Rod Stewart "Every Picture Tells a Story" [1971]

The biggest sell-out in the history of anything, hands down. But back in the early 70s, when people still thought Rod Stewart was cool, he released "Every Picture Tells a Story," and the lazy fat-fucks of classic rock radio haven't let it alone ever since. But if you pay attention, Rod is already busy selling out aspects of contemporary music at this early date: recycling acoustic Stones and Led Zep riffs with all the subtlety of Humble Pie (the band, not the metaphor), stealing whole songs from Van Morrison, bastardizing Elvis and crucifying a church hymn staple -- all within just the first 4 songs! Jesus Christ, the guy even rips off Dylan's "yes'n"s from "Blowin' in the Wind"! So you see there was already no level to which Rod Stewart wouldn't stoop, and prior to this incarnation, he'd sold out Jeff Beck, sending the guitarist careening into ill-advised fusion bullshit. And what did Rod give back to pop music after taking so much from it? The impetus for "To All the Girls I've Loved Before." You know, I, for one, never believed all the rumors about Rod needing his stomach pumped because it contained seven ounces of sperm, but upon revisiting this "classic" album, I'm starting to rethink that maybe he did -- after sucking himself off.

Oasis "What's the Story, Morning Glory?" [1995]

Blame Mick Jagger. For a lot of things, actually, but specifically in reference to Oasis: Mick made it OK to spew any lyrical nonsense at all and have it get over, as long as it's vocalized with the right amount of torque and snarl. But fuck that -- it just cheapens the experience for everyone who might just want to find some meaning in what they're listening to. But you'll die before figuring out what the fuck "Wonderwall" is supposed to be about. Elsewhere, Oasis' solo John Lennon LP collection influence is showing, and doing nobody any favors. Slow, boring arena rock -- which Coldplay "perfected" a decade later -- "What's the Story, Morning Glory?" ushered in an avalanche of mostly unintended calamities, including Russell Brand's career, where he was able to lampoon shiftless limey rock-star douchebags like Noel and Liam Gallagher with little effort. That they may have been considered Britain's version of Nirvana means little, save two minor differences: Oasis screamed a lot less and needed extensive dental work a lot more. They're actually a lot closer to the UK version of Pearl Jam: providing broad, vacuous, meaningless musical gestures to legions of broad, vacuous, meaningless Gen-X Ticketmaster victims. If anyone tries to tell you the 90s were the "good ol' days" of rock, prove them wrong by playing this CD.

Blondie "Parallel Lines" [1978]

Nowadays, it's commonplace to hear rock music led by female voices, but if you've ever wondered why it took so long for this to take hold (aside from your occasional Olivia Newton-John or Sheena Easton), re-introduce yourself to "Parallel Lines," a sad, tired excursion through the world of 70s New Wave, without the edge, recklessness, insubordination or anything else that made that movement worth paying attention to. Blondie as a band is basically Graham Parker and the Rumour with blonde hair and tits but without any of the songwriting talent. It's no wonder this bland bunch of poseurs lurched toward rap and reggae in their follow-up efforts; "Parallel Lines" must have been what cokeheads put on when they got home with their 'ludes and cognac so they could get some sleep. Honestly, the filler here makes "Hotel California" sound exciting. Fronted by Debbie Harry, whose life up until then was probably ten times more interesting than what she's able to convey on vinyl here, she was the female version of what wash-outs David Johansen and Iggy Pop had become by the late-70s. Witness the disco sell-out "Heart of Glass" and tell me Rod Stewart is the only singer who should have been convicted of a musical felony back then.

MGMT "Oracular Spectacular" [2007]

So if your "depth" as a recording artist consists immediately of nothing deeper than the trappings of rock star fortune and fame, you're already walking on very thin ice. That any of us bought in should ensure we're swimming for our lives in the cold darkness of the modern music business. But it's hard to blame MGMT (short for "Management," which is short for "industry hacks") -- these kids literally don't have anything else to sing about; thanks, American education system! What the boys from MGMT did manage to learn is that imitating 60s sounds with modern sampling equipment is a good way to be considered "psychedelic," and is thus a good way to streamline yourself into the good graces of Rolling Stone, if anyone still reads that rag. Better than actually hustling for gigs and building up your name the honest way; MGMT was signed to a major before any of them needed to shave. To that end, when they sing "the youth is starting to change," they indeed mean it as a threat but are apparently clueless about what they intend to have the youth inflict upon society, unless it is an endless scroll of boring pop wallpaper. Watching clips of the Thin White Duke on YouTube and wrapping your imitation in reverb does not give you soul, as MGMT proves here, but like it or not this is the overall sound you're going to find most of your new music from (via TV commercials, of course) for the foreseeable future. God help us all.

Lynyrd Skynyrd "Second Helping" [1974]

Because dumb-ass rednecks in the 70s probably thought women were incapable of playing the guitar, Lynyrd Skynyrd used its 3-guitar hick-dickhead assault as some sort of badge of masculinity. It's no surprise to find this worldview when one listens to the lyrics in "Second Helping": from defending Jim Crow as a Southern "tradition" to Ronnie Van Zant's vocal extrapolation on his unapologetic rant of fecklessness begun on his band's previous album's "Freebird." The slamming of their very own record company helps illustrate that trailer trash often can't keep a job once they bother to find one, and they firmly attest that not all Southern boys are racists, but only if you happen to be an old black guy who's an awesome guitar player. Ultimately, however, Lynyrd Skynyrd re-created themselves as arena rockers from shithole roadhouse lowlifes, secure in the knowledge that you didn't need to be a decent human being to be a rock star -- after all, the Stones had been doing it for years.

The Cure "Disintegration" [1989]

If pomp and pretension were weaponry, the Brits would still rule the world (and The Cure would be amongst their generals). Fronted by a calculated ladder-climber who gets his jollies behaving like some misfit kid who won't leave his bedroom, the members of The Cure struck gold when they drilled deeply into suburban teen angst, declared they weren't callously exploiting it, and did so with a straight face. Well, not really -- perhaps that's the reason behind all that hideously-applied Joker makeup. Every grandiose sweep of 80s synth, every plunky little amateur guitar line and every wailing whine from Robert Smith makes this entire album sound like the Police's "Every Breath You Take" without all the exciting parts. These guys were old pros by this time, though -- they'd failed goth and bubblegum pop yet still managed to stay signed -- so focused on bringing both the suicidal gloom of their early albums and the overt sell-out studio hack shit from their middle period together in one cloudy, squishy ball of weak, annoying neediness. Throw in some fake Peter Gabriel movie-soundtrack drums and you don't have a make-out album for insecure teenagers -- what you have is a UK submarine of sullen, sunken arrogance. The 80s couldn't possibly have ended fast enough.

Allman Brothers Band "At Fillmore East" [1971]

The record company came to their senses when they decided to forgo the original title: "When Rednecks Take Over." Ripping off blues slide guitar, vocal lines and lyrics, peddling them to a room full of New York hippies and then selling it all at the concert-going heyday as one of the "greatest albums of all time," the Allman Brothers probably took years off Muddy Waters' and Howlin' Wolf's already tenuous lives. It's one thing to be ripped off for your pocket change outside the club, but quite another to have the very style of music you created and struggled to make relevant yanked out of your decrepit hands by a couple long-haired blonde rube junkies. Theremin-yelping guitarist Duane and his honky singing brother Greg take black people down more pegs than George Wallace and Strom Thurmond combined. It worked out so well for the music biz that they went even whiter, which is why we eventually wound up with Edgar and Johnny Winter. Not content with simply robbing fat, sweaty Chicago musicians, the Allmans also deftly target sophisto-jazzers like the Crusaders, minus the piano playing and anyone with the slightest trace of melanin. It was just the fertile fields for Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels and Molly Hatchet to lay their own brand of cow patties on everyone. And you thought the 70s were liberal.

M.I.A. "Kala" [2007]

Among the reasons Sri Lanka is on absolutely no one's short list of vacation destinations -- with its extreme heat, poverty, pollution and violence -- at the very top has got to be that they apparently listen to crap dance music like M.I.A. Either that or this West Londoner of Sri Lankan descent is faking what dance music in her home country is supposed to sound like, and doing a really terrible job of it. Sloppy, noisy and obnoxious, complete with screaming poultry and garbage being kicked around by far too many wayward children, listening to "Kala" is like imposing yourself deep inside a third-world tenement. It's world music on some really bad acid, Afro-Indi sewer sludge covering every beat and discarded Bollywood scrap. That said, it's easy to figure out how M.I.A. keeps winning glowing reviews from music critics of the West, besides the fact that they can't resist anything with Clash or Pixies music in it: those pastey-white fat-asses aren't going anywhere near Sri Lanka -- ever -- but listening to "Kala" lets them believe they've just visited some sort of exotic hell on earth. "Better you than me, girl. Here's 5 stars."

Limp Bizkit "Significant Other" [1999]

With how many different groups these guys are the cut-rate version of, if there was something akin to a record store cut-out bin during Y2K, Limp Bizkit would have owned it. Rage Against the Machine without any conviction, the Beasties without any savvy, Eminem without any brains and the Red Hots without any hard-ons, Limp Bizkit was the perfect faceless, feckless group to yield huge rewards from the faceless, feckless music industry. In fact, Fred Durst was so in sync with what record execs wanted from their talent that he was eventually made Senior VP of A&R. It only takes a quick listen to recognize this guy is a corporate hack posing as an actual rocker. Honestly, the only thing to get in the way of Limp Bizkit taking over the world of major label rock in the early Aughts was 9-11, when Americans (and everyone else) realized we had plenty of things to actually be upset about and dedicated to -- leaving frickin' Durst's phony angst in the frickin' dust. Unless you'd care to hear how Motley Crue would sound posing as a hip-hop group, there is absolutely no reason to snack on Limp Bizkit.

Tupac "All Eyez On Me" [1996]

Gee, it's hard to believe such a helpful, concerned citizen could have left us so suddenly… psssh, yeah right. Tupac popped so much shit he bagged it up and sold it as brown popcorn. "All Eyez On Me" went platinum nine times over, proving that it wasn't only the 'hood that was looking to suffer at the hand (er, voice) of an ignorant, sadistic punk-ass with a death wish. Dr. Dre put his best prime-time TV clean genericism on the production, but the lowlife sleaze, woman-hating and overall misanthropy permeates through like the stink of a fresh doodie on the back seat attempted to be covered up by a Christmas tree air freshener. Tupac is the perfect representation of gangsta rap: recklessly hateful and stupid, calling out women for bad decision-making while basically begging to get himself filled with lead calling out his gun-toting rivals. The desensitized worldview is astonishing, with the end result giving rednecks a perfectly good reason to continue discriminating against black people (and "bitches," depending whether they choose to agree with Tupac or not). Between this guy, Biggie Smalls and OJ, it's no wonder Eminem got to have a career in hip-hop. About as far away as you can get from "I Have a Dream," Tupac would have been Martin Luther King's biggest nightmare ever.

Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" [1985]

Here's how much you needed to suspend your disbelief listening to popular music in the mid-80s: hearing guest-vocalist Sting bleat plaintively that he wants his MTV was originally sold as some sort of anti-commercial statement on the condition of the industry at the time, when in reality (and especially in retrospect) it was nothing but one great big fat commercial. Mark Knopfler selling out his group of London jobber bar-band hacks was so egregious it made ZZ Top look earnest. Along with the homophobic, misogynistic, myopic viewpoint in "Money for Nothing" (naturally blamed on working stiffs -- classic class-warfare at work in plain view), the filler songs here bespeak of what mild fake Windham Hill yawnisms Knopfler would have released had his album not been hijacked by the Margaret Thatcher wing of the "Rah Rah Ronald Reagan" campaign, which was so bad it'd have made Mellencamp cough up a french fry. What a waste of a perfectly good faceless guitar talent who should have by all rights remained in obscurity.

Sufjan Stevens "Come on Feel the Illinoise" [2005]

I'm still not sure why there should be a correlation between multi-tracking abuse and boy-man whisper-singing, but it's possible it all started here with Sufjan Stevens' 2005 release (and the only one anyone ever cared about), "Come on Feel the Illinoise." If it did, feel free to blame this beardless musical egghead for the indie scene being overrun with ball-less beardos for the following decade. Imagine The Cure as teddy bears, but with far more grandiose orchestral conceits. Even more accurately, think Elliott Smith duct-taped to a chair in Belle & Sebastian's basement by an overly articulate baroque composer. What any of this has to do with the state of Illinois, let alone Quiet Riot, is anyone's guess -- though Stevens did manage to flip through a "Land of Lincoln" tourism guidebook and at least one sensationalist work of nonfiction on John Wayne Gacy before writing out his lyrics. So I'd advise not investigating those teddy bears too closely unless you're one of those perverts who enjoys finding horribly grotesque things in your cotton candy.

Portishead "Dummy" [1994]

Taking recording techniques to synthetic extremes that would make Tricky scream in agony, gloomy doomster Brit-mopes Portishead shower their distinct brand of depression on susceptible 90s potheads, rendering the entire remainder of the millennium a complete waste, steeped as it was in deeply morose self-pity. So anally tedious in the studio he'd make Dave Stewart cringe, Geoff Barrow spends what must have been an eternity splicing together and slowing down snippets of music not his own for "Dummy"'s pastiche of preciously meaningless sound collages. Beth Gibbons' voice contains all the comfort of a cold, steely spinal-tap needle (and I don't mean the funny 80s movie; there's nothing remotely funny about this album -- believe me, I'm searching for it). As a result, in retrospect this is the perfect CD to listen to as your soundtrack to the ensuing Y2K paranoia; you may even hope a plane will fall out of the sky on top of you after listening to this toxic grey mud-slide. I think I hear Robert Smith from The Cure telling this band to cheer the fuck up. Perhaps they were clairvoyant enough to know what havoc the Bush administration was about to wreak on the world in the next several years... or maybe it's just that they're from a part of England where it never fucking stops raining.

The Zombies "Odessey and Oracle" [1968]

Turns out there were plenty of options for music listeners in the 60s, particularly if you were of the opinion The Turtles were too radically harsh and non-commercial for your tastes. "Odessey and Oracle" might even have made Don Kirshner's head explode if he weren't already conspiring within the industry to foist saccharine insults like The Monkees and The Archies on everybody. This is the kind of record that makes you realize how hairy Simon & Garfunkel's balls were (in a good way, actually). "Odessey and Oracle" is the Beach Boys strained into baby food, Procol Harum sleepwalking. The singing here makes Nico, by comparison, sound like she had a penis. How Britain itself was not invaded and demolished upon this album's release only proves how few people ever bought it -- all except critics, who were likely contractually bound to give it a good write-up so the Zombies' major label wouldn't shrivel up on the spot. Jesus, this is one painful listen: bring your ear close and you'll hear the Mamas and the Papas laughing at how dickless these guys are.

T. Rex "Electric Warrior" [1971]

It's extremely hard to understand how these itchy guitars, burbling hand drums and breathing-on-your-neck reading-the-paper-over-your-shoulder vocals could have amounted to a glam-rock sensation in the Western world during the early 70s, but somehow the Hobbit-obsessed UK weirdo named Marc Bolan (itself a pseudonym) traded in his acoustic for a Gibson with a Marshall stack and made the impossible happen -- to all the rest of us' detriment. Rock this opaque and bleak could scarcely be produced by Hendrix's corpse. Add in a bunch of inane string arrangements and Theremin-inspired backup vocals, as well as the most infantile fantasy-schlock lyric sheet ever printed, and it's crystal clear that the "sensation" of glam was more biding-time/treading-water while rock fans waited around for the Beatles to rejoin, the Stones to kick drugs, or to get pounded in the face by the jack-boot of punk rock. But Bolan had cashed in all his chips by then, and never had to suffer the agony of MTV's 80s version of glam-rock that he was in part responsible for -- clearly there are some rewards for being thrown through the windshield of a car to your death. For these brief moments early on in the decade, however, T. Rex had Rolling Stone critics, David Bowie and chicks who thought Gary Glitter wasn't creepy enough gushing with excitement. Impossible to see in retrospect; luckily we're no longer so myopic or emaciated.

deadmau5 "4x4=12" [2010]

OK, skip over the bad math skills, which is clearly a ploy to distract us all from the "music" within this compilation (if robots farting can indeed be considered "music"), and consider the aural contents: somehow deadmau5 found a way to make programmed loops sound pretentious. Perhaps that's worth consideration in some other way than clicking on the icon and placing it in the picture of your garbage can, but not if you're looking for an enjoyable night on the town. Perhaps a vacuous person on the right amount of X, speed and flavored vodka might find something to dance to here, but anyone else is going to be annoyed beyond belief and into despair, finding themselves plugging the jukebox at the corner dive and sadly dancing to Yaz's "Upstairs at Eric's," recognizing finally their best years are way behind them -- even the young people. Take your cue from the Mickey Mouse get-up minus the cuddly felt: it may be disguised as entertainment, but it's really The Terminator. (BTW, has deadmau5 signed with Disney yet?)

Midnight Oil "Diesel and Dust" [1987]

Because no one truly gives a crap about Australia -- even Australians (witness the mass exodus to Hollywood, et. al.) -- nobody gives a crap about what Midnight Oil has to say. If we did, there certainly would have been some blowback to their overt advocation of socialistically giving back the "honestly"-conquered homeland to the naked Aborigines. Should you ever wonder why liberalism never took hold in America in the 80s to counter the Reaganites, don't consult a history book -- consult this album; these guys make INXS look like Milton Friedman. So pretend you don't speak any variety of English, even & especially the godawful Aussie dialect, and judge the quality of the music: overcooked pedestrian studio rock horseshit. But because the late-80s sucked dinosaur eggs, Midnight Oil was allowed on the radio. Had it been a decent era for tunage, these guys would have had to be content with a weekly-meeting book club of radical non-fiction with the FBI unit designated to Sydney (aka, those in the federal government's doghouse) up their ass; even Peter Garrett's bald head is suspicious. Beware judgment from others when proclaiming your fandom to the Oils -- especially if you want to be considered a fan of good music.

Ace of Base "The Sign" [1993]

True, by the time this album was released in the States the 80s were over, but it sure didn't sound like they were: techno-bubblegum synthesizing the most hideous aspects of Madonna, reggae sell-outs Third World and computerized soul conglomerations Snap! and C+C Music Factory quickly became ubiquitous in every uncool venue in America, including television. Essentially the rebirth of Abba as cyborgs, Ace of Base seems to represent a long-term pop trajectory that will one day culminate with plastic mannequins automated to move around onstage with pre-fabricated tracks bouncing rubbery plastic through the speakers. The kids will love it. This will also, of course, be Armageddon for actual musicians, who will choke to death in poverty on the toxic waste cranked out by corporate cockroaches like Clive Davis, who will not only survive the calamity but thrive on it. Then again, it would probably be a mistake to expect Sweden to actually produce the musical anti-Christ, bad as Ace of Base, Roxette and Abba truly are -- they're only imitators, after all, and always have been. That they were still faking Madonna in the grunge era only meant they hadn't begun to counterfeit Kurt Cobain yet.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs "It's Blitz!" [2009]

Not even when you get your jollies laughing at bad music efforts like I do is it at all pleasant to see desperation emerge within small-time indie groups when they're about to be flushed out of the system if they don't come up with a pop hit pronto. In the case of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O., she has willingly transformed herself from brash 00s punk slut to 80s-style Quarterflash slut (she may as well have changed her name to "Karen O. Shit"). The rude garage guitars are permanently supplanted by tame New Order keyboard washes and suburban mall dance beats. Not that this band didn't have sickly sweet pop tendencies early on, but this aggressive foray into the marketplace results in a tidal wave of underwhelmingness. Maybe Karen O.'s just all fucked-out, but in that case she missed a great opportunity to cover Lili von Shtupp's "I'm Tired" from "Blazing Saddles." Even in the few moments when they try to rock they can't really manage it anymore; maybe they should have tried to sell-out even earlier in their career. So while maybe indeed "It's Blitz!" it sounds like Yeah Yeah Yeahs are only sacking themselves.

Guru "Jazzmatazz, Volume 1" [1993]

Killing the entire vibe right out of the gate, Gang Starr rapper Guru brings hip-hop self-congratulation to an entirely new level with the opening track of "Jazzmatazz, Volume 1," wasting time introducing the band of Blue Note-style jazzers who had yet to play anything on the CD. (Isn't that what jacket covers are for, moron?) Anyway, Guru finally jumps the shark by specifically and restrictedly joining rap beats and rhymes with outdated bop-jazz phrases and solos of the 50s and 60s, rather than allow different styles of music to organically grow within the rhythms, like hip-hop did when it was actually successful. Even worse, Guru's rhymes are even more washed-out and obtuse than LL Cool J's -- you could find better rappers on any street corner in New York in the early 90s. Furthering his series of imbecilic decision-making for this album is the modernized, repetitive female "hooks" a la Brand New Heavies, probably added as an afterthought once his rep at EMI threw the original masters back in his face. What it all amounts to is one huge aggregate compromise: be-bop without the freedom, hip-hop without the edge, philosophy without the depth and culture without the fun. It's amazing anyone bothered with Us3 after this debacle.

