Blues Traveler "Four" [1994]

Epitomizing the horrid little secret of the 90s music scene -- frat-stoner rock -- Blues Traveler rode the thrift-store coattails of Dave Matthews and Spin Doctors toward infamy and a few extra bucks by annoying the rest of us with their faux-hippie East Coast meanderings, peppered with plenty of shit-ass whiteboy funk (I mean, at least Matthews had actual black dudes in his band). Vamping -- endlessly -- off Grateful Dead conceits for similarly-minded fucktards who bought tie-dye t-shirts at Saks for 50 bucks, this was "safe," "wholesome" music that yuppie parents could get into, too. So if you were a rich mama's boy or daddy's girl, this was likely the band you cited to your even more vacuous friends who thought there was no good music besides Hootie & the Blowfish. Led by harmonica-swallowing fatso John Popper, who sounds like if Magic Dick's name was Magic Asshole, Blues Traveler neither plays any actual blues nor goes actually anywhere. In fact, they never veer too far from redneck music, approximating country & western enough to satisfy racist white college kids from New Jersey, though ultimately they hoped to reach FM rock radio staple status. Unfortunately for them and for the rest of us, too, Popper's tortured-robin soloing and his moronic guitarist thinking it was a good idea to try and keep up with him doomed Blues Traveler to the realms of Weird Al parody, had Weird Al given enough of a shit about these guys.

Yaz "Upstairs at Eric's" [1982]

For those not old enough to remember, or who had sufficiently blacked it out from their memory banks, Yaz's "Upstairs at Eric's" plays like a cartoonish parody of how bad techno was back in the 80s. The distinctly queefing syth sounds -- which some Hollywood shithead actually deemed worthy enough to rip off for the "Beverly Hills Cop" soundtrack -- come from Depeche Mode reject Andy Clark. And that homosexual dude singing? That's Alison Moyet, who I believe is actually a woman (no direct proof, I'll concede). Clark breaks up the plastic bubblegum monotony with odd, meaningless pastiches of him and his drunk grandma in fake Laurie Anderson art-crap excursions, but this fails to disguise the demo-quality, pop market-aspiring lameness of "Upstairs at Eric's" that taught all the gay singers of the Aughts that no amount of sickly sweet emoting is too much. Simply put, Eric's place must have been one queer apartment of drugs and banal sentimentality (though notably devoid of any AIDS references; this was the Reagan Era, after all). That said, this album appears to have the improbable magnetism for skinny gay boys and fat chicks that babies and puppies do for straight girls and hot babes with giant hooters have for straight guys. Had we been paying more attention at the time, perhaps the gay political lobby wouldn't be so goddamn powerful right now.

Linkin Park "Hybrid Theory" [2000]

Here's a hybrid for ya: Eminem with a mullet -- that's exactly what Linkin Park's debut album "Hybrid Theory" reminds me of. Too stupid and trying too hard to prove they're really angry, Linkin Park sounds like the cast from Star Wars (including R2D2) starting a Metallica cover band. Even more accurately, they're Cake with studded dog-collars. Elsewhere, they employ the worst pop-pandering of Depeche Mode, then predictably open up their screaming noise-choruses like Dave Gahan having his smack withheld for 5 minutes too long. Angst this overbaked is really no good for anybody but sports-bar owners who look forward to seeing lots of fights outside around closing time. But clearly this band's promotion is the direct result of corporate music biz group-think: combine enough genres into one and you're bound to sell product. Squeaky-clean din like this for some reason always seems to find an audience with spoiled white guys, though perhaps this has to do more with the lyrics constantly citing being persecuted by those who don't understand them. But the band -- and its audience -- get it all wrong: in fact, as fellow spoiled white guys, you're understood all too well. That you feel any sense of persecution at all is more than likely very well deserved. Nobody forced you to get that tattoo on your neck, for instance, you frickin' moron.

The Jam "All Mod Cons" [1978]

I'm sure you don't care -- unless you're an Anglophile with way too much time on your hands -- but the difference between "punk" and "mod" in the late 70s equates to: if you're "punk," your folks kick you out of the suburban house you grew up in; if you're "mod," your folks begrudgingly let you live in the basement. "All Mod Cons" is self-important Brit-rock (a redundancy?) ripping off Beatles lines, covering the most cloying songs from The Kinks and continuing to imitate Pete Townshend's ineptitude. The Jam are actually an impressive guidebook for anyone who inexplicably hates English music to suddenly become explicable. It's no wonder these guys never took off on the other side of the pond. Self-consciously trying to balance out their various ghastly pretensions, lead dickhead Paul Weller attempts to put himself amongst the crowd of his fans, like the commoner he actually is but mostly tries not to be; why anyone would buy this I have no clue -- maybe people in the UK are a lot more naive than they let on. How else can one explain a serious discussion about this album being one of the all-time greats of the era while allowing this chorus: "No matter where I roam/I will return to my English Rose/For no bonds can ever keep me from she." This line is so bad it doesn't even register on my suckometer.

Otis Redding "Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul" [1965]

Between the confusing album title and blonde chick's face hogging the front cover of his album, Otis Redding should have learned early on that his race was not appreciated among a plurality of music fans with enough money in their pocket to go out and buy his record. Didn't stop this big, scratchy-voiced, repetitive, slow-jam shouter in a ridiculous red suit from continuing onward with his grade-school education, under-disciplined horn section and ham-fisted subtlety that made Sam & Dave sound like Nick Drake. Supposedly, his fat voice is one of the most influential instruments in all of 60s music and beyond; if true, it's easy to see where we went wrong: he showed Van Morrison and vile British drunks like Humble Pie that overly-emoting every syllable is perfectly fine (when it's clearly not), taught the Black Crowes' Chris Robinson every bad habit not involving shooting junk, and offered up the multiple-note vocal calisthenics that has plagued soul and pop music all the way up to garishly overcooked singers like Cristina Aguilera. Yet somehow, Redding's obvious flaws always seem to be taken as stylistic breakthroughs, whereas to this listener, things like his uttering the same phrases over and over brings to mind none other than Foghorn Leghorn. And in the rare moments when he doesn't bore everyone sounding like a Little Richard 45 played at 33 1/3, he does songs like "Respect," which Aretha Franklin could kick his ass with in her sleep.

Wolfmother "Wolfmother" [2005]

These lousy sons of bitches. Aussie Aughts trio Wolfmother was apparently strictly for people who didn't think Ozzy Osbourne sounded retarded enough. How this got over in the post-9/11 decade is a mystery; my best guess would be that The Strokes and all the limey wanna-be Strokes were busy ripping off every other rock band of the past 30 years, but the geniuses of Wolfmother discovered they'd left Black Sabbath wide open. In case you are under the impression Jack White needs to be more vocally cloying while describing the girls he's having sex with, then this might just be the band for you. What's shocking is these guys are from Australia and not Canada; I'd have sworn they'd started out as a Krokus cover band. That said, it's actually Mr. White to whom Wolfmother keeps coming back to suckle at the teat of, a sort of weird and disturbingly ironic image I'd rather not see the psychological research on. Probably because drop-tuning guitars to Kyussian depths only allows for slight enjoyment over the course of an entire album (just check Kyuss' total album sales for proof), it seems these guys set out to be popular enough to open for the White Stripes and get to squeeze Meg White's boobs after the show. Pretty lame, but indie rockers necessarily had to lower their expectations once the music biz had officially gone in the toilet.

