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Monday, March 07, 2005

“Spring” “Break”

In my house we speak of spring break the way we speak of the Holy Roman Empire:  for just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman (nor, for that matter, an empire), so it is with Penn State’s spring break: it usually occurs at a time of year when the high temp is around 35 and there’s a nice comfy blanket of snow on the ground (as there is now), and it certainly doesn’t constitute a “break.”

But this year, we’re actually taking a break chez Bérubé!  All four of us are headed off to– where else would you go for spring break?– New England, and I probably won’t be anywhere near an Internets connection for four days.  Imagine that.  And it really is something of a break for me, because this week I finished reading and evaluating those fellowship applications, I finished a short essay on I can’t remember what, I finished an introduction to that dang “special issue” I’ve been editing for– hmmmm, let me think– about two years or so, and best of all, I finished a complete first draft of Liberal Arts, the book I’ve been talking about and not producing for roughly as long as I’ve had a blog.  (And yes, I’ve backed it up in two undisclosed locations, and I have hard copies too.) So for the next few days, I believe I will begin doing extensive research into some of the fine, fine suggestions all of you have made with regard to the new Ministry of Culture and Beer.

Now, in the past I wouldn’t bother to make an announcement about a tiny hiatus of three or four days, but then again, in the past I wasn’t averaging four to five thousand readers a day.  And to thank you all for your patronage of (and infinite patience with) this humble but sometimes technologically precarious and excessively self-referential blog, I have a Brand New Game to offer everyone.

You’re all familiar with “One-Hit Wonder” contests and radio programs, and you know they always involve the usual suspects.  Yes, yes, “Brandy” by Looking Glass; OK, “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians; “Smoke of a Distant Fire” by the Sanford-Townshend Band, but of course; “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo, “Tubthumping” by Chumbawumba, “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc., and so on.  The list is as long as it is tedious.  And without fail, someone will propose Mister Mister or Golden Earring or the Human League as one-hit wonders, when in fact these people were two-hit wonders who lived in mortal terror of being one-hit wonders-- though in the case of the Human League, not enough terror, because they decided to follow “Don’t You Want Me” with “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” one of the worst songs written since the retreat of the global ice sheets circa 10,000 B.C.E.

But I’m not going to ask you to name one- or two-hit wonders.  I have another question entirely.  Which musical “artists,” in your learned opinions, should have been one-hit wonders?  To put this another way: what hideous, ubiquitous person-or-group has produced years or decades of dreck except for that one song you can’t entirely dismiss and– gulp– might even like?  You know, such that your opinion of him/ her/