Cat Stevens "Tea for the Tillerman" [1970]

Along with fellow soft folkies James Taylor and Jim Croce, Cat Stevens can be held responsible for the onset of wussified radio popsters like Harry Chapin and Dan Fogelberg in the mid-70s, and still later the indie beardos of the 20-teens. It's enough right there to see what sent Stevens screaming toward hard-core Islamicism, without even investigating the 19th-century family values lullabies that perpetually gross out the listener through "Tea for the Tillerman"'s entirety. "Wild World" is his G-rated, sac-less hectoring older brother version of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," and naturally it became a big AM hit. Basically, the UK couldn't stand the loss of the Beatles as an entity so went lurching for whatever contemporary music might again placate all the grandmas out there. Conceived as a cheapo-Elton John LP construct, "Tea for the Tillerman" has plenty of meandering piano filler in between his hippie-dippie singles, which are the aural equivalent of Vaseline and quaaludes. Even Stevens knew this caliber of played-out Simon & Garfunkelocity couldn't last much longer, and when he finally disappeared he ran as far away from the music industry Jews as possible -- only to resurface years later to call for the head of Salman Rushdie on a platter, self-fulfilling his notion that there are indeed a lot of bad people out there.

The Smiths "The Queen Is Dead" [1986]

There's definitely a point where wryness becomes torture, and on "The Queen Is Dead," glum sour-grapes peddler Morrissey crosses the line purposely and routinely, rendering this volume of echoey 80s indie tracks a series of drips to the forehead. Speaking of drips, Morrissey's horrid mama's-boy neuroses and paranoid delusions are bad enough, but packaged in a somber voice that has only sung the same four notes in its entire existence, it's amazing he and his edgeless Edge-guitarist Johnny Marr got to do a third album at all. Slow, whiny, precious and spiteful, "The Queen Is Dead" rocks about as hard as Everything But the Girl checking out a library book. Morrissey unmistakably sings as if he's dancing ballet alone in front of a full-length mirror and loathing every second of it. So naturally he pursues fame for its own sake like any navel-gazing queer boy; why anyone bought into it is a different story -- Thatcher-hatred back then must have been at an all-time peak to let this moaning misfit anywhere near the UK Singles Chart. And if you're listening to find out if the dead queen in question is actually himself, be prepared for even further disappointment -- this guy's sticking around at least as long as Elizabeth has.

Billy Joel "The Stranger" [1977]

It goes without saying that we'd all be better off had Billy Joel remained a stranger to us all, but clearly we weren't destined to be that lucky. Just hitting his stride as a sappy balladeer and glossy schlockster that makes Elton John's -- hell, Liberace's -- late-70s work seem palatable by comparison, Joel proves that no one in the Tri-State area had the slightest idea what constituted decent pop music. "The Stranger" is pretty much a time capsule of 70s suckiness: Steely Dan's wedding-band chord changes, Chuck Mangione's false jazz simple syrup, 10CC's cringe-inducing angelic backup singing, Elvis Costello's strained song construction, Springsteen's banal vignettes about uninteresting people and Boz Scaggs' antiseptic cokeheaded production. All you really need to know about why people were so depressed in the decade can be found within the grooves of this very record; being force-fed crap like this and Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" was enough to spiral anyone into alcoholism, drug dependency and divorce. Joel did his best to bum everyone out in the 80s, too, but he never again succeeded in placing a turd in the punchbowl like he did with "The Stranger."

James Brown "Live at the Apollo" [1963]

Hyperactive, anally retentive and more egotistical than Muhammad Ali on a gram of coke getting his dick sucked, James Brown presents his sweaty, overcooked doo-wop supper-club extravaganza "Live at the Apollo" for discerning music listeners who were just beginning to become desensitized to endlessly repetitive soul riffs -- perfectly useful in setting the table for multiple generations of rock, R&B, funk, disco and hip-hop brain-dead morons. He solicits bad behavior from his audience of expensively-dressed middle class Harlemites and generally gets it, although the toga party in "Animal House" dancing to Otis Day & the Knights was livelier than "Live at the Apollo." And all this before mentioning James Brown sounds exactly like Otis Redding with his balls in a vice. His aimless wail and chalkboard screech are intact, however, even as far back as this era of processed hair; unfortunately the producers had not yet been able to disguise the fact that this album was recorded over several dates, thus they were able to cherry-pick when the crowd was behaving the most respectfully boisterous, probably when their TV-studio "Applause" sign was operational.

Elvis Presley "Elvis Presley" [1956]

A series of lunkheaded decisions -- letting a sobby-voiced hambone fake his way through modern standards, backing him up with a faceless group of hillbilly hacks and apparently recording his vocal tracks in an elevator shaft -- is what got the whole ball rolling in 1956. Thus, if at any time in the ensuing six decades of rock music you ever wondered what in the hell the embarrassing clowns you're listening to are trying to do, the answer will inevitably lead you back to this: they're emulating the Original Embarrassing Rock 'n Roll Clown, Elvis Presley. On this, his debut album, Elvis sets the entire genre on course weighed down by a series of bad habits that only mutated monstrously as time wore on, including sloppy performance execution, lying-ass come-ons, callous put-downs, overt vocal grandstanding (including his hopelessly sappy falsetto), materialistic shallowness and willing self-objectification. Because he only had to compete with whitebread pussies like Pat Boone and Perry Como at the time, Elvis' style was able to spread across the landscape like a viral epidemic. If only he had been a true talent with at least a few brains in his head, there's no telling how much higher musical quality could have reached by now. Instead, we got this cocky hip-swinger who could only manage to sell himself out to Hollywood and be put out to pasture in Vegas as a phony karate-chopping swine. To say we deserved better is an understatement more massive than Elvis' final white jumpsuit.

The Shins "Oh! Inverted World" [2001]

Back before non-rocking songwriters smoked too much pot and grew their beards too long, they tended to sit around wallowing in their own insecurity. I'm not sure which is more pathetic, especially after revisiting The Shins' debut, "Oh! Inverted World." This is music by and for young people who want desperately to get laid but overthink everything until they've gone completely soft; clearly it's natural selection getting in the way of neurotic eggheads being allowed to procreate. This explains the restless refrains, climbing vocal lines and modulations in these tunes, designed to distract from the abject failure of the band members' ability to function as well-adjusted human beings. Certainly this must have given somebody comfort, but probably only in that their own lives looked less miserable by comparison. Basically these are grad-school folksters who somehow lucked into a record deal; why they should be so down-in-the-mouth about it I can only guess, but perhaps this is where not being able to get laid comes into play. Which would naturally give way to smoking too much pot and growing your beard too long, and this brings us right to the present day. Thanks, Shins, for getting this musical train of Cream of Wheat going in the first place -- now go ruin some other line of work, like accounting or something.

Frank Zappa "Apostrophe" [1974]

You've probably never wondered what happens to jobber musicians just before they die of boredom, but if they're unfortunate enough to find the tape rolling at the time, they probably always come up with insipid wankdom like Frank Zappa's "Apostrophe." A hyper, hairy 70s-era Spike Jones capitalizing on the plethora of stoned-out music fans at the time, Zappa orchestrates every second of this meaningless faux-hilarious romp about smelly feet and eating pissed-on snow when he's not trying to prove to the listening audience -- who'd already abandoned the record by the beginning of Side B (and that's being generous) -- that he's some sort of guitar rock god. Further, Zappa was always quick to demean drug usage, especially among his band members, but clearly he himself needed something to take the edge of extreme smarminess off his approach -- or at least realize those xylophones needed to go. Why he felt the need to try and out-weird druggy psychopath Captain Beefheart with this brand of sophomore gym class humor is only something that can be plausibly explained by someone out of his mind on hallucinogens and narcotics. But even Jimi Hendrix wasn't this big of a control-freak cocksucker. Ultimately, "Apostrophe" should be a warning to all chart-reading musicians: if you find you're only in it for the money, you just might wind up with this embarrassment on your resume.

Liz Phair "Exile in Guyville" [1993]

If anything bore out the notion that music critics are nothing but hapless masturbators, it's the nip-slip cover of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville." Even before the first endless progression of aimless guitar chords gets underway, these pent-up fatsos were all hailing it as a "masterpiece." The band sounds like a weak, out-of-tune John Cougar Mellencamp cover band fronted by deadpan slut with a voice as flat and monotone as a report from the Emergency Broadcast System, with nothing constituting the remotest emergency save the fact that Chicago's burgeoning indie-rock scene of the early 90s was dead on arrival, largely thanks to this CD. But combine the partial nipple exposure with Ms. Phair calling herself "a real cunt in spring," and suddenly it's not only the season that's springing to life -- what a grotesque concept when one pictures the editorial staff at Spin. This is probably why Gen-X sprawled toward unkempt Seattle arena-rock and yupster bar-band tripe faster than they could beat off to Jennifer Aniston's naked ass on the cover of Rolling Stone a couple years later. Sincere ineptitude is what joins Liz Phair with critically lauded uber-hacks like The Flaming Lips and Pavement; thanks to them all, an entire generation of music-listeners was totally cheated out of a worthwhile alternative rock experience that would eventually have saved them from "Livin' La Vida Loca" and letting the dogs out. Thanks, 90s -- without provocation, you sucked far worse than necessary and beyond anyone's reasonable expectations.

Beastie Boys "Paul's Boutique" [1989]

There's a very important reason it's "Paul's Boutique" -- an album nobody bought when it first came out -- that's cited as "great" by Beastie Boys' fans: they knew celebrating the frat-house nightmare of "Licensed to Ill" would get them laughed straight outta the conversation. The party of obnoxious self-congratulation continues with "Paul's Boutique," though more obscurely and hit-lessly: Ad-Rock's sour bitch-whine can still burn your nose-hairs, but all the other guys can muster is the idea that if hip-hop had broken through on a national level by the Beasties rather than Run-DMC -- who they stole their entire schtick from -- the whole industry would have gone exactly nowhere. Poorly conceived rock radio samples, grade-school scratching and broad-based bragging that a blind man could see was total horseshit, the Beastie Boys unapologetically and persistently answer the unasked question: "What would rap music sound like if it had been founded in the Catskills?" This group does provide an important insight into the psyche of wannabe hipsters of the 80s and 90s, however: they prove indefatigably that white people never understood hip-hop. So when the Beasties say "racism is schism on the serious tip," they're not interested in black equality -- they want to be allowed to weasel their way onto the scene without impunity. Why'd anyone let 'em get away with it?

Janelle Monae "The ArchAndroid" [2010]

Even in the egocentric world of popular music, it's rare to find yourself choking on someone's ego like smoke from a housefire as brutally as when you're listening to Janelle Monae's "The ArchAndroid." Endless tracking and even-more endless name-dropping of historical giants in literature and cinema (Fritz Lang? really? And what R&B fan is going to hear the name Philip K. Dick and not immediately think "porn star"?). Witness the couplet "Just another weirdo / You can call me your hero" -- it's nearly impossible not to turn green with nausea. Besides, just because your producer knows how to string together your unfinished Stevie Wonder-via-Quincy Jones knock-offs (with Barry Manilow choruses! feeling ill yet?) does not make your self-centered vignettes a "concept" any more than Lady Gaga does "concept" albums about being a disillusioned party girl abandoned at the club. Monae's references to existing as a synthetic entity does not square with her struggles to get past her detractors' complaints about her -- what self-respecting android would give the slightest shit? -- but at least it's consistent with her polished voice and dehumanized production values. Picture the love-child of Prince and Grace Jones blasted into outer space to get an idea of what "The ArchAndroid" is trying to be, and then take a moment to appreciate your life resembles this inferno of pretension not at all.