Weezer "Weezer (Blue Album)" [1994]

Even though it's pretty clear 90s indie rock suffered greatly from a profound lack of talent and hideous audacity, it took Weezer to articulate that it's ultimately an insular, home-schooled, competition-devoid group of rich kids from American bi-coastal hippie parents who had the requisite moxie to force their embarrassingly amateuristic sub-par songwriting and performance on a music-listening audience of young people thirsting for something -- anything -- to save them from the Guns 'n Roses double album. Obviously, none of these chumps had it within them to deliver the goods, but what's so frustrating is it's just not that fucking hard to tune a goddamn guitar before you record your tracks in that multi-million-dollar studio. Are you checking if there's anyone besides Pavement and Jesus Lizard whose band is so horrendous they can set a two-inch tape on fire just by performing with extreme ineptitude? While Weezer is not as atonal as Dinosaur Jr nor as grating as anything that asshole Steve Albini ever did, they're still complicit with the slummy Gen-X aesthetic that ruined the youth of everyone who yearned for a viable alternative from TLC. Weezer even proves they do have at least some chops by singing harmonies, but they totally succumbed to what the cool kids have brow-beaten them into: shittiness = coolness, because quality = what Mom & Dad listen to. For God's sake, even boomer Ric Ocasek has drunk the koolaid, producing this worthless heap of Big Head Todd on a bottle of tequila. Only in the 90s could playing like shit equate selling out.

Rick Ross "Teflon Don" [2010]

Oh, hip-hop -- will you ever get over your infatuation crime and murder? Rick Ross, even with the help of "talents" like Jay-Z and Cee-lo, knows in his heart that he'll never get famous unless somebody guns him down like Tupac or Biggie (who gives a fuck which?). But now that those two niggas have worms crawling through their skull holes, Rick Ross still hasn't learned that scene is way the fuck over. Mindlessly, he cops the Kanye West off-time sample production technique, thinking it would somehow work for him when it didn't even work for Kanye himself. Besides, senseless as Kanye is about most things, at least he was bright enough to understand gangsta rap was a three-legged dog dying in its own pool of vomit. Rick Ross, though, is trying to resurrect this most misogynistic musical genre outside of Taliban radio. So fuck him. Besides, as he strolls through "Teflon Don," thinking he's a big man in more ways than just in reference to the medicine ball where his stomach should be, he's clearly been signed too long to understand most people have given up the fantasy-pimp bullshit since the Great Recession hit them. The only good thing about this enterprise is that music is so segregated these days you won't hear anything about Rick Ross getting his head blown off unless you're devoted to African-American Sirius stations or hear the news eventually through your favorite sports stars. And even then, you'll think they're talking about the kid who rapped with his clothes on backwards.

Judas Priest "Screaming for Vengeance" [1982]

Because they were already caricatures of 70s arena metal when they first started, Judas Priest made an effortless transition -- for them, not the listener -- into 80s hair metal. Proto-fascist, power-hungry conceits fit in so well with the Reagan Era it's actually kind of a wonder there was any other type of music happening back then. And Judas Priest themselves were consummate pros of the lunkheaded metal guitar gallop, with the perfect (as in horrendous) soaring scree of their sleeveless, studded-leather lead singer, Rob Halford. In fact, Halford was an A&R rep's spontaneous ejaculation of a cross between Ozzy Osbourne and Freddie Mercury, and obviously a lot closer to the latter than the former as far as sexual orientation, as we were to find out later. But Halford was, in fact, making his desires known in plain sight even back then; the lack of sexual savvy of the Priest's suburban teenage boy fan-base, however, saw the overtly gay lyric sheet going "straight" over their heads. Even the major hit single off "Screaming for Vengeance" -- "You Got Another Thing Comin'" -- is a perfect description of the male gay experience (subtly switching the original catch-phrase's "think" for "thing," and "thing = penis" was a "masterstroke" of sorts), so one can hardly fault people like Billy Squier for jumping on the gay metal bandwagon (Google: pink tanktop, video in the).

Thin Lizzy "Jailbreak" [1976]

Somehow under the impression that Foghat was having all the fun, 70s Irish rockers Thin Lizzy set out to get themselves onto American FM radio during hard rock's crisis point ultimately failed by Aerosmith, Bad Company, a completely wasted Led Zeppelin, disco sell-out Stones and these overly macho opportunistic wankers. Imagining himself some sort of Springsteenian storyteller, singer/bassist Phil Lynott lets everyone down with choice lyrics like "Oh Poor Romeo / Sitting out on his owneeo." Didn't matter that even properly executed, "Jailbreak" would be a vacuous pile of shit; this was the era of "Hotel California," after all -- Thin Lizzy didn't kill rock music themselves, they just fed off its corpse like any other manner of low-life vermin. That said, even at their most lyrically pretentious, neither Don Henley nor Springsteen himself were so reactionarily crotch-grabby as Lynott consistently is here. Made worse by the constant doubled guitar solos that enhance musical freedom the way the Manhattan Transfer enhanced "Birdland," somehow nothing seems to be able to thwart the continued force of "The Boys Are Back in Town," even this many decades later. You'd think that at least if Thin Lizzy was going to commit to male chauvinism they'd have sense to rock up their filler and not recede into the Doobie Brothers on 'ludes. But that's 70s rock all over: one major disappointment after another.

The Animals "The Best of The Animals" [1966]

Lots of rock music traditions got started with The Animals in the early-mid 60s, and they all suck. Amateur, high-in-the-mix organ playing, honkified approximations of sweaty old black bluesmen and brazen tunes about whorehouses can all be blamed directly on this stevedore version of the Rolling Stones. Eric Burdon consistently sings like a constipated grandpa, making way for a plethora of white-bread hacks on either side of the Atlantic (Ocean, not record label) to hawk their own brands of pedestrian garage crap -- and ones with the same shallow interests as dipshits who go into various other lines of work, like advertising on Madison Avenue or war profiteering at Kellogg, Brown and Root. Being rockers, the Animals' "grand scale" thinking is relative: they dream to "wear sable, one dayyy." Basically, these are young guys who were forced by their record label into Nehru jackets and love beads, only to be surprised their bastardization of John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley tunes was met with utter derision by actual black people. Instead of imploding from drugs, The Animals went the unfortunate way of a much higher percentage of rock bands: ripped off by their manager, the bass player left to be a corporate music biz stooge, and Burdon dug his own grave by extending his clown show of faking black music until the top-heavy weight of his self-imposed buffoonery collapsed him in a heap of self-parody. Knowing what we know now, rock music should have just stopped there.

Hercules and Love Affair "Hercules and Love Affair" [2008]

Just how much improvement did anyone expect from fiercely "out" groups' influence on popular music? Well, the petri dish of gayness had its heyday in the 2000s with singers like Rufus Wainwright, groups like Scissor Sisters and dance bands like Hercules and Love Affair, resulting in a profound thud -- as in finally stepping out of the closet, tripping on a pair of high heels and landing smack on your face. Singer Antony Hegarty sings so indefinably homosexually that he makes Alison Moyet sound like Lemmy. Nomi Ruiz tries to sex things up in a more "traditional" sense herself, but there's only so much one babe from Brooklyn can do in the face of such anti-heteroism. Perhaps (one day) redeemingly, neither Hegarty nor Ruiz are considered permanent members of Hercules and Love Affair -- maybe one day DJ Andy Butler will gravitate to biker rock, though the odds are admittedly very slim -- especially since Moby tried something similar 10 years previously with horrendous results. Queer and present here are all the trappings of bad electronica: simplistic keyboard phrasings, seemingly endless repetition and far too many nods to Fire Island disco, allowing for the disturbingly vivid image of Nile Rodgers in a mesh tanktop. It's almost as if the 70s were so long ago we're under the impression they embarrassed nobody. How far from the truth are we allowing ourselves to go?

Morphine "Cure for Pain" [1993]

Sounding like what I could've sworn was one of Tom Waits' bands in its sell-out phase, 90s indie rockers Morphine apparently went drastically redux -- two-string bass, sax and drums, (almost) no guitar -- so they'd have more money to spend on drugs. Of course, this will lead a band speedily down a path of boring redundancy, and it predictably takes only a few songs before you're ready to kick that sax player off the street corner. This wouldn't be nearly as annoying if singer/broken-bass-player Mark Sandman could carry a tune at least a little bit, or if his filler consisted of something other than his embarrassing wannabe Leonard Cohen conceits. These guys sound like if Mitchell Froom had fired all the non-Jews from Los Lobos. Let this be a lesson to all would-be rockers looking to keep expenses at a minimum as you go on tour: your shit gets old fast with minimal instrumentation, believe me. Even if what you think you're doing is sparing everyone from another trite, two-guitar grunge assault, it's not really helping if what you're playing is even more trite. And about boring chicks only you care about. The only reason Morphine went over in the first place is because the 90s was supposed to be this renaissance of rock bands; the only way to legitimize this idea was to have like a million groups signed to record labels, even the crap ones like Morphine. Instead of "Cure for Pain," they should have called this "Filling the Void."

