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.