King Crimson "In the Court of the Crimson King" [1969]

Even during the "free love" 60s, guys had a sure-fire way to make sure all the women would leave their party immediately: they'd put "In the Court of the Crimson King" at full blast on the record player, and show everyone the horrendous cover art of a freaked-out cartoon-guy's nostrils and tonsils. By the squealing Robert Fripp guitar(?) solo 4 minutes into this proggy swamp nightmare, any chicks still in your apartment could clearly be classified as psychedelically immobile or passed-out drunk. King Crimson could have easily been named "Proud Wank," and even their mellow stuff (jazz flute? cue the Will Ferrell parody -- stat!) renders a mental cacophony, if only due to legions of boy-musician listeners pounding at the inside of their closet doors, begging to come out. But there's a reason proud gay wankers like David Bowie abandoned this type of scholarly musical nerdliness: he wanted to become famous. Apparently "In the Court of the Crimson King" was a satisfactory antidote for pop music critics' soft hell of reviewing Sonny & Cher and The Mamas & the Papas records back in the day; nothing else really presents itself as a valid reason to consider this worthwhile material, let alone one of the great works of the 60s. That, or it only hammers home the suspicion that all Rolling Stone critics are/were homosexual geeks in the first place.

Motley Crue "Girls, Girls, Girls" [1987]

It's entirely possible that no group of people in any profession, at any time in history, has perpetuated more cliches about their industry than Motley Crue on "Girls, Girls, Girls." In fact, it's like that with all their albums -- they were major-label sell-outs from Day One, and any metal fan who has ever listened to them is no metal fan at all. We choose "Girls, Girls, Girls" for slammation because this 1987 release was when we'd no longer be rid of these prettified shitheads, and which would eventually and extremely unfortunately make Tommy Lee's wiener a social topic. Each and every song by the Crue is a cardboard cut-out of an actual rock tune, and as a result they make fellow-LA nimrod David Lee Roth seem downright philosophical by comparison. This is paint-by-numbers rock, complete with phony vocal screeches, plastic guitar distortion, dime-store Michael Schenker solos and vignettes about humping random bimbos. There's a perfectly good reason 80s hair-metal is the only popular music of the past 40 years to completely flop in its attempts to cash-in on the nostalgia market: the genre was already a cash-in from 70s hard rock, and all the Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers in the world won't help you enjoy a minute of it a second time around.

Iron & Wine "The Shepherd's Dog" [2007]

Here he is: the beardiest of all beard-rockers. With all the soul of Zach Galifianakis in a guest-host skit on "SNL," the whisper-singer/guitar-snoozer who calls himself Iron & Wine digs up and reanimates the corpse of Crosby, Stills & Nash (yeah, I know those guys aren't officially dead yet, but have you heard anything they've released over the past 25 years?) with highly concentrated THC weighing down his brain like an invisible albatross. The infinite-track syndrome of most white recording artists of the late Aughts/early Teens is on full display, as are all the cliched earthy campfire conceits, and of course his giant, smelly beard. Unfortunately for people seeking worthwhile musical experiences of this era, the indie industry is apparently plagued by a particular strain of ball-lessness with few signs of a pending recovery. I'm afraid until A&R reps stop searching log cabins in South Carolina for their next hit-makers, we're stuck in this Great Recession of rock. Maybe that's the point of all the hydroponic weed -- to make everyone forget how shitty this era is for new music. What's the alternative, after all -- "The fucking Voice"?

Parliament Funkadelic "Motor Booty Affair" [1978]

Proof positive that kitschy white groups like Alice Cooper, Kiss and Devo in no way corner the market on embarrassingly foolish schtick. Parliament Funkadelic had been robbing record companies blind for years by the time of "Motor Booty Affair"'s release, their first LP after the incredibly improbable hit "Flash Light" from their previous album. Obviously spending all the money on reel-to-reel tape and blow, George Clinton's business model -- throwing a party for moocher funk musicians and just letting the machines roll -- had obviously taken its toll on his brain cells and integrity by then, with "Motor Booty Affair" full of imbecilic caricatures talking over each other amid the impersonating of 70s idiots like Howard Cosell. Shows you how lame the parties must have been in 1978 that this was still considered "party music." Rivaling future hip-hop acts for using a maximum amount of words to say absolutely nothing, "Motor Booty Affair" is the Casablanca Records version of those annoying kids at the back of the bus. For all the spaceship props and extensive shirtless costuming, George Clinton's "concept" of some otherwordly futuristic outer-space nonsense makes Sun Ra seem comprehensible by comparison. Maybe it sounds better with enough drugs in your system; Clinton obviously thought so.

Pearl Jam "Ten" [1991]

Did you ever quietly think to yourself (because no 90s rockers would ever acknowledge this at the time) that Seattle's "grunge rock" movement was one giant load of bullshit? Well, the proof is in the "pudding," as they say -- and here you have Exhibit A. "Grunge" was simply arena rock for guys who don't wash their hair, and "Ten" -- from its broad, blatantly recycled riffs to its mannered vocalizations from long-time haircut-boycotter Eddie Vedder -- is its ultimate example. No wonder the music industry got behind bands like Pearl Jam (way to appropriately name yourselves after spooge, though, fellas) so quickly and utterly -- they allowed them to peddle the exact same macho-poseur crapola, cheapened and watered down this time, as they had for the previous two-plus decades. If anything changed, it was that expenses were cut significantly by forgoing the spandex and leather in favor of thrift-store flannel and hiking boots, and by renting places in Seattle for a fraction of what they cost in LA. Perhaps Pearl Jam was really part of a grand scheme to gradually pussify hard-rock fans, who were then softened up further by Dave Matthews Band and then John Mayer a decade later. Even if not, "Ten" is a redundant, obvious, rambling, pretentious wreck of an album by guys who rightly should be playing Foghat covers at the local fair.

Johnny Cash "At Folsom Prison" [1968]

Goat-voiced pill-popping country hard-ass Johnny Cash somehow managed to cross-over to non-redneck music fans with this live album inside a Texas prison, which apparently had no black people in it (otherwise I'd have expected some sort of anti-twang revolt within the first few songs). Even more puzzlingly, this album came out in 1968 -- when psychedelia was hitting full force and Vietnam protests were getting more violent. Perhaps that's the point of this major-label release: even the squares wanted to feel like they were part of the drugs and chaos. Cash was happy to oblige -- chuckling along to his stark tunes about senselessly murdering people after however many pills and drinks he usually takes before playing a gig. (It's hard to fathom how much less of a career Chuck Berry would have had with the same lyrical content in his material, BTW.) The inmates are nothing if not extremely polite to the Man in Black, even as he struggles Elvis-like to hold himself together and keep the frogs out of his throat. Overall, however, he manages to fulfill his purpose in "At Folsom Prison" by exposing exactly what's wrong with an extraordinarily high percentage of American white men: the calloused swagger in doubling-down on their bigotry and other crimes of ignorance, and compassion that extends only as far as their possessions. Consider this record the blueprint for what you need to know to finally take down the sons of bitches.

Band of Horses "Infinite Arms" [2010]

It's been suggested that the unfathomable sluggishness of a plethora of musical releases by beard-rockers of the late-Aughts/early-Teens is a direct result of far-stronger marijuana than ever existed in society previously. If so, I guess it's nice to know someone's having fun (but it ain't me, not as I'm listening to "Infinite Arms"). Nothing if not of their time, Band of Horses join a seemingly endless stream of feckless, spoiled groups who need to economize their track recording usage about as often as they take a clipper to their chin hairs. And because there's no tension in the music, there's nothing here but campfire wallpaper and concert venues with rich kids politely yawning through their noses. The tame sing-songy tracks on "Infinite Arms" in the countrified hirsute get-up brings to mind the Brady Bunch boys as Hasidic Jews from the South -- but even that description would imply music with more snap and flavor than this series of hickory-smoked puff pastries. The only way Band of Horses is aggressive about anything is in the on-the-nose everyday banalities in their song lyrics, which sound as if they had been lifted straight from the journal of the least interesting dudes in the world. But I bet they can't even lay claim to being something that profound.

Fiona Apple "Tidal" [1996]

I'm guessing that if 90s fashion waif Kate Moss had tried to record a CD it would have sounded a lot like this; give Ms. Moss credit for sparing us this husky voiced, faux-soul box of disgruntlement and maudlin Gen-X balladry. Fiona Apple's handlers likely envisioned for her (and themselves) plenty of MTV video success, but here on her debut album she proved cranky and difficult enough to manage resisting everything but her impulse to add mellotron (or optigan, you dumb-ass purists -- same fucking difference!) to everything and constantly rewrite the progression to Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man." In "Tidal," she proves she's headstrong enough to foist her sub-par singing and piano-playing talents on a generation of kids who were already incredibly bummed out to begin with. A decade later, Fiona Apple would have been one of those pitchy white girl soul singers who gets voted off "American Idol" in the early rounds, but at least she never lowered herself to the indignity of covering Billy Joel or Diane Warren schlock in front of millions on prime-time TV. She's always been self-possessed enough to fail on her own terms, and on "Tidal" this she does -- mightily.

Eric B. & Rakim "Paid In Full" [1987]

Rapper Rakim is an absolute marvel to behold: it's entirely possible that no one in this history of humanity has used more syllables to say less. Endlessly bragging how he wins all the rap contests (mm-hmm) and is seriously dedicated about working as a rapper (fo' reals?), that he actually writes his words down before he raps (aw hell nawww!) and expects to get paid for his performances (psshh!) becomes downright tedious after about the first minute or so. Even worse, his generic 80s DJ Eric B. sounds like Marley Marl falling into the toilet. Cheap Cosby Show-era beats, scratches and samples both date "Paid In Full" terribly and suggest that the early backlash against hip-hop had less to do with racism than with quality control. Even further, that rapping is really not about anything but a minimalist "art movement" akin to an entire gallery displaying canvases with a single drab color painted on each one. What else can explain a 6+ minute track of staccato monotone entitled "My Melody," unless it's all a sublime joke?

Queen "A Night at the Opera" [1975]

Hard as it is to believe (or stomach), the mathematical equation for this album appears to go like this: "A Night at the Opera" = "Sgt. Pepper's" - (John + George) / Deep Purple x Elton John(2) x "Jesus Christ Superstar"(10). Notice "Tommy" nowhere in there; "A Night at the Opera" leaves that steaming dump of pretension in the dust. This is the bejeweled golden calf of 70s AM-radio pomp-rock. Fuckin'-a, it's gag-inducing just writing that phrase… So this is lead-singer-a-flambe Freddie Mercury's major "achievement" -- recording vocal overdubs until they inexplicably disappear off the tape, stringing horrid partial songs together drenched in echo and "look at me" insecurity and demonstrating to fellow pomp-pricks Styx, et. al. that no amount of glitz and glitter is too much. Apparently the Western world had been desensitized into the dirt by the time this monstrous hit record came out, but all "A Night at the Opera" managed to do was dig everyone a six-foot ditch. This album is worth studying if you're interested in hearing every last ill-advised impulse English music ever indulged in throughout the 20th century, from Gilbert & Sullivan to Yes. Otherwise, avoid this at all costs and sleep securely with the knowledge that pop music has indeed already hit its absolute low point.