Rush "2112" [1976]

Wow, everything worth hating about 70s rock in one hideously pretentious album -- what luck! Unless you're under the impression that a "Wide World of Sports" theme is worthy of rocking out to, you really have no business here. Maybe if you're 15 with no possibility of getting a girlfriend in the near future you may dare to take a listen, but then you must also have an extreme tolerance for lead singers who suck helium to achieve their ridiculously high registers, like Geddy fucking Lee does here. Bad as he is, however, he's not even close to being the main thing that's so incredibly wrong with Rush in general and "2112" in particular. This band will waste your time in majorly uncalled-for ways such as tuning Alex Lifeson's guitar as an "intro" to a song he then goes on to rip off Jimmy Page in, but even bringing pomp to that sort of time-wasting filler isn't this record's main infraction. No, that's saved for drummy show-off Neal Peart and his endless kit and even more endless B-minus student knowledge of classic literature; his proggy faux-sophistication is cloying enough musically, but his aimless Shakespeare and bible references are even worse... aw, who am I fooling? Geddy's voice is so awful it could strip wallpaper. Prog-rock always sucks monkey dick, but it's even worse through the pinched vocal of a ball-less Muppet. If you're into musical tedium you can always listen to actual classical music, you know -- and it's kind of a relief they never say "it's not over til the stringy long-haired Canuck man-soprano sings."

Chuck Berry "The Great Twenty-Eight" [1982]

I know there are actually 28 songs on the Chuck Berry compilation "The Great Twenty-Eight," but minus the same songs that he keeps re-writing in the same keys, at the same tempo, about basically the same things with exactly the same solos, it's like 3 -- and they're not even all that great. Of course Keith Richards thinks they are, but that's only because you can be this close to brain-dead and still be able to play Chuck Berry tunes on guitar. This brought the amateurs to rock 'n roll in droves, so the next time you have to endure a band that sounds like dogshit, you know who's ultimately to blame. Sure, he may have been an OK car mechanic, but we trusted this guy with the future of contemporary music? Serves us right. Ultimately, Chuck Berry was probably best suited for a nondescript songwriting career in Nashville, but his dark complexion made that next to impossible, so count the origins of rock 'n roll as another thing for which American racism is to blame. Elsewhere, Berry thinks of himself as an erudite citizen of the world, but his lyrics clearly demonstrate he's nothing more than a dime-store paperback novel reader, probably in between crap roadhouse gigs in Midwestern Nowheresville. So while he may, in fact, have nailed American existence -- at least as of the mid-late 1950s (he'd nail plenty of other things that would prove him to be a high-level pervert in future years) -- it's really nothing for any of us to be proud of. As much as Chuck Berry may have lowered the bar for everyone, we're still stuck with the asshole.

Ke$ha "Cannibal" [2010]

Looking for something to relieve your annoyance of Lady Gaga and Lana Del Ray? Ke$ha fits the bill nicely -- as in horribly -- the same way hitting yourself in the head with a hammer will make you temporarily forget about your hemorrhoids. This is a grotesquely unholy combo of generic club dance beats with the worst aspects of the Spice Girls' combined attitudes and through the voice of that yodel-yelping chick from The Cranberries, made worse by aggressive auto-tuning vocal effects (the modern contemporary music version of smallpox). This is bubblegum for pervs and nasty-minded girls, most of whom only share Ke$ha's viewpoint with each other in the safety of their suburban bedrooms. Anyone who readily carries out even half of what this dim-witted attention-seeking fake-urban twat condones on "Cannibal" -- without even remotely considering the actual cannibalism part -- wouldn't last long outside the club in one piece, and more tragically: everyone would say she had it coming. But peel off the heavy makeup and ridiculous costuming and it's pretty clear this obsessively ambitious young woman who spells her name with a dollar symbol (because, y'know, money!) is attempting to cross Lily Allen with Kanye West, but she keeps coming out like the Cake guy's obnoxious little sister who tries to talk black when she gets too drunk. Still holding out any hope for the Millennial generation? You won't after listening to this.

Billy Idol "Rebel Yell" [1983]

Billy Idol happens to be one of those micro-talents, like Debbie Harry, who actually managed to fail punk. And, following Harry's blond(ie) locks toward fame and fortune, transplanted limey Idol fell on his feet by abandoning punk music altogether for straight-up pop -- in his case, 80s sell-out Bowie-lite: all synths and meticulously controlled guitars, with the cardboard cut-out imagery of a pedestrian crooner in studded leather bracelets. Between this and his blown-dry Heat Miser hairdo thoroughly trivializing whatever statement was originally attempted by the Sex Pistols a few years earlier, Idol's image likely destroyed whatever was left of American punk by 1983, turning the styles into shopping mall accessories. But Idol was always a poseur to begin with; he never had the heart of a true rebel. So naturally he tried to claim that as part of his iconography as well, and of course scored a big hit with it. His handlers were smart enough to realize American kids in the 80s didn't want real rebellion -- they wanted to make out with a guy who looks like he just walked off the set of a Mad Max flick. As such, Billy Idol got over on people who felt Adam Ant was too gritty, sounding like a guy who could beat up Pet Shop Boys but not quite Simple Minds. And his attempts to reach Bauhaus-style noir came up short the way David Cassidy came up short of Jim Morrison.

The Supremes "The Supremes A' Go-Go" [1966]

Oh, that 60s Motown sound: the peppy, major-chord keyboards, strings and horns that make this self-conscious, insistent claim: "We colored folk ain't so scary." Following Smokey Robinson's Disney-cartoon falsetto and before Michael Jackson's precocious rug-rat soprano presided Diana Ross' airbrushed-diva approach, safe and clean as a bubble bath. Diana's sugar-princess persona makes Nancy Sinatra sound like a dominatrix by comparison, and the Berry Gordy-overseen production even made sure the hand-claps came on every beat so the white people listening in public wouldn't have to be embarrassed. But as music like The Supremes was calculated to have everyone remove from their imagination every speck of garbage on the streets of inner-city Detroit, Motown's zero-margin-for-error made for lots of redundancy; you'd be forgiven for thinking you're listening to the same over-produced song every time you're not hearing another over-produced cover from a different Motown artist on this album. Diana Ross became a huge star after "A' Go-Go," largely among people who were made extremely nervous by women like Tina Turner and Martha & the Vandellas. Thus, with The Supremes Gordy achieved the perfect commercial retort to the growing pains of Civil Rights legislation in the U.S. -- black people are OK as long as they don't perspire or show more than two dimensions. If you're still a fan of this music today, does that mean Tina Turner still makes you nervous?

Spoon "Gimme Fiction" [2005]

Gee, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the meeting where Britt Daniel convinced a record label that his sloppy, home-made recordings of amateur quality and sub-amateur execution should warrant some sort of payment and promotion -- he must have given those idiots quite the snow-job. Apparently as unable to mix his various tracks with any skill as he is to sing his vocals after blowing his nose first, this is the kind of music the guy who spends all day in his dorm room plays for you as he explains how he's flunked out of college but it's totally worth it because he's got all these amazing tracks that are going to make him super-famous. You try to freeze your expression into one of non-committal interest and gently nod your head, all the while thinking one day this guy is going to kill himself once the real world stomps all over his slow-moving, under-inventive, repetitive, meaningless demo-quality crap. So not only did Spoon getting signed set an unrealistic example for all the other mediocre home-studio dreamers out there who totally have no shot in hell especially now that Spoon has screwed the pooch, but it presented an extremely low barrier to entry for the brown-bag electronica of LCD Soundsystem instead of discouraging these sorts of self-absorbed rich kids with all the equipment and connections in the world. So much for increased access to recording technology being any sort of democratizing agent.

