I boo the grafting of Dylanesque wordiness and multi-verse hell into the still-nebulous era of new wave that is Graham Parker's "Squeezing Out Sparks." If new wave overall was a silly pajama party of diverse pop weirdness, then Parker was the guy taking a shit in the punch bowl. Grouchy, angry prole-rock with a bar band that makes Huey Lewis' News sound edgy, about the only thing this album has in common with other groups of the era is the flat, cookie-cutter production -- clearly this was a defection from the grandiose Jimmy Page multi-layering abominations, but when the end result is sterile as "Squeezing Out Sparks," you're better off listening to a live demo tape from some other nondescript London band. And if all this wasn't bad enough, Parker's ascerbic rants on things like abortion and the sex act in general uniquely separate him from even other English prick dorks; he makes Elvis Costello seem erudite, Joe Jackson reasonable. Finally, whichever genius decided uber-pedestrian Brinsley Schwartz was a good enough guitar player to deserve so many goddamn solos needs to have been flushed out of the music industry immediately. The only thing he lends this album is a suitable reason for Parker to be so pissed off all the time.

Alice in Chains "Dirt" [1992]

Further proof -- as if any was needed -- that Seattle's grunge movement was nothing more than 80s LA-metal, minus the blow but plus plenty of H, Alice in Chains' "Dirt" articulates the manifestations of these two main stylistic differences between LA and Seattle: they've replaced the high-end screech cokeheads can't hear with deep bass rumblings neighbors two blocks over can't avoid, and traded the studded leather for stinky jeans. Alice in Chains was not the most famous Seattle band -- they barely crack the top ten, actually -- but their sound is a perfect representation of the glum anonymity, near-zero melody and burnout guitar crunch that infected the Pacific Northwest for far too many years a couple decades ago. On "Dirt," they sound like nothing so much as Guns 'n Roses with major self-esteem issues. About the only thing separating these famous nobodies from the pack of other flannel-clad, greasy-haired losers are the perpetual vocal harmonies, as if anyone ever gave a shit about Wishbone Ash. (Who? Exactly.) But you don't have to look at Starbucks Corp.'s insane market cap to understand that if Seattle did anything well, it was the faux-mellow self-promotion of its rainy, geographically inconvenient, un-diverse and near-Canadian ass. Those who bought into the hype eventually realized they'd acquired a polished turd, and when that happens, that's when you get "Dirt" on your hands.

Robin Thicke "Blurred Lines" [2013]

Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" sounds like the kind of two-dimensional party music for dipshits who throw beads at girls who show them their tits at Mardi Gras. As such, is it really harmless fun, or the source of shame for the rest of some once-drunk bimbo's life? I know I feel pretty shamed listening to this pile of crap, and no one's called me a bimbo yet. I'm pretty sure Thicke's heard it plenty himself, however, but it's no stubble off his chin -- he's just marking time between Justin Timberlake releases with the over-cologned whiteboy nightclub soul, complete with whole verses in sugary falsetto and way too many notes in his vocal runs. Ubiquitous crossover producer Pharrell Williams clearly has no problem substituting Thicke for Timberlake; not only are they cardboard cut-outs of each other, but Pharrell's been a pop industry sell-out so long he makes Will.i.am look like Ol' Dirty Bastard. Ultimately, though, what could one possibly expect from a Robin Thicke album -- depth? Sincerity? Actual human emotion? Come on, that'd be like Tom Cruise playing Hamlet. You already know what this album sounds like before you even hear it; he was literally born into the network television entertainment industry, and not only would he be stupid to knock over the gravy train, it probably never will ever occur to him to do so. He's completely cut and dried -- the only blurred lines here are in the album's title.