Carole King "Tapestry" [1971]

We all should be in total agreement that any recording artist giving Barry Manilow the idea to make the jump from the Brill Building to center stage deserves to be savaged within an inch of his (in this case, her) life. Disagree? I dare you to listen to "Tapestry" again -- you know you still have a copy somewhere -- and tell me anything holds up other than that Carole King had one nasty head cold throughout the time of her recording it. Oh, and maybe that she had a way with exploiting the misery of things like getting divorced to serve as a good AM radio intro to the latest Ringo Starr single. And while one may have issues with singers who recorded King's songs such as Aretha Franklin, the musical accompaniment of "Tapestry" is as shallow, tepid and gross as a kiddie pool at a Palm Springs motel. Even worse, her hippie-cum-materialist sentiment provides the perfect insight into the naturist-turned-corporatist "development" of a majority of baby boomers from the 60s to the 80s. Thus, a strong case can be made that the "greed is good" Reagan-era revolution can be traced back to this very record and its 25 million units sold. Apparently, all it took was one piano-plunking hack to not only undo the "all you need is love" aesthetic after about two short years, but to also usher in a nasty infestation of ivory-tinkler band leaders that only ended a decade and a half later, once Billy Joel finally imploded.

The Stone Roses "The Stone Roses" [1989]

Strictly for those who thought the Happy Mondays were too soberly capable and the Jesus & Mary Chain not full-of-themselves enough, The Stone Roses hit the frail-trippy "rave" scene of the pre-grunge 90s with all the impact of Echo & the Bunnymen's wet socks. Their marketing department was unbelievable (literally!), though: this tired trail of mushy loops, soggy guitar chords and vocals the consistency of watery porridge was being pushed as the forefront of a new British Invasion... one which could have been defeated solely by roadies from the Smithereens' tour bus. To understand England may be a boring place to exist is to expect not at all the slo-mo XTC progressions and dickless hip-hop beats that were at the forefront of The Stone Roses' "attack." This is ultimately cutesy 60s music that the Beatles could've beaten ruthlessly to death with an offhanded single about Paul's grandma. Had The Kinks still been allowed to release music into the 90s, this album sounds like them playing while being suffocated under a ton of marshmallow fluff. I guess this goes to show that as long as you can somehow make Jann Wenner feel like he's not an old fart, you can still win yourself a high-profile 5-star review.

Brian Eno "Another Green World" [1975]

Filing down the edges of prog rock and jazz fusion, then placing it all in the precious cocoon of the recording studio with a big-label expense account, Brian Eno's "Another Green World" burns several bridges toward what might have been ways to escape the tripe of AM radio like the Doobie Brothers and the proto-disco glitz like "T.S.O.P." at the time. Eno was more interested in playing spoil-sport to anyone other than those who may have felt Joan Armatrading was too spicy or Kraftwerk too palatable. Even when he lurches -- Todd Rundgren-like -- toward pop-ditty sentiment, the effects are undermined by his watered-down sour-buttermilk voice and his Quaalude-encumbered approach to sound-scaping. His hair must have fallen out due to sheer boredom. Amazing he was able to farm out the comatose stylings of "Another Green World" for the next decade through fellow pretentious suck-asses David Bowie and Bryan Ferry. This album should be called "Cure for Insomnia," as I'm finding it difficult to stay awake even writing about this wholly forgettable record by a guy who makes Moby look like Hulk Hogan. If this is the only "Another Green World" we ever wind up finding, we'd be better off getting sucked into a black hole.

The Cars "The Cars" [1978]

Proof that the major-label learning curve was speeding up with capturing, capitalizing -- killing -- unique musical movements (in this case New Wave, which was otherwise begging for a merciful death anyway), The Cars released their debut into a near-total void of commercial pop-rock (ahhh, what blissful times those two seconds were) with songs about emotionally vacant materialism and one-upsmanship: a perfect blueprint for how the interests of the 80s would manifest themselves. Less a workmanlike bunch of pop-hungry shmoes like Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, The Cars were more a supergroup of underground Boston sell-out musicians; you can play frat-house gigs and cling to the conceit of coolness for only so long before you blow your brains out. Session-wank guitars and drums, along with Devo-via-ELP synthesizer embarrassments, make Brit-pubbers Squeeze sound cutting-edge. This is when labels were so desperate to find a palatable alternative to disco that they settled for the airy sweetness of cotton candy; The Cars were happy to fit the bill, to the detriment of hard-working rockers with any balls at the time. And unless you plan on making a career out of running the roller coaster at the perpetually migrating carnival, this is in no way the album for you.

New York Dolls "New York Dolls" [1973]

Back when New York City was a vermin-infested shithole -- yes, even worse than it is now -- New York Dolls only made things worse by putting lipstick and high heels on a few of the junkies and handing them guitars. In what amounts to a Stones-in-drag photo shoot transformed into an airborne virus, "New York Dolls" was released into the marketplace in the early 70s, only to be kept off the airwaves by relative musical powerhouses the Eagles and the Steve Miller Band. That the Dolls inspired not only the punk rock movement but later "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and still later Poison and Warrant illustrates how dangerous this band's half-life truly was, and thankfully they stopped after two albums or we might still all be wearing big hair and spandex and listening to Cinderella today. The Dolls originally played NYC clubs where, based on location alone, everyone in attendance had an obvious death wish, but even by the time of this debut album, the presence of big-label schmuck Todd Rundgren in the producer's chair showed that these guys would have sold out their own grandmas for a chance to become Aerosmith. Proves yet again all one need do is look into the soul of those with "rock 'n roll integrity" and find little else but a swarm of cockroaches.

The Specials "Specials" [1979]

It was an inauspicious rebirth of a genre -- ska -- that no one cared about the first time around. Bad enough this band brought pork-pie hats back in style for a minute, but that they allowed Ray Charles-hater Elvis Costello (who had already ripped off their style himself) to produce their debut record managed to nullify every self-congratulatory aspect of the anti-racist sentiment this "two-tone" band purportedly tried to convey. Don't believe it; these jokers were just in it for the money, and Costello's production technique is emaciated as the supermodels he was trying to nail at the time. There were plenty of future groups The Specials influenced -- from The Selecter to Fishbone to No Doubt -- but unfortunately none of it resulted in worthwhile fare. Perhaps this style of music was only ever useful to get tourists in Jamaica to fork over their vacation money... that is, before the spliff-smoking got so out of hand they cut their beats in half and called it "reggae." In any case, aside from charting a history of bad clothing styles, The Specials is one band you can rest assured is not actually special at all (unless you're referring to the level of education the members received in school).

Jefferson Airplane "Surrealistic Pillow" [1967]

A veritable encyclopedia of bad ideas, the Jefferson Airplane took a series of dumps into the well of 60s music and taught Crosby, Stills & Nash that singing multiple harmonies was the same thing as having substance, the Monkees that continually running triplets on blues scales is the same thing as playing a solo, the Mamas & the Papas that any group of chicks and dudes will do (i.e., a key party's a key party), the Grateful Dead that tripping while playing means the same thing to those listening to your album who are not tripping, and X that a female singer can be way-off and it gets excused as "purposefully dissonant" instead of "destructively atonal." You really don't even need to revisit this album; simply listen to this band's 80s metamorphosis as Starship and their single "We Built This City" -- the acutely hideous nadir of all pop music -- to see what Jefferson Airplane's ultimate manifestation was going to be... and it was Otis Redding's fucking plane that had to crash? Count this band's Marty Balin as one guy I'm glad the Altamont Hell's Angels beat the shit out of.

Taylor Swift "Speak Now" [2010]

It's as if country music had always been hermetically sealed and never exposed to the elements, least of all the scrawny little Barbie doll at the helm of the entire procession (although look closely enough and you, too, will see the corporate puppet strings attached). Taylor Swift -- the lottery-winning cutie of LA-via-Nashville, or Nashville-via-LA -- takes country twang back more steps than Shania Twain and Faith Hill did a decade beforehand combined; the Chipmunks have more soul than whatever "Speak Now" is trying to emote. Had Hank Williams managed to stay alive until 2010, he surely would have OD'd a second time at hearing what Taylor Swift -- her handlers, that is; everybody with the capacity to reason blames Dick Cheney a lot more than George W. Bush, after all -- had done to his genre. That moneyfied dickwads have descended vulture-like onto modern country music only makes me feel sorry for a style of music I could not have given less of a shit about previously. So even though Taylor Swift may only be conscious of doing nothing more than passing up a bite of that sandwich, in reality she's much more complicit in the overall undermining of society, and as such ranks below intellectually vacuous porn stars, in my estimation -- at least they have the capacity to get me off.

Franz Ferdinand "Franz Ferdinand" [2004]

The last possible existing combination -- garage guitars with disco beats -- proves beyond a shadow of a doubt it should have never been explored by anyone, let alone Franz Ferdinand on their debut. Caught in an uncomfortable limbo between dancing and rocking, British kids of the mid-Aughts I'm sure were just as clueless as those of us who thought we were listening to the The Strokes the first seven times we heard "Take Me Out." Further complicating this band's alchemy is snooty lounge-lizard lead singer Alex Kapranos, whose impact is similar to finding a slice of gruyere in your box of Cracker Jacks. How these pub-gig rats find anything to be snooty about is unclear but probably totally unwarranted -- nothing new there in re UK sentiment. Being less dysfunctional than the Libertines isn't anything to be especially proud of. Oh, maybe it's that they have a superior working knowledge of 20th century history than the Ramones did? Yeah, no extra points there, either.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds "Murder Ballads" [1996]

Good God, just kill me now. Look, Iggy Pop may be an asshole, but at least he never tried to sell himself as Edgar Allan Poe like Nick Cave does, and has ever since his lyrics became comprehensible. On "Murder Ballads," he sheds all pretense and growls into the mic the various ways he could kill you, or rather how his archly derived characterizations could. Figures he'd chicken out like that; I'm sure in real life Nick Cave violently extinguishes lives the way Jay-Z does: not at all. Certainly his intensity is real, but this may be more due to acute frustration at not having the slightest capacity to be able to sing. In that way he is like Iggy, though he's more dickheadedly selfish in that he'd rather vent his rage outwardly, like they did at Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, that Colorado movie theater, Newtown CT, the Boston Marathon… OK, you know what? Fuck Nick Cave and his bloodthirsty hard-on. We've got enough problems with actual psychopaths in this country carrying around dangerous weapons without having to know this guy's out there beating off to our horrors.