Counting Crows "August and Everything After" [1993]

I almost wish Counting Crows had come before Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen -- that way, we'd never have had to hear from those guys because this band would have already choked on all their conceits. Nasal, plaintive, bleating vocals always mean the deliverer is insincere but taking direction from his album producer; the Counting Crows guy is definitely a house-trained mutt, but he's fooling himself if he thinks he's passing off being empathetic about the loser characters in "August and Everything After." And that's not exactly a hanging crime (though he might wish to consider a career in politics instead), but his conscious and deliberate vocal delivery on this album should be. Though if Van Morrison weren't so fat and feeble by 1993, I'd be just as satisfied watching him kicking that guy's ass. I'm sure between Van and Robbie Robertson, they could take care of the whole Counting Crows band themselves, even in their decrepit state. It would have been worth it to see their shallow dreams of being "big stars" come true, just to see them cruelly taken away. See, that's what these guys were really after; they thought faking "Eleanor Rigby" every so often would suffice in allowing them to be famous enough to receive fellatio from female TV stars. And while it did work for a time, Counting Crows eventually wound up as filler on a "Shrek" sequel soundtrack; I'll settle for that if I can't get Van the Man on pay-per-view pulling out this douchebag's dreads one by one.

Boz Scaggs "Silk Degrees" [1976]

A 70s session-hack nightmare felony if ever there was one, "Silk Degrees" is when Boz Scaggs oozed out of side-musician obscurity with his disgusting "Theme from Love Boat"-meets-crossover-Glen Campbell album featuring the chart-reading shitheads who would later form the godawful Toto. Singing exactly like Kermit the Frog in a smoking jacket, this clown ("Boz" must be short for "Bozo") transforms himself from a poor man's Lowell George into the glitziest, grossest pop-meister douchebag on the planet not named Elton John. As such, the album's skating-rink horns and strings production became the horrid primary-color palate for late-70s ABC TV. This necessarily constitutes not only "Silk Degrees" as one of the most notable abominations in a decade that already had far too many, but Boz himself as the runner-up to biggest sell-out of the century behind Rod Stewart. What should have been an hysterical but obscure joke on the music biz became, instead, the force behind future Debby Boone hits, Diane Warren's entire catalog and Kid Creole & the Coconuts. How he was able to live with himself after infecting the entire landscape with his scumbag phoniness I can only guess, though I'm sure the high-quality drugs he was now able to afford had a lot to do with it. I dare you to listen to his version of "We're All Alone" and tell me with a straight face he didn't single-handedly ruin the entire decade.

Minutemen "Double Nickels on the Dime" [1984]

Few bands either sound as ugly as they look or look as ugly as they sound, but Minutemen -- the blue-collar nobodies from the lame part of Southern Cal -- sound exactly as ugly as they look. Their "masterpiece" called "Double Nickels on the Dime" is a double-LP toss-off of bratty attitude, snot-nosed irony, garage-rat funk, unfinished failed experiments, sour-grapes-belching Socialism, and inside jokes way too nerdy to bother with. Essentially the product of guys who rightfully knew nobody would be listening, D. Boon and Mike Watt create a chummy pastiche of warbly, minute-long (get why they're called Minutemen? and you thought it was because guys like this couldn't have sex for longer than 60 seconds... likely true, as well) demos that the punk pranksters at Black Flag's SST Records thought would be a good idea to release. Probably they just needed someone for Henry Rollins to beat up in the van when he got bored on the road. Impossibly, the end result is both a social embarrassment and also the very sketchy blueprint of an influence on future wise-ass white indie bands: they're the Chili Peppers if they never had a girlfriend, Meat Puppets if they'd ever read Karl Marx, etc. That such doofuses should be so influential demonstrates how wide the schism had already gotten by the mid-80s between major label twits and twats owning everything and indie losers feeding out of garbage cans. Capitalism killed quality pop music. Minutemen knew it would, but they couldn't get anyone to give a shit. You won't either if you listen to this album, which you won't.

Bruno Mars "Unorthodox Jukebox" [2012]

"Unorthodox" -- yeah, sure. This guy is a record exec's wet dream: not masculine, not feminine; not white, not black; generic yet referential; and willingly overcooked by a veritable legion of producers and songwriters. To say Bruno Mars is polished is to put it far too lightly; he's Michael Bolton for a new generation of mixed-race Millennials. Singing songs strictly from the perspective of the privileged party guy with enough cash for an eight-ball who only fucks models -- and then lamenting whatever went wrong with such vacuous people and things -- Bruno Mars is perfect weekend music for bimbos and meatheads. Any emotional gesture at all guns for the lowest common denominator at every turn; the level and detail of this music's universe of corporate-style compromises can take your breath away if you really listen closely, which you're probably not supposed to. And the seamlessness of the production is downright suffocating -- even veering into other genres sounds like a virtual-reality approximation: jump blues with air conditioning, dub reggae with all the homespun integrity of a Sandals vacation. Everything in "Unorthodox Jukebox" is so untraceable and inorganic, forget wondering whether his voice has been auto-tuned and start wondering if he isn't actually some sort of pop cyborg. Janelle Monae, eat your damn heart out.

Love "Forever Changes" [1967]

Y'know, for a black guy, Love's Arthur Lee sure sounds like he's part elf. The dainty, baroque California 60s acoustic sound is full-bore -- if you can call it that -- here on "Forever Changes," so I'd be tempted to cut Lee some slack if he wasn't also the goddamn producer of this vinyl Renaissance Faire. His singing voice gives one a clear visual of his curly-toed silk shoes; good thing he was insulated in the LA hippie community, as no self-respecting black man would ever be able to survive on the streets of a major city sounding like he does or with such an aggressively un-funky backing band. "Forever Changes" contains the same cloying string arrangements that sunk at least one Nick Drake album; nearly everything here is so pretentiously non-rock I can hear the Moody Blues mocking them behind their back. So why not simply chalk this up to an unfortunate moment in history when a black dude did whatever he could to swing with white chicks? Because the residue of "Forever Changes," even though almost nobody bought it when it came out, permeated as a poisonous influence of acoustic pomp from The Doors to Led Zeppelin to T. Rex, and as such, Lee and his band deserve to be saddled with an extensive amount of the blame for the creation of Hobbit-rock. What a disappointment to have learned this -- I so wanted to blame a British boarding school Tolkeinist asshole instead.

Fugees "The Score" [1996]

Not sure what apocalyptic non-event was making Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill so paranoid during the recording of Fugees' debut "The Score," but what it tells me is that some people just don't mix with heavy-duty weed, even black people with roots in the West Indies. Regardless, if it really causes Ms. Hill to "defecate on the microphone," please count me out. Even though "The Score" scored a hit with a boiler-room re-make of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly," this is still ultimately a hip-hop album, which is probably why Fugees are trying to gin-up all this talk about how dangerous everything is even though it's clear these are college grads, not street hoods. So they pop plenty of shit about the FBI, gangsters and Asian food, dropping names like Farrakhan as if Chuck D hadn't already backed far away from the edge by the mid-90s. In fact, probably on purpose "The Score" sounds like it was recorded in the basement of a campus building that had been hijacked by leftists with no clear demands, as if their SWAT-team execution that never materialized would have somehow turned them into martyrs, even though it wouldn't have because nobody cared. Both Wyclef and Hill managed to escape the imaginary bunker and went on to have solo success in the music biz before they both suffered embarrassing defeats, however. Just goes to show that people looking for trouble often find it; better to simply call "The Score" a couple of zeros and just leave it be.