Echo & the Bunnymen "Ocean Rain" [1984]

Sounding for all the world like the illegitimate offspring of Jim Morrison spoiled by privilege and crappy English weather, Ian McCulloch fronts the pointlessly-named Echo & the Bunnymen. On the band's breakthrough album "Ocean Rain," the boys flop around with vast and various instrumentations wholly unsuitable for a rock group. Then again, these guys really didn't rock anymore by this time -- they were following The Cure down the rabbit-hole (bunny-hole?) of gloom-pop, as it was clear they were always going to be too bland and un-frightening to make it in goth music. The end result proves McCulloch to be just as brazenly annoying as Bono, but without all the Jesus references and barely any of the comparable fame, largely due to his uncommon ability to wring the most grossly maudlin vocal sentiment over a laconic two-chord vamp while stringing together random and totally meaningless word phrases. How so many overworked and utterly forgettable tracks can constitute the band's "masterpiece" must be only in relation to the rest of the band's output -- from the redundant new wave rock of their earlier albums to the later glitzy schlock that both got them on MTV and forced them to implode in sell-out disgrace. If the name Echo & the Bunnymen seems to imply the images of a strange nightmare that ultimately makes no sense and should best simply be ignored, I'd say go with that notion.

The Jesus and Mary Chain "Psycho Candy" [1985]

These feckless poseurs have got to be grateful for the existence of the Sex Pistols -- nobody else are as big of self-centered dickfaces as The Jesus and Mary Chain. On their bland and washed-out echo-chamber distortion debut "Psycho Candy," the band had already arrived fully "developed": it's the sound of bleached acetate on 60s garage rock master tapes, run over a few times and slowed down to a snoozer tempo. That grossly noncommittal Gen-X "aesthetic" where only wishy-washy opinions are hip is pushed to its limits with these guys who can't be bothered to raise their voices above an annoyed whisper nor change the effects of their guitars; it's a conceit largely on display in the early-mid 90s, so these guys were at least ahead of their time in one way -- just not one worthwhile, in any sense of the word. They don't even sound like they really did any drugs, just like they're pretending to be high while they make sure their hair looks just right. Even their rocker tracks are boring as shit; Iggy Pop snores in a deep sleep with more fire than these indie pseudo-cool guys display on "Psycho Candy." Yet somehow they managed to influence other phony dope-head phony rockers like The Church and Love and Rockets, though those bands at least had brains enough not to bury everything underneath the white noise. Even this many years later, I totally want to beat the shit out of these guys; I finally understand where Phil Spector got the impetus to start killing people.

Traffic "John Barleycorn Must Die" [1970]

Existing in and fully representing that awful musical time in English rock between lame American R&B approximations and even lamer baroque folkie Hobbitations, "John Barleycorn Must Die" is everything about the music business in 1970 pointed in the wrong direction (save for anything relating to Black Sabbath): wonky, technical expertise supplanting feeling and passion, overly stylized orchestrations (as if they really believed it was Yoko who tore apart the Beatles), 17-verse tomes of Dylanesque dusty folk, meandering organ solos over two-chord vamps for the longest 7-minutes of anyone's life outside of an Allman Brothers record, a steaming load of Renaissance Faire bullshit, and goddamn jazz flutes riffing all over the place like a swarm of horse flies. Steve Winwood writes a song here called "Empty Pages," proving he didn't have a single new idea in his head, which also explains the endless instrumental indulgences elsewhere on this album. If there's one thing these wankers got right, it's the name of their band: Traffic is one frustratingly long, noisy, smelly jaunt to seemingly nowhere, perpetuated by a group of stoned idiots who just don't give a fuck. Checking the liner notes again just to make sure John Barleycorn isn't the actual name of this album's producer.

Spiritualized "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space" [1997]

It's becoming increasingly more difficult to figure out whether Lou Reed fans are more likely to become interested in taking heroin or if lowlife heroin addicts find comfort in listening to Lou Reed. Not that it really matters -- both ways spell fucking disaster, and not just because of the drugs. On Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space," all the slo-mo pomp of 70s glam-rock's burnout phase meets all the shit Brian Eno threw away over the previous two-plus decades. They try to dub themselves "space rock," but Neil Armstrong's got nothing on this aimless, nebulous black hole. They could have easily called this album "High Music for High People for High Music..." repeated endlessly, like most of these tracks seem to do. Imagine Philip Glass pretending he's in the Stones, and that pretty much spells this album out with as little effort as these junkies bother to put forth. If you're a hipster doofus who somehow missed this pulsating narco-trash when it came out, think The Jesus & Mary Chain on several bottles of cough syrup. (Hmm -- maybe these fuck-ups thought Lester Bangs was going to give them a good review... in 1997.) Half-timed arrogant garage music with huge dollops of distorted swirl and the "Exile on Main St." horns -- this is what you want to hear for your entertainment? May you never sit up from your disgusting living room carpet.