OutKast "Stankonia" [2000]

Greasy as a cookout in an Atlanta project and loose as the stool 12 hours after the food's all eaten, OutKast named "Stankonia" correctly: this CD has wafting stink trails emanating from it ("Toilet Tisha"? give me a fucking break). Figures something from the sub-genre known as Dirty South would have a foul odor. The rap tracks here consist of demo-quality beats, scratches and patches fronted by incessantly dueling Siamese twins Big Boi and Andre 3000 -- the first who missed his calling as a back-country auctioneer and the second who's far too humanly fallible to get away with referring to himself as some sort of futuristic robot. The subject matter is typical for the most part: opulent overspending on shiny objects, fucking anonymous babes with big booties, etc. (some female perspective, too, but nothing that raises the bar of classiness). That they came up with "Bombs Over Baghdad" more than 2 years before "Shock and Awe" occurred doesn't mean they were privy to national security secrets as much as it does they were equally as ignorantly disrespectful of other cultures as George W. Bush would soon prove to be.  Careful with this "Stankonia" -- it's both horribly vulgar and really hard to wash off.

The Band "The Band" [1969]

Known better as the lowlife Canadian folksters who lucked into the Bob Dylan gig, The Band continued the log-cabin charade for many years before Martin Scorsese eventually exposed them as a bunch of coke-mongering fools like him. On the follow-up to their debut "Music from Big Pink," Robbie Robertson's group of campfire geeks couldn't find a new title as comically pornographic as that, so they just called it "The Band." The results are equally as terrible: siding with the South in the Civil War ("The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"), advocating infidelity, alcoholism and gambling ("Up on Cripple Creek") and forcing the maple syrup icon to come out with her hands up ("Jemima Surrender"). Somehow these are the alley cats who always managed to avoid the old boot, though nothing could disguise this "earthy" album from having been recorded at Sammy Davis Jr's Hollywood pool house. So be careful who you consider "genuine": they're perhaps even more likely to be connected on the inside.

Madonna "Like a Virgin" [1984]

So terrible it should have been enough to impeach Reagan, Madonna's second record -- arriving tragically at the apex of MTV's popularity -- exposes the "new normal" of greed and soullessness that was just building steam as completely bankrupt from the start. In retrospect, we should all have seen the economic crash of 2008 coming upon the release of her single "Material Girl," although by then Madonna was an untouchable trillionaire, inconceivably garnering more respect than all the honest female singers in history combined. Shows you she wasn't wrong for being a shallow bitch -- and a lying-ass one, too: "Like a Virgin"? blow me -- and that all one needed to do in America in the 80s was get with the corporate program and be willing to stomp everyone else's fingers as you climb the ladder (or dance in your video). True, Madonna's natural image may have been a lot closer to that of a cool, punky Village chick, but by then the die was already cast: you can only really make it if you kowtow to the system, let gay men write all your songs for you, and encourage ancient pedophile Wall Street bankers to stroke themselves off to your image.

Alice Cooper "Billion Dollar Babies" [1973]

If you've never heard Alice Cooper's music before, be prepared to recoil in horror… though not for the reason you may think. From the early 70s to present, the public's capacity to handle grotesque imagery has grown exponentially, rendering Ms. Cooper's Halloweenie camp rock star bit a quaint amusement in the modern age. Far more offensive are "Billion Dollar Babies"' musical contents: cartoonish hard rock schlock that would make Elton John cringe, the residue of pinheaded prog elements from the band's earlier incarnation, a kindergarten-level intellect and -- worst of all -- the aggressively mediocre teflon-coated recording quality of future Kiss producer Bob Ezrin. Antiseptic, edgeless guitar tracks finally prove Kryptonite to the Marshall stack due to Ezrin's anal-retentive hackery, which proved him to be the Lex Luthor of rock music, leaving the genre vulnerable to the virus of disco soon to be bubbling up on Fire Island. Naturally, the execs at Warner Brothers gave "Billion Dollar Babies" a huge push; major labels had by then finally realized they could cage and control their talent, even and especially if said talent is prone to overcompensating by playing with snakes onstage.

Bjork "Post" [1995]

It must have been exhausting for Bjork to create a body of such consistently undanceable dance music, but on "Post" she manages to accomplish this with sad, insistently minor-key progressions and her minimalist approach to vocal melody (very minimalist: there are only ever five notes she sings -- sometimes whispered, sometimes growled, sometimes shrieked) sulking gloomily over the top of cheap, shimmery programmed beats dumpster-dived from Portishead's back alley. This elfin chanteuse had arrived on the scene a few years earlier, fronting the Sugarcubes as something of a female, Icelandic Bobcat Goldthwait, but by the time of "Post," her schizoid delivery had already been well played-out. She must have recognized this, or her record label did, when they decided to put together a phony-baloney big-band number out of nowhere to capitalize on all those bored 90's white people with enough disposable income to invest in swing-dancing lessons. Thus, for as cloying and repetitive as the rest of "Post" is, I can only imagine an entire CD's worth of material with this Scandinavian munchkin channeling Frank Sinatra. Thank goodness she spared herself and all the rest of us such an indignity; too bad she still gave us this.

Bon Iver "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" [2011]

Proof that musical bombast doesn't only come in brassy, loud colors, Bon Iver on "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" (hey -- I think they'd like us to know their name is Bon Iver) generates the pompous overkill in slow, muted tones like an uncomfortably distended stomach filled with gas bubbles. Thus, though most of the sounds here are offered up subtly, almost as suggestions, this album still vehemently subscribes to the "kitchen sink" mentality of filling as many of the infinite tracks as possible before submitting to the A&R department. Which might be OK if the end result didn't sound exactly like Sufjan Stevens drowning at the bottom of the pool. Zen-like acoustic guitar monotony mixed with James Blunt vocals (after smoking a big Blunt) and horn sections buried under six inches of topsoil are the main ingredients here, and if you're starting to nod off right now just listening to the description, perhaps it'd help if you knew Bon Iver also apparently rented out Vampire Weekend's marching band for this album. No, I didn't think it would.

The Kills "Blood Pressures" [2011]

Scratching to finally get out of the dirty garage and onto the Coachella stage, The Kills had had it with slumming by 2011 and, the way fellow redux-douchebags The Black Keys did, added a bunch of studio production that took them from being a band who sounded like they didn't give a shit to one sounding like they're trying way too hard. Singer Alison Mosshart -- who resembles a preppie grad student on a lost weekend bender -- channels her inner Martha Davis, to ill-effect. Worse, at times guitarist/singer Jamie Hince tries to put on a John Lennon cap that clearly doesn't fit. All in service of the same desperation, of course: who in their right mind wants to spend their whole life in a shitty van playing dinky clubs in Omaha and Cincinnati that reek of stale beer and vomit? That said, is grossly selling out by way of soccer-chant choruses really the way to go? And finally, how long can an indie band truly expect to last with the accompaniment of a stupid pre-programmed drum track? Questions like these are probably daunting enough for The Kills to not have the guts to ask them, but come to her senses and I'd expect to see Mosshart back in the MBA program before long.

Steve Miller "Book of Dreams" [1977]

Inexplicable 70s hit-meister Steve Miller released "Book of Dreams" just in time for most Americans to look the other way from punk and before they traded in their blue jeans for disco leisure suits. Why anyone bought into this obtusely obvious, on-the-nose combination of faux-60s rock-pop and Alan Parsons-style synth-flatulence says plenty about how society could have let such vacuous, idiotic garbage like "Three's Company" become a hit, which was the prime-time TV equivalent of this album. Ahead of its time only in that it buffed all the edge and depth from each and every song the way they all did in the 80s, "Book of Dreams" robbed an entire generation of suburban high school kids the chance to dance to decent music at the prom. Serves a lesson of sorts, though, I suppose: look to the radio for your musical entertainment and you're bound to be swindled. Perhaps people didn't think so at the time, but with tastes having veered to the safe, sterile and soft, everyone was looking for some sort of respite from their fucked-up, tumultuous lives in the mid-late 70s. But all Steve Miller did was let people sleep in until the real bad stuff got here.

Sly & the Family Stone "Stand!" [1969]

That's OK, feel free to sit... unless you're a "midget standing tall," that is. Cross-"fro"ver soul group Sly & the Family Stone -- think the Staples Singers with WAY more drugs backstage -- scored several hits with this schizophrenic effort that's part major-label Steppin Fetchit and part Black Panther paranoia (witness "Somebody's Watching You" and especially "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey," which I think was a reworked cover of the German anthem "Don't Call Me Nazi, Jew Boy"). Chalk this up to the extreme psychotropic confusion of the late 60s, when everything seemed to carry the splotchy sheen of a Jackson Pollock light show. For sure, Sly took himself higher during and after the success of this record -- apparently into orbit, when he'd be too high to bother showing up to his own gigs. Present and plugging away on his frog-croaking keyboard here, though, Sly deserves to shoulder the blame for giving George Clinton the idea to self-medicate into obliteration before turning on the recording equipment. Thus we can trace most embarrassingly drug-addled soul and dance music of the 70s -- which means close to 100% of it -- back to this abomination, the LP equivalent of a hippie party gone on too long, where the hosts argue over who needs to tell the black guys to go home.

XTC "Oranges & Lemons" [1989]

We've all experienced in school that time when the class clown was the smartest, nerdiest person in the room as well; it's also probably the first time you actually thought of murdering somebody. Well apparently they have those people in England, too -- except over there, they give them record contracts. Hence the existence of XTC in the first place, let alone allowing them to release their 11th fucking album, "Oranges & Lemons" (not sure about the oranges; the lemons here are all over the place). Cutesy, precious, cringe-inducing musical passages routinely awarded A+s from the impressionably insecure schoolmasters by Public Wedgenemy #1 Andy Partridge and his dork-squad of a band solidify just how shitty it was to try to listen to music in the late 80s. To say nothing of the fact that because XTC were so aggressively anti-commercial (yet disgustingly poppy at the same time -- try that trick without hurting yourself) the music biz spawned an even worse carbon copy by the name of Tears for Fears. If that's not enough to inspire you to give Partridge a swirly until his glasses fall off, I don't know what will.

D'Angelo "Brown Sugar" [1995]

Hard to tell whether the "brown sugar" D'Angelo refers to is black women or hero'n; these spacey, slow-tempo vamps -- calling them "songs" would be super-generous -- give naught but an extremely hazy perspective either way. Played by a bunch of strung-out jazzers who shamefully include gospel music into their oeuvre, I sincerely hope their grandmamas are no longer around to hear their Jesus music mixed with this druggy porno. I'd guess the sleepy narcotic nod of song after song leans toward drugs and away from sex, however, unless slow-motion fucking is someone's idea of a good time. Also, I wonder where D'Angelo would have wound up had it not been for the automatic harmonizer; would he have stuck with his vocal passes long enough to sing whole secondary parts and beyond, or -- as I suspect -- would he simply have opted for another hit and crashed out on the leather couch in the console room? Please tune in if you'd like to hear Prince OD'ing on sleeping pills, but otherwise this CD reeks of a performer who hasn't paid his dues, finds life extremely easy and is perfectly comfortable telling us how little it all means to him. Way to cash in your ticket, bub -- now disappear forever.

X "Under the Big Black Sun" [1982]

This group of party-pooping vampires did an excellent job of sucking all the joy and wonder out of living in Southern California, and on "Under the Big Black Sun" they reach their zenith/nadir: nondescript rockabilly bar guitar playing, a rhythm section of brutish cavemen, and the most blisteringly horrendous pair of singers ever to destabilize chemicals with their "harmonies." Exene and John Doe make weird, awful new dissonant chords with their vocalizations, and somehow have the temerity to front this band of loser-misfits that was for some reason celebrated for exposing the seedy underbelly of life in LA. I'll bet anything that any random drunk on Sunset Boulevard can sing better than these chumps. Otherwise, their semi-digested paperback knowledge apparent in their lyrics reaffirm that a (very) little knowledge can be a (very) dangerous thing. Because they're punkers, they'd probably be flattered by such a comment, but even X realizes they're just going to wind up face down in some dive by the end of the night. Better you didn't hang around such reprobates if you know what's good for you.

Dead Kennedys "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables" [1980]

What do you get when you combine 60s-style garage rock with pre-Reagan disappointment and an exponentially worse capacity for mindless hatred than Johnny Rotten? This fucking shit album. Aside from failing the Van Halen test of playing faster than you can think, little did these fucking SF wise-asses know at the time, but everything they poked fun at potentially happening in the US actually bore "fruit" eventually. So much for Americans ever getting the concept of irony. We now kill the poor and our children, drug people, send them off to be tortured, etc., etc. If there were any justice, Jello Biafra would be in jail for giving the verbal signals to the disturbed; what he was interested in achieving besides complete and acute anarchy in America is impossible to know because it never fucking existed. So where does this pencil-neck expect to find himself when the various shits hit the fan? Probably off in France somewhere, sipping chablis, bitching out his waitress for not bringing him his frogs legs fast enough. Some people can only ever find something to go batshit about.

The Hives "Veni Vidi Vicious" [2000]

Leave it to the Swedes to steal everything going on in contemporary music, even the crappy stuff. Coldly swiping the entire sound of American post-punkers New Bomb Turks -- and then ineptly needing five guys to recreate what that obscure power trio did -- The Hives attempt to come on like The Stooges on Ritalin instead of The Stooges on… uh, everything other drug in existence. Because Swedes are historically, patently incapable of musical originality, The Hives must be considered the Abba or Roxette of rock, pathetic as that may seem. Yet they do deserve such treatment; anyone who tries to turn themselves into a wind-up version of punk while the Ramones were actually dropping dead around the time "Veni Vidi Vicious" came out deserves to be slagged mercilessly. Certainly there is a place for punk-rock mockery ("prockery?" let me work on it), but when The Hives brazenly admit they're just in it for the money, that's enough to bring back the "tradition" of hocking loogies on the "talent." Hmm, maybe The Hives are bright enough to realize this possibility, which is responsible for them not having toured in awhile. Score one for things working themselves out.

Fugazi "13 Songs" [1989]

Perhaps the only band in history whose fan base in 100% male (and ugly), Fugazi takes things like drug use and casual sex to an extreme: they never do either, ever -- it's like some sort of cult with these guys. DC-based Ian MacKaye's faux-Mormon extremism logically has produced "music" so frustrated and aggro, Black Flag was like, "Cut it out, geez!" In fact, MacKaye seemingly has a legion of pent-up followers that rivals the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon in fanaticism and cluelessness; to his credit, MacKaye disbanded Fugazi before same-sex marriage legalization would have provoked him to preside over hundreds of his shirtless devotees. Anyway, what you'll hear if you accidentally find yourself with "13 Songs" playing in the background (and please notify authorities, thanks) is MacKaye's pedestrian tonic chords being propped up by his game but hapless rhythm section, but nothing saving his sinking wreck of a voice, especially the other shirtless freak who steps in from time to time to chicken scratch his vocal cords over the top of these 3-minute crises of conscience. If you wish to see side-boob ever again in public, stay far, far away from these guys.

The Black Crowes "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion" [1992]

Apparently, "Southern harmony" means existing as a rich-enough band of derivative redneck rockers to hire a bunch of soul sisters to find the harmonies within your scrawny, phony Steve Marriott posing vocal lines. With the Black Crowes, their fecklessness even at this early stage of their existence is toxic. What's helpful about this in retrospect was just how low the bar was set for rock music fans to escape the last bloviated gasps of LA hair metal that this album became a viable option. Every note played by everyone on this entire album is lifted from somewhere else; it's a veritable fencing operation of early-70s FM riffage. If only some of the guys tapping Public Enemy's phone would've bothered looking into this thievery, but somehow anything Stones-related -- even this obviously copy-cat -- has always been untouchable. So much the worse for all of us. Had the listening public known ahead of time that "Southern Harmony…" was on its way, perhaps we all might have pitched in to help build a time-machine so these guys could go back and suck-up with the hangers-on at Villa Nellcote so we'd never have had to hear from them in the first place. Win-win all around.

Little Feat "Sailin' Shoes" [1972]

Likely but inexplicably trying to prove that Graham Parsons is not the only drug zombie to dabble in major-label country music without any real country roots, Lowell George and his band Little Feat on "Sailin' Shoes" try to musically construct the slogan: "Cocaine - Not Just for Rockers Anymore." With his studio hack associate, piano-plunker Bill Payne, and assorted other jobber-mentality musicians in tow, George writes songs about traveling the country and learning nothing but how to continue being a miserable fat-fuck. With a voice like loud sandpaper and a slide guitar like a squealing greased pig, George not only assaults country but boogie, blues and rock too -- an equal-opportunity offender. It's easy to see what's eating him (and what he's eating), and with the most songs about whorehouses this side of ZZ Top, also easy to see how he tries to placate his torment. Too bad none of it works. For sure the black crows from "Dumbo" would have had a field day if they'd actually seen Lowell George two inches off the ground; hopefully he gathered some joy from being everyone's clown before kicking the bucket a few years later.

MC5 "Kick Out the Jams" [1969]

When did hippies trade in their peacenik flower power for blowing up Science Hall on the college campus? You just found out. The late 60s were always embarrassingly unkempt, but by the time the MC5 brutalized their way onto the scene, all those Jew-fro losers who couldn't get laid during the era of "free love" now had a vessel with which to direct their anger, laced with left-wing radical politics which I'm convinced was some sort of Nixon-era FBI jujitsu. After these hairy, marauding noise freaks were sufficiently lauded in issue after issue of Rolling Stone and Creem, there hasn't been a true liberal anywhere near the Democratic Party nomination for president since. Nicely done, moles. Aside from which, you can basically blame these guys for the existence of Kiss: testosterone-overload to the point of actual retardation, except the MC5 were too slovenly to bother themselves with costuming, which I'm sure they thought was for sissies. Even further, the amateurish execution of guitars at ear-splitting levels is the albatross which ultimately brought down the punk movement of the mid-late 70s. That's a lot of apple carts being turned over -- I'm sure even the heads of the National Security Council must have been impressed.

Frank Ocean "channel ORANGE" [2012]

If trippy soul music were a game of one-on-one, Frank Ocean would find himself endlessly dunked on by Shuggie Otis. This did not stop Ocean's 2012 debut "channel ORANGE" from garnering attention, however, despite its lack of direction, intelligence, songwriting ability or production quality. Sounds to me like the materialistic world of contemporary soul is finally giving way to ennui: congratulations, rich black people -- you're now officially as douchey as rich white people, where no amount of money, cars, drugs, etc. is enough to satisfy you. May as well just get high and do nothing with your life, which would bring you back full-circle. Thus, Frank Ocean inadvertently provides a glimpse into the potential future of R&B -- only when you've burned through the trust fund and wind up back on the curb will you be able to generate enough fire to sing and play with the intensity that put soul music on the map in the first place. Until that time, I'll pray my car doesn't get smashed into by your feckless, wasted ass. Thanks, Frank, for giving me something else to worry about.

Husker Du "Zen Arcade" [1984]

Not sure what good being a hardcore player with a conscience does when you're just going to beat your brains stupid on the edge of the stage anyway. Essentially some sort of update of "Tommy" for desensitized speed freaks, "Zen Arcade" is supposedly the master work of Bob Mould, Grant Hart and the dude with that big, gay mustache. Trouble is, that deaf, dumb and blind kid was more dynamic than whoever the main character of this album is; nothing happens within the "Zen Arcade" story that couldn't exist as a slogan on one of those cutesy kitten posters. Then again, if I weren't so distracted that Mould and Hart were about to rupture a blood vessel in their head while screaming their unintelligible lyrics -- can't tell which one of them sounds more like Bobcat Goldthwait getting his nipples pierced -- perhaps something more worthwhile might emerge. Too painful to sit through a second time, though; maybe someone who finds Sonic Youth too poppy would have more of an appetite for this molten static. Basically, if you're this keen on aural assault, you could always just go join the Army and get in a war or something.

Tom Waits "Rain Dogs" [1985]

By the time Cookie Monster-voiced alcoholic weirdo Tom Waits released "Rain Dogs" in the mid-80s, somehow his worsening musical condition -- a haphazard collage of bad fiction and an odorous stew of junkyard jazz and junkie blues-rock in the aftermath of a burned-down circus -- was making it onto critics' "best-of" lists, and he was lauded as some sort of creative visionary. But unless your tastes somehow descend to a low-budget theater stage recreating vignettes from the Great Depression, there's no reason to go slumming with this record. Perhaps Waits' effort lent guilt-ridden Reagan-era yuppies the chance to get gritty without actually needing to wash their hands. "Rain Dogs" does this along with plenty of other useless things, like demonstrating what David Johansen covering Leonard Cohen on a handful of pills would sound like. Not even cubist guitar art-dick Marc Ribot, tortured-goose sax honker John Lurie or animated corpse Keith Richards could rescue this drowning lowlife of an album; time to put "Rain Dogs" down and go take a bath.

Eminem "The Marshall Mathers LP" [2000]

Perhaps no one in history both hates himself and thinks he's the shit simultaneously as intensely as Eminem does, which may represent a tragic malady that's a modern late-onset form of self-imposed psychosis. His damn fault; if Eminem would stop trying to suck his own dick for one minute (as a white guy, though, I understand the extreme challenge involved) perhaps he'd recognize it's not just his fans, groupies, parents, friends and enemies who are fucked beyond repair… and his violent, paranoid revenge fantasies help no one except those willing to turn America into a fascist police state. Just because you can move your mouth fast enough to verbalize every meth-riddled trailer nightmare that courses through your 8th-grade-educated brain doesn't mean you should; in fact, you most certainly shouldn't. Consider Eminem's redneck ramblings yet another nail in the coffin of modern society; yeah, I know he'd take this as a compliment -- what some people won't do to be accepted by black people.