Ludacris "Chicken-N-Beer" [2003]

If you were ever under the impression that all the bragging going on in rap albums had something to do with profound, deep-set insecurity, for proof look no further than Ludacris' "Chicken-N-Beer." Because the former radio DJ is so desperate to get himself some Jay-Z money, he inflates his prosperity and importance in virtually every syllable of this album. He's trying to align himself with the Dirty South movement (and actually hails from the South, I guess, somewhere), but ultimately he's interested in LA prominence via the East Coast, like he thinks he can be Will Smith or something. The numbing repetition of Ludacris' so-called "hooks" betray him as a total amateur; no wonder he was in such a hurry to get to Hollywood. And while subtlety was never hip-hop's long suit, the ham-handed obviousness of the sex-and-capital lusts are enough to make Donald Trump holler, "Too much!" Elsewhere, Ludacris transparently cops Kanye West's method of slowing down Curtis Mayfield samples and rapping about how hard he's had it coming up. But again, he can't get out of his own way, driving every semi-decent inspiration right into the garbage dump with sociopathic over-use. As a sort of capper to the whole lame-ass proceedings, Ludacris actually takes pains to demonstrate a pedestrian version of Eminem while proving he's got nothing on Snoop Dogg when it comes to smoking weed. Has any recording artist of any genre ever pushed so aggressively to prove he's nothing special?

Little Richard "Here's Little Richard" [1957]

Just in case there's any confusion: rock 'n roll has always been a rip-off of other forms of music. Witness chitlin'-circuit clown Little Richard on his debut album "Here's Little Richard" providing a dumbing-down of swing-jazz patterns, amphetamine-dosed blues and letting the Devil give the sermon in Sunday morning choich. Further, Richard Penniman (not short of stature, BTW; I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason he's considered "little," though) apparently never met a 1-4-5 progression he didn't like, or perhaps he was incapable of following anything else; the rampant redundancy in the musical genre can therefore also be laid at this man's manicured feet, and probably gave Andy Warhol the idea to repeat a single dumb, vacuous figure mindlessly and endlessly -- he was hanging his silk-screen versions of "Here's Little Richard" only a few years later. That Richard constantly sang about his lust for women -- especially given his obvious preferences in later years -- is not really a sticking point here: I'm sure the Little Richard of 1957 was fuckin' everythang. It wasn't long before Richard repented and turned to the Lord for salvation; without any specific details, it's easy to hear how his depraved, lecherous animal spirits on this record practically begged for forgiveness. I guess that means all the fans of this type of music are damned for eternity. Thanks, Little Richard -- perhaps you were actually the anti-Christ all those racist rednecks thought you were back in the day.

Television "Marquee Moon" [1977]

Ever wonder how shit-ass singers like J Mascis and S Malkmus (beware the single-initial first name; just sayin') were able to get signed? Simple: they pointed straight at Tom Verlaine's amateur warbly howl on "Marquee Moon" and said, "These guys were on Elektra." True enough, but Television was mostly of interest to A&R reps back in the day because they were part of that initial CBGB's push, when young New Yorkers were so starved for entertainment that they were willing to use the most disgusting toilets in the history of public venues. They cleverly left out the fact that Verlaine was mostly reputable within that scene for his guitar "prowess," but honestly he's just Brinsley Schwartz with a narcotics habit -- nothing to get too excited about. Besides, nobody bought "Marquee Moon" when it first came out; absolutely everyone who wasn't a mid-70s drug fiend in downtown Manhattan is a latecomer to this band. But junkies like the guys in Television were still pretty bright -- they took a page from Andy Warhol (and passed it on to future suck-meisters Sonic Youth) and rode the hype machine, to whatever extent their crap songs were supported by it, as far as it would take them. And all this before mentioning Verlaine's blatant attempt to cash-in with the "Free Bird" crowd with his tedious, endless solo on the title track. Jesus, guys, if I wanted to get stoned senseless and listen to weak guitar solos all day long I'd be lying in Golden Gate Park listening to Jerry Garcia, not fighting off roaches in some condemned NYC flophouse listening to you douchebags.

Jane's Addiction "Nothing's Shocking" [1988]

As if rock music didn't already have enough problems with redundancy during the late-80s -- filling the void between metal selling out and grunge buying in -- LA's Jane's Addiction released their debut, "Nothing's Shocking." Led by art-school stoner with the raspy voice of an old California prospector, Perry Farrell, this boring, pretentious collection of over-worked, over-long singsongy fake metal managed to garner a huge advance from Warner Brothers due to the utter lack of competition at the time. Among the violations to humanity Jane's Addiction is responsible for is the shroud of jagged depravity that gave Nine Inch Nails the stupid idea to start a scream electronic version of the same thing. Sure, they're edgy -- but "edgy" as in "grating," not "affecting"… unless, that is, you do as many drugs as these guys did. Big fucking deal -- this all had been well played-out by 1988: the 6+ minute dirges by feckless assholes on heroin; the abrasive, suggestive subject matter about as satisfying as a Vincent Gallo film; and faking the LA club scene as some sort of artistic movement it never was. Thus, while it may be absolutely true that "Nothing's Shocking," Jane's Addiction certainly had a lot to do with why.

Neon Trees "Picture Show" [2012]

This has got to be some sort of world's record: the longest string of pop-rock hit-makers in a row that are completely indiscernible from one another, from My Chemical Fun. to Death Cab for Killers. Neon Trees are probably the latest in this long line, but who can really tell? Everyone involved in each of these bands is a commercial jingles hack going the "serious" route of the big-label music industry... and their ultimate goal is to have their single selected for a commercial jingle. It would be poetic justice if it weren't so sad. But this is commercial jingle music that has a crystal-clear, simplistic philosophy: "the ambitious uniformity of the 80s is the correct aesthetic," because the ultimate target here is not young music-lovers, but young people who actually couldn't give a shit about music. Those are the people desperate and insecure enough to make sure they go with all the cool people they know to the absurdly-expensive Ticketbastard concerts and download all the iTunes at $1.29 a pop, just to prove they fit in. I guess it's just as well kids don't really appreciate history; if they did, they'd feel infinitely cheated by disinfected, disaffected junk like this. Perhaps one day they'll learn to boo things like "Picture Show" and throw their gum back at the screen; until then, we're stuck with the 3-D printer for our new pop music, like we are with all the new guns.

Sam & Dave "Soul Men" [1967]

If you really want to listen to singers who incessantly tug on your coat to get your attention -- i.e. "Lookee here" -- you don't need to buy a record, you can just go to the party street of any bad neighborhood in America. You may get your wallet stolen, but you at least won't have to hear the chicken-grease tenor and hoarse baritone of Sam & Dave (their act ended sometime in the 80s, probably after watching the crap John Cusack flick "Tapeheads"). In fact, you wouldn't ever had heard of these guys had they not been among the stable of Atlantic Records wage slaves in the 60s, farmed out to the white boys at the Stax studio so they could figure out their songs for them. Basically, the music biz was a factory even back then, with Steve Cropper and his gang working the assembly line, putting pieces of Sam & Dave together and taking a cut of the action. The end result is the outright bastardization of gospel music combined with the appropriation of whatever Otis Redding did OK (all three things). The white people made a killing; Sam & Dave were forced back out onstage every night for decades in the same ugly jumpsuits. If you don't think there's anything wrong with this, then go ahead and buy all the Sam & Dave records. It's on your head now.

Depeche Mode "Violator" [1990]

One of the most successful albums ever, it's still amazing to me that so many people were interested in the musical equivalent of getting felt up on the dance floor by a gay shirtless guy. At this point, the 90s had not established their cynical, disinterested slovenliness yet, so Depeche Mode was right there to fill the gap with its tired 80s come-ons in a world that had yet to successfully treat AIDS. In short, "Violator" may be the most unintentionally horrifying album ever recorded. It may be because the Reagan/Bush era was still playing out and most music fans were still in denial about the existence of homosexuality (and needle-delivered narcotics) in the world, thus everyone thought this was a great party record that made you seem deep for putting it on, because everything's played in a minor key and so much of it is too slow to dance to. But when it comes to sinister sexiness, these guys couldn't hold Dracula's codpiece. This bears out, too, when you consider that what's actually being lusted after here is not the touch of a nubile lover but simply lead singer Dave Gahan's latest shot of dope. "All I ever needed is here in my arms" -- I can picture the needle still injected, the hose still tied, as he's singing these words. Give it up to Depeche Mode, folks -- they may sound like pussies, but they were living very, very dangerously.

Interpol "Antics" [2004]

Why anyone in the mid-Aughts would have had the slightest interest in imitating the bleak post-punk abortion that was Joy Division is extremely difficult to surmise, especially seeing it's clear Interpol was interested in being a successful band. Perhaps it's that fellow New Yorkers The Strokes had ripped off every other late-70s sound by the time Interpol showed up, from Television to Iggy Pop to Tom Petty. Or maybe the guys from Interpol are interested in taking the frenzied despair out of the Joy Division sound -- the bloody hatchet out of Fozzie Bear's vocal delivery, if you will. This they do succeed at. Yet the suicidal part of Ian Curtis' singing was at least something to derive morose amusement from when listening to Joy Division (and when he actually went through with it? whoah! to this day, I'm still like, "Fuck you, Axl Rose!"); hearing Paul Banks' arch, pinched vocal come-ons to random chicks in the audience is still disconcerting, I guess, but more in the way that I want to throw a brick at his head. And anyway, if post-punk had really been this bland and sluggish the first time around, we'd still be buried in the various mutations of disco. So while I don't really begrudge Interpol for trying to bang as many tatted-up, pink-haired Soho chicks as they can get their hands on, neither do I need to appreciate them or their dumb name, which is really just a more-pretentious version of "The Police." They should arrest themselves, for all I care.

Bad Company "Bad Co." [1974]

Here's another piece of evidence that all the sting of major-label rock music was gone by 1974: even though Bad Company emerged to tell the world how dangerous they were -- fresh from smoothing out their edges and firing the actually dangerous (to himself) drunk from their previous band, Free -- it's clear they were as toothless and docile as Alice Cooper by this point, setting the table for even softer fare like Eagles and James Taylor to run the marketplace for the next few years. God, is it any wonder everyone stayed as completely fucked up as possible in that decade? What a bummer to realize contemporary music radio of the Beatles and the Stones from a few short years before had given way to the teddy-bear boogie of Bad Company and, well, the Stones. Not that "Bad Co." didn't have the opportunity to really tear shit up in the studio -- with Led Zep nodding out and funding Swan Song Records on just their royalty checks from "Stairway to Heaven" airplay alone, they likely let Paul Rodgers and the rest of these shmoes do whatever they wanted -- they just chose not to. Thus, in short, pay no attention to their tough-guy swagger; Bad Company put together a debut album suitable to have been performed at Jerry Wexler's niece's bat mitzvah, which it probably was.

Mamas & the Papas "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears" [1966]

About as jamming as a Perry Como record, folk-popster singing group Mamas & the Papas slyly crossed over between Lawrence Welk fans as well as Beatle fanatics by growing their hair long and dressing stylishly (for the mid-60s, so it's a relative term), then recording the squarest, most un-rock album every given a glowing review by Rolling Stone. The aggressively whitebread arrangements and delivery of the otherwise disgracefully-hippie'd-out John Phillips sound today like nothing so much as a gigantic prank on everyone who thought they were properly gauging the direction of popular music of the time. All the swing and groove of the modern (and not-so-modern) standards has been ironed neatly away and shrouded in the linen gauze of their four-part harmonies. In fact, listening to "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears" makes me finally realize what made Brian Wilson freak out -- he thought for a moment that the Beach Boys might have actually sounded like this unfathomably sugary swill. Made worse by Cass Elliot's modernized Mae-West-in-a-mumu lead singing jaunts, apparently the only people not in on the joke are the baby boomers who were duped by Mamas & the Papas when they first came out. It's like if Pat Boone had started smoking pot and joined a singing group; there's a good reason that toilet was there on the original front cover.

Dinosaur Jr "You're Living All Over Me" [1987]

Indie-rock of the late-80s was one foul-smelling corpse. Don't believe me? Then by all means revisit the ghastly, amateurish, tempo-challenged, pitch-challenged "You're Living All Over Me," recorded and inflicted on college-age rockers back when even R.E.M. and the Replacements had signed to majors, and there was absolutely no hope for underground rock. (If there's one thing Dinosaur Jr succeeded at, it's proving this.) Clearly influenced by FM rock of the 70s, the feckless, woefully untalented, perpetually stoned J Mascis and his trio of collegiate miscreants prove beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't know how to tune a fucking guitar, let alone write or sing anything anyone should be subjected to hearing unless you're an enemy of the CIA being driven out of your hidey-hole. This is a profoundly shitty and yet still self-righteously egocentric series of plunks, noises, warbles and other aural stank. In this way, Mascis was probably considered something of an Elvis figure for bands like Pavement and Wilco, who basically copped his entire mountain of suck, accomplishing the very opposite of rock music's original intent: instead of taking what's ugly and hateful about the world and turning it into something great, they took classic rock, warped all the records, fucked up the mix, and brought it back to something twice as ugly and hateful as before. Good job, guys -- way to make Milli Vanilli a viable listening option by comparison.

M83 "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" [2011]

Toward the forefront of a sub-genre what should rightly -- and oh, so wrongly -- be called "soccer-chant disco pop," M83 manages to combine a multi-decade collection of bad ideas in electronica: the moody-robot bleat of Kraftwerk from the 70s, the artificial hairspray sheen of the 80s, the grandiose arena pomp of the 90s and the zillion-track gluttony of the 00s. Oh, and they throw in a little mellow beard-rock from the 10s, even though they try to disguise it by adding digitized, druggy-sounding movie soundtrack sap. M83 is clearly interested in earning their techno street-cred (to whatever extent bands like Spacemen 3 actually matter to anyone anymore, or ever), but they're even more interested in getting radio play and performing in big, giant arenas so people can wave their lighters to their Coldplay-on-Nyquil "anthems" of filler between heartless attempts to recreate the album's first single. These guys have all the facelessness of Muse, but without the rock guitars; they're an unintelligible version of MGMT. Then again, who needs to actually understand a soccer chant in order to be able to shout it like a brainless lemming?

A Tribe Called Quest "The Low End Theory" [1991]

Apparently, these guys were interested in killing the bop-meets-hop conceit before it even got started. "Jazzmatazz"'s Guru was fond of crediting himself with the idea of combining the two genres, but A Tribe Called Quest had already gone there with "The Low End Theory." Trouble is, ultimately it's a pretty empty premise, especially considering that if rappers were actually musical they'd be singers; neither Q-Tip nor Phife Dawg has the slightest idea what to do with these assorted jazz riffs. So while what they're shooting for is a level of sophistication, like most failed attempts at such things all they're capable of doing is taking potential party music and boring the shit out of everybody with it. But this was still the "In Living Color" era, before gangsta rap destroyed any idea that black guys might have brains enough to not try to kill each other all the time. Still, it's hard to do much with "The Low End Theory" than take issue with why such a deliberately literal lyricist as Q-Tip would want to call himself "The Abstract," how much longer after their bookings did "Arsenio" finally get cancelled, and how broke-ass must upright jazz legend Ron Carter have been to agree to be a part of this whole thing?

Eurythmics "Touch" [1983]

Everyone knows the 80s were fakest, most shallow years in relatively modern existence, but if you think it's wise giving this era a pass on overtly pretentious recording techniques -- especially when the previous decade had given us Queen, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa -- then you haven't revisited Eurythmics for awhile. Amazingly, the flat programmed drums, garishly beglittered keyboard passes, whole string orchestrations, and over-baked hired session hacks turn "Touch" (and, let's face it, all Eurythmics music) into the busiest, most meaningless two-dimensional musical canvas you'd ever have the misfortune to hear. Annie Lennox's voice sounds like the gayest man this side of Alison Moyet, but if that seems like a compliment to you, consider that all the filler of this album sounds like it was swept out of Yaz's back alley, thus nullifying whatever pleasure might have been had by 10% of society. So there you have it: homosexually ornate to a fault, yet strictly corporate business-minded; "Touch" is the Reagan era in a nutshell. No wonder Annie's wearing a mask on the cover.

Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" [1967]

Proving that it didn't need to be just male artists to sing bullshit come-ons to members of the opposite sex, Aretha Franklin -- owner of perhaps the fattest voice to ever make its way to acetate (it would take a few years before her girth would match it) -- released her late-60s unholy three-way marriage between churchy gospel music, jive-ass supper-club jazz and shallow session-jobber hippie grooviness, "I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love You." Its success led directly -- woefully -- to the "soul" music foisted on the record-buying public by limey white drug addicts like Joe Cocker and Humble Pie a couple short years later. She was never ostracized from the African-American community the way Bruce Lee was when he was jettisoned from Hong Kong for selling out the martial arts, but this album resulted in no less violence: her voice was a pulverizing weapon, one which was developed to call down Jesus from the heavens, but which here only manage to punish secular listeners into submission while they're busy cleaning their house on weekends. Besides, if she were really such a great catch, don't you think she may be protesting a wee bit too much?

Wire "Pink Flag" [1977]

So it turns out that in the original movement now referred to as "punk rock," there were plenty of musical flavors from which to sample; no surprise they're all horrible. English arch-garage wherever-the-hell-they-came-from band Wire brought to their debut "Pink Flag" slow, grinding, ugly, turgid turds and put them next to noisy, jumpy punk-rock abortions that are abandoned in mere seconds. The overall effect is nothing so much as an incohesive and largely incoherent band rehearsal tape of song ideas that simply got put out as-is. Damn, if only it were this easy for everyone to release a "classic." The album's 150 or so fucking tracks went on to influence plenty of other unkempt rockers with a paint brush up their ass, like the Minutemen, but nobody bought their albums either. What this vast amount of spiky-haired insolence did manage to do was populate the vomitous pool of punkdom, artificially inflating the catalog of the overall genre. So much for integrity; then again, that's too much to have asked from anybody in 1977, let alone guys who looked and sounded like Wire.

Link Wray "Rumble! The Best of Link Wray" [1993]

Who says you need to re-visit Elvis, Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis to get an accurate depiction of the genesis of rock 'n roll? All the lunkheaded trashiness of the era that finally put Patti Page's doggie in the window to sleep for good exists on Link Wray's seemingly endless, mostly instrumental compilation "Rumble!" Even worse -- Link Wray never bothers leaving the shithole roadhouse he's mangling his generic blues numbers in, making the listening experience of this album one long, annoying night drinking whiskey with fat chicks. This might be seen as pro-Link Wray's integrity, but in reality it speaks of an amazing level of visionlessness, even among white American guitar players. Why anyone even knows who he is now has less to do with Wray's drunken laziness than with the ineptitude of future rockers like AC/DC and The Cramps, who adopted his cranked-out, cranked-up approach because it was apparently easier than learning how to play anything good. So feel free to consider this guy as influential as you want -- just don't confuse it with something worthwhile.

Tricky "Maxinquaye" [1995]

Clearly "trip-hop" is one of the biggest euphemisms ever prodded toward the music-buying public, as evidenced by "Maxinquaye," Tricky's first album after escaping -- and ripping off all the studio production techniques from -- Massive Attack. "Trip-hop" should be instead called something like "Technobummer" or "Disillusionectronica," steeped as it is in morbid emotion and the boredom of spoiled grown-ass children. Just because you can get your jailbait girlfriend to ruminate over the same two verses of a Public Enemy song doesn't mean you have depth; in fact, it just proves you shouldn't have gotten so high in high school, because now as a Gen-Xer in the workforce (to whatever extent such a concept ever existed) you could have used those brain cells for something constructive. "Maxinquaye" is pretty much the opposite of that: unapologetically materialistic and crassly vengeful, privileged yet still brim-full of unpleasant dickheadedness. This is a storm cloud of Bjorkist misery and Portishead conceit, or vice-versa. In any case, if smoking hydroponic weed makes you this morose, save yourself a few bucks, drink some cheap beer and go listen to Blues Traveler.

My Morning Jacket "Z" [2005]

There was a terrible but ultimately forgettable time in recent music history when girly falsettos from guys fronting indie bands were all the rage; they all thought they were combining Brian Wilson with Prince, but all they actually accomplished was James Blunt without the airplay. My Morning Jacket are about as guilty you can get of delving into this failed conceit, but even worse -- on "Z" they are trying to summon the bedrock glumness of Radiohead, but can't seem to get anywhere deeper than "mildly bummed out." So they settle for pseudo-scholarly subject matter and even pseudo-er late-era U2 production bombast. Actually, their desperation is pretty scattershot; they even stoop to trying to sound like The Who, a band that hadn't had any integrity for 25 years by the time "Z" was released. This indicates to me two things: 1) Classic rock must die forever, lest every new rock band keep returning there, and 2) Bands like My Morning Jacket will forever be doomed by their own idiocy if they think things like "classic rock" are destined to revisit nondescript musical eras like the mid-2000s.

The Cramps "Bad Music for Bad People" [1984]

Nothing says "punkers sell out" like their second "greatest hits" compilation in two years. "Bad Music for Bad People" is a high school haunted house of three-chord 60s garage rock and backslap reverb infused with enough airplane-model glue vapors and Betty Page pin-ups to constitute something representing American rebellion in a time when President Reagan was just starting to make the genuine article impossible. Singer Lux Interior attempts his best "Gene Vincent on bad acid" schtick while Poison Ivy tries to keep it all together with her pedestrian guitar delivery, especially with their drummer apparently playing his kit with pig bones. If punk music was ever truly a serious movement, these wacked-out wise-asses killed it dead. Questionable decision-making like singing with the mic halfway down your throat and carrying the Ramones' midnight slasher flick obsessions to their obvious, unfortunate conclusions, "Bad Music for Bad People" is thus rendered an absolutely perfect title, especially if "bad" = "lowlife."

Neutral Milk Hotel "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" [1998]

In case you hadn't noticed immediately, take that pretentious spelling of "airplane" as a big red flag. This music is They Might Be Giants without the self-deprecating humor, Cake without the "funk" (gag -- did I just say that?). I mean, I know they're going for some sort of modernization of Dylan, but they keep coming off like if Billie Joe Armstrong had attended Oberlin (or college at all). This album didn't sell well back when music listeners were busy livin' la vida loca, but following fellow indie-folk trolls Wilco's still-incomprehensible coup over their record company when they came out with their own album with "Hotel" in the title, suddenly this album was no longer left to rot. But if you don't have time for strummy campfire tunes by dudes you don't actually get high with (and who unfortunately gave Bon Iver the dubious idea to use muted trumpet for accompaniment), I'll just tell you this album sounds like bored, slumming white boys trying to act like they're from the back country in Ireland or something. As such, the initial impulse to leave it in obscurity was probably a good one.

Psychedelic Furs "Mirror Moves" [1984]

Basically, if David Bowie were a completely talentless hack (instead of a partial one) who could only sustain any sort of a relevant career in the sonic plastic of the New Wave 80s, he would be Richard Butler of Psychedelic Furs. A cranky, stylized front man with the voice of a sword swallower, Butler cashes in his rock guitars for gross synth piano and fake-sounding drum kits so that he might crossover into Boy George territory, or at least ABC. He and his band partially succeeded (if "succeeded" is the right word; it feels very wrong), adding to the huge and growing slag-heap of failed limey punkers with big record deals who'd clearly do anything not to have to score their own dope: Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, Billy Idol -- the list goes sickeningly on and on. Overcompensating for his emaciated frame and more emaciated, exhausted vocal growl, Butler's band overcooks the reverbed-out-the-ass arrangements with saxophones and backup singers for miles in every direction, as if trying to create the aural equivalent of vomiting Z. Cavaricci. Only the 80s could produce such hideously grotesque phoniness and get away with calling it "culture."