Steely Dan "Aja" [1977]

In an apparent effort to make Eagles' "Hotel California" seem rootsy, New York-transplant session wanks Steely Dan set out to invent a purely synthetic form of coke-headed jazz that inexplicably wound up on the charts throughout the late 70s. When President Carter was talking about the "malaise" in America at the time, he all but name-dropped this album -- a sad, soulless series of laments tackily conceived enough to make the Manhattan Transfer go, "Eww, guys -- yuck!" Rightfully slam this record for long enough and you'll eventually uncover the diehard fans of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who'll tell you: "Their earlier stuff was way better." First of all, that's bullshit unless you think future Defense Dept. advisor Jeff "Skunk" Baxter was a less techno-nerdly guitar player than whatever chart-reading pinheads play on "Aja," and secondly, this was the album the Dan was always destined to make: an uber-cautionary tale of how not to live life in the 70s, one that made Boz Scaggs appear reasonably functional.

John Legend "Get Lifted" [2004]

This album should be called "When Supper Club Hacks Attack." On this, John Legend's debut "concept" album -- and what a concept: celebrating partying and fucking, only to throw it all away remorsefully in the name of true love (welcome to married life, bud) -- the piano-playing crooner embodies the musical equivalent of one of those terrible Tyler Perry movies, where everything is overt sentimentality and subtle as a punch in the nose. Trying to throw off the scent of his corny jazz-covers background, Legend employs patches of studio recording "technique": lazily conceived 808 machine beats, cheap fake string sections and thrown-together backup singers, with the end result falling far short of not only The Apollo but 30 Rockefeller Center, as well. After listening to "Get Lifted" I now understand John Legend's moniker not to be the impossibly egocentric gesture I originally thought it was; he's actually trying to compare himself to Larry Bird (as in: "the funkiness of…"). Even here, however, the guy comes up short -- he's off the front rim song after grossly precious song.

Nine Inch Nails "The Downward Spiral" [1994]

Technical "wizardry" was never so aggressively obnoxious. You'd think renowned knob-twiddler Trent Reznor could do better than having to go through the Ministry guy's dealer for his dust-laced brown acid. Paranoid conversations with his perceived enemies -- mostly pigs, BTW (jeez, how Jewish is this guy, anyway?) -- ping-pong with psychotic screaming tirades that could kill any dancefloor vibe dead in an instant. Y'know that guy at the club -- looks kinda sexy at first but you start talking to him and immediately realize any second he's going to froth at the mouth, hurl himself off the roof or give himself a tattoo on his face? Yeah -- "The Downward Spiral" is what's playing in that guy's head. It's all got to be a big put-on, though -- no way would a real freaked-out maniac be able to be so anal-retentively tedious and trivial in the recording studio. That said, if there's one thing worthwhile about this collection of sleaze-gore, it's the title. "The Downward Spiral" clearly refers to a flushing toilet, and fittingly, the album sounds like Marilyn Manson taking a big dump.

Radiohead "OK Computer" [1997]

Endlessly belabored druggy downer vamps with so many bleeps and blurps you'd think they were contacting E.T., depressed British wussies Radiohead on "OK Computer" sound exactly like U2 finding out their cat just got run over. A hodgepodge of acoustic and electronic instruments basically thrown into a blender, the result is one unappetizing smoothie. Stringing parts of unfinished songs together the way the Beatles did when once they ran out of ideas was a good way to cover their directionlessness on "OK Computer," and apparently Radiohead either were too ignorant or too stoned to know that pretentious prog music went out of style 20 years earlier. For how anemic their efforts, it's easy to hear how hard this band is trying, struggling to get through the material without breaking down in a pathetic crying jag -- it's the only album on earth that makes Jeff Buckley sound downright chipper. And this many years later, it's amazing Radiohead still has so many fans; you'd think they'd all have slashed their wrists by now.

Motorhead "Overkill" [1979]

Because there's not only virtually no difference between any Motorhead albums but between any of the band's songs either, it's pointless to decide which album you should stay away from most. If you're looking for some guidance why you should steer clear of everything remotely associated with Motorhead -- especially if you're somehow drawn to hardened biker criminals on speed -- it's this: these guys would ultimately still be Bad Company if they had the wherewithal. Chalk up Motorhead's struggles to break into the pop market to their extraordinary ineptitude; they make Black Sabbath sound scholarly. Lemmy not only has a two-note range, but he can only scream those two notes, and even by this time his scream was nothing more than the hoarse bark of an English sheepdog. Behind his frightening, wart-faced exterior, listen as Lemmy still tries to come onto chicks in his songs even as he's fully conscious he's scaring the fuck out of them; forget Bad Company, he would've traded places with Shaun Cassidy, given the chance.

The Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" [1968]

Music of the 60s has plenty of cautionary tales, but none with so many wrapped up in one body of music as The Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo." Alienating their fan base and destroying any chance of remaining on the charts, these psychedelic pop folksters veer inexplicably toward country music, screwing the pooch and killing the golden goose at once. They were subsequently derided by Nashville purists: "Yew laughing' at us, hippie-boys?" Essentially the band was hijacked by headstrong country and drug/alcohol enthusiast Gram Parsons (who partied so hard he made David Crosby look like Donny Osmond) when he rode this wagon train into a manure-filled ditch, then split the band and left them there. Why Roger McGuinn didn't hire Johnny Cash to come slap the shit out of Parsons is a real mystery; he'd probably have done it for free, or at most a bag of bennies and a bottle of Old Crow. Country music is already bad enough -- it doesn't need any help from spoiled music industry fuck-ups.

Kanye West "Late Registration" [2005]

Some people just don't know when to shut the fuck up. In Kanye West's mainstream breakthrough "Late Registration," this post-gangsta rapper (y'know, the kind who goes to college… then drops out) serves up the motormouth hip-hop like Eddie Murphy in "Beverly Hills Cop 2" on fast-forward. His unmistakeable production style -- just letting extended samples lie where they may, regardless if they serve the beat or not -- is on full display here as well; as a result, mid-00's dance floors never looked so awkward. Endlessly blaming/bragging about his humble beginnings is annoying enough, but when one considers "Late Registration" served as Kanye's launching pad into his purgatorial orbit of plastic clothes and Autotune vocals, the effect is aggravatingly nauseating. The last thing anyone wants is to hear him gloat about "making it," especially now that we know what happened after he did. Good thing hip-hop's played out, maybe he'll finally go away now.

The Flaming Lips "The Soft Bulletin" [1999]

Being both pretentious and amateurish must be quite a balancing act; otherwise, how this band of pseudo-Floyd creeps continues to be lauded by critics is as mystifying as lead singer Wayne Coyne's remarkably consistent ability to sing off-pitch. Try listening to "The Soft Bulletin" while watching "The Wizard of Oz" and you'll be willing to hurt someone while reaching for the remote to listen to Judy Garland sing instead (if you don't fall into a deep sleep first). Coyne clearly loves Neil Young, but for exactly the wrong reasons: the pinched, nasal vocal style that can curdle milk and the stoned, trite lyrical quality. (Hmm, perhaps he's got ol' Neil pegged after all.) Astoundingly, The Flaming Lips actually turn out to be bigger hacks at electronica than they are as a regular band. Heck, a FINITE number of monkeys with the infinite studio time Coyne & Co. had to make this CD could produce something more listenable than this, and without all the metaphors torturously stretched from end to end. True, "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" -- I'll even go so far as to say an eyedropper of The Flaming Lips' profound suckitude is enough to crush an entire off-campus house of ecstasy dealers.

Hootie & the Blowfish "Cracked Rear View" [1994]

Here it is: the soundtrack for when they finally let black guys play golf at the country club. The main tragedy with this album -- and there are quite a few -- is that said black guy needs to fake sounding like a redneck to get in, as Darius Rucker does on "Cracked Rear View" (and elsewhere, I imagine; it would take someone paying a lot of money for me to listen to another note of Hootie & the Blowfish after enduring this pap). Thus, everybody's pretending to be someone they're not: Rucker acts like he's a sincere country fan, and the country club assholes try not to bristle when they hear him singing about wanting to "love" their white girls. Within this vast aural environment of fabricated arena pop is a chokingly disconcerting claustrophobia, though nothing the preppiest fraternities aren't already completely used to. As long as you're willing to exist within these extremely narrow confines it's not really a tragedy at all; I guess they cracked that rear view on purpose, lest they see what everyone else does about them.

New Order "Power, Corruption & Lies" [1983]

Well at least they're honest about how they made it in the music biz. Actually, New Order really made it when obscure English gloom-punkers Joy Division surfed the publicity that came with their Muppet-on-angel-dust-voiced lead singer committing suicide. New Order thus rose from the ashes unsteadily with the remaining mopes -- their guitarist warbling sub-pedestrian-caliber vocals and the bass player confused about whether he plays a lead instrument (he doesn't; well, he shouldn't) -- and took their brand of insipid repetition and immature perspective to the pop marketplace. Far less apropos of a title than their debut "Movement," still better would be calling this album "Heaven 17 Goes to Hell." Shimmering synth patches, programmed disco beats and all the introspection of a first-time meth user, Ian Curtis would have killed himself all over again had he been subjected to this charcoal-flavored bubblegum.

Van Morrison "Moondance" [1970]

As soon as the 70s started, the fun of the 60s ended. No record depicts this sad chapter of Western history more than Van Morrison's "Moondance," a sluggish compilation of un-crisp approximations of soul music by a pitchy Mick who couldn't carry Marvin Gaye's jockstrap. Van is constantly being bowled over by the lovers, music and drugs in his life during the course of "Moondance," and listening to his vocal delivery throughout, one can only guess that all three are due to extremely poor decision-making. He sounds like a tenor sax honking amateurishly over the band at the lame supper club, rambling inexpertly and lunging desperately for what someone, anyone might perceive as being "soulful" ("funky" left his place long before he ever got started). And because this approach gave that Counting Crows bastard the idea to do the same thing, Van loses extra points. In short, "blue-eyed soul" is as real as the Easter Bunny, and on "Moondance," Van dons the rabbit ears and fuzzy tail.

LCD Soundsystem "Sound of Silver" [2007]

"Dance Music for Dorks" should have been this album's title, and the concept offers a classic good news/bad news scenario. Good news: you can dance any stupid way you damn well please to LCD Soundsystem and no one else can call you out because they all look way stupid too. Bad news: this is the age of instant digital embarrassment, so shake your booty in public at your own risk, lest you wind up going viral and in Daniel Tosh's wheelhouse. Generally constructed by a random white boy with too much time on his hands, James Murphy devises ill-conceived concepts like imitating Berlin-era Bowie mixed with bad disco, singing with his sinuses clogged with snot, busting out synthesizers that were passé when Devo still did world tours and insisting on purveying extremely un-hilarious lyrical neurotica. I'm sensing a bit of Schadenfreude when it comes to the minor success of LCD Soundsystem: it soon becomes very easy for the listener to say, "Yeah, my band/life might suck, but at least I don't come off like this douchebag!" Besides, if silver really sounded like "Sound of Silver," it'd be totally worthless.