13th Floor Elevators "The Psychedelic Sounds of..." [1966]

Boy, it sure didn't take much to get tagged "psychedelic" back in the 60s. The 13th Floor Elevators were simply one of those faceless garage bands with bad sound quality, except they added some weirdo blowing 16th-notes into a big jug like some loser hillbilly. If that's enough to make you trip out, you should probably just stay away from drugs altogether. But you wanna hear what's really annoying? The jug guy sticks around and plays that goddamn thing on almost every single track! So perhaps it still counts as a hallucination if you're driven to smash your record player to smithereens, as a sort of an out-of-body experience of sheer annoyance. It's certainly true The Sonics, Sam the Sham and ? and the Mysterians were all annoying as shit, too, but none of them shoved their creepy freak-flag in their face quite as aggressively as these Texas morons did. Those guys also had brains enough not to slow their tempos down every other song like 13th Floor Elevators, the slovenly cousins of the Zombies. Thus this band added a new element to their so-called "psychedelic" experience: complete boredom.

Erykah Badu "Baduizm" [1997]

Not that I have lots of jazzer friends (thank God), but if I did I'd have to think they'd be downright insulted by Erykah Badu's debut "Baduizm," a collection of casually stoned half-assed vocal bop with R&B beats that illustrates effectively what Billie Holiday would sound like in a modern context... if she were too lazy to give a shit. Less a song cycle than a series of similar-sounding grooves that Ms. Badu sounds too high to recognize are actually different tunes, singing as she does virtually the same lines for all of them, "Baduizm" actually does recycle tracks the deeper this CD goes on (& on). But it's hard to tell at first what's actually just another slow-tempo, minor-key rimshot groove so innocuous you can practically hear the drummer falling asleep. Add in some faux-spiritual nonsense about reincarnation and charms with all the philosophical depth of a freshman girl at an inner-city high school, and you'll soon realize what you've got is the sonic version of an onion: it may seem wholesome and useful at first, but peel away the layers and you'll realize it's stinky enough to make you weep.

ZZ Top "Deguello" [1979]

Countdown to the fuzzy guitars and Taliban beards -- "Deguello" was nearly the album that finally proved to 70s Texas trio ZZ Top that they were never going to make it without some sort of enormous schtick. Cheeky Sam & Dave references nobody got, Elmore James slide guitar ho-hummers and bad saxophone overdubs nearly everywhere you turn, these roadhouse shit-kickers were finally caked to the cowboy boot and starting to stink the place up bad. So what if they beat Dire Straits in the race down the ladder of integrity to make it with the MTV crowd -- that just means they worked harder to perpetuate their sleazoid libidos so they wouldn't have to write new songs about whorehouses every five minutes, like they'd been doing for years. In "Deguello," the guys are clearly out of spunk, like most bands you hear at a late-night truck stop. That their label hadn't dropped them by this time only proves how scared shitless everyone was of disco taking over the world. Absolutely nobody outside of a Neil Young fan is interested in listening to a three-note guitar solo, no matter how much fuzz you put on it. Thus, Billy Gibbons got the big idea to attach the fuzz to the outside, instead.

Fleet Foxes "Fleet Foxes" [2008]

If there's anything that's going to allow David Crosby to outlive Keith Richards, it won't be his various organ transplants -- it'll be campfire beardos like Fleet Foxes who record to infinity endless harmonies and instrumentation what it took 60s lightweights the Byrds and CSN only a few mix-downs to accomplish. At this point I'm not sure what the rest of the 20-teens are going to be like, but I sure hope they smell a lot better than the combo of IPA/hydroponic weed breath, gastro-pub hickory smoke and facial hair mung that guys like Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine have aurally imbued everyone with (everyone white, that is). At this point, it's tough to tell who was the original perpetuator of this style of music -- was it the assholes who call themselves Grizzly Bear or the asshole who calls himself Sufjan Stevens? No matter, it's still a wholely rock-less era which I'm far from surprised has led to a major increase in automatic weapon purchases; I'm sure most people would think it's a bunch of Nugentified right-wingers interested in gunning down President Obama, but the further along this seemingly endless debut album goes on, the more I'm convinced a bunch of Fleet Foxes enthusiasts are this close to being blown away any second now. After all, this is probably the first time in history a popular music group is too wussy for the President of the United States.

Def Leppard "Pyromania" [1983]

Congratulations if you were seeking the very moment when "rock" ceased to rock. Obsessive-compulsive control freak Mutt Lange spoils what fun might have eventually been wrung out of these two-dimensional hair-metal stretched-out Budweiser jingles. The plastic emptiness of "Pyromania" -- from Lange's insistence these blue-collar nobodies from somewhere in England nobody cares about imitate Angus Young solos to the multi-tracking of chorus vocals so exorbitant they'd make Freddie Mercury give them the finger -- represents perhaps the signature moment in 80s popular music, more than anything by Madonna, Milli Vanilli or Culture Club: everything here is paint-by-numbers rock, with nothing outside the lines or the least bit interesting. About as dangerous as a neutered pit bull on a two-foot leash or a 40-something Alice Cooper on a three-foot leash, Def Leppard clearly and indefatigably sold out every Led Zep conceit they might have had to major label ass-hats who knew feckless Americans would be idiot enough to gobble this stuff up in droves. Hard to imagine they'd do even worse (and sell even more) with their follow-up a few years later; Lange was obviously properly defeatist and industry-conditioned enough to know a one-armed drummer could play just as well to an audience full of retarded arena rockers.

Gorillaz "Demon Days" [2005]

If there was ever a good time to make illegal the use of sampled loops by people who didn't know how to control them, it was the mid-Aughts, when snotty Brit junkies Gorillaz decided they'd infect the CD-buying public with their preciously gag-inducing mix of Coldplay-meets-hip-hop. Imagine Beck with even less shame and a douchey English accent to get the idea of what "Demon Days" sounds like. Digging their hole deeper is the inclusion of washed-up rappers like De La Soul; they coldly calculated that white kids wouldn't have the slightest idea what counted as hip in the 'hood anyway. Besides, nothing apparently was going to help Blur's morose limey Damon Albarn cheer up any, which he also probably calculated was fine, because getting happy would have probably hurt his street cred with other mopey transplanted Londoners like Morrissey. Why anyone outside the UK would give a crap about any of this is hard to understand, unless Gen-X'ers are actually so latently racist they'd rather hear sad, boring white party music than actually have to pay attention to anyone with darker skin than their own. Even worse, Gorillaz created all these fake cartoon characters to represent the band members. Fuck being scared of black people; Gorillaz fans clearly are uncomfortable with the very concept of reality.

Toots & the Maytals "Funky Kingston" [1973]

This collection of post-ska, early reggae singles from the late 60s makes it difficult to understand why the phenomenon of the genre took hold anywhere in the world they may have thought Haile Selassie was some sort of cough medicine, but somehow "Funky Kingston" -- an obvious reference to how bad that town smelled of decay and B.O. back when locals were busy killing the tourism industry, sending everyone to Montego Bay instead -- managed to retain some sort of relevance. You could probably blame that big white Brit goon Chris Blackwell, or perhaps Chinese Jamaican Leslie Kong, who lived his entire life without realizing VU meters in the red equal distortion. As such, we have slop, stoned recordings from an island not exactly known for its precision (I, for one, would never buy a watch made in Jamaica unless I wanted to be late for everything -- including the down-beat). Toots Hibbert, the near-unintelligible near-Rastafarian leader of this singing group, would spend the next 5 decades trying to establish relevance in the states it took Bob Marley about a year and a half to accomplish, but ultimately he's only partly blame for this ill-advised string of forgettable "one-and" up-strum guitar ditties: this style was only ever intended to rip off rich Americans already jaded on Acapulco; don't blame yourself if you don't get what all the laconic excitement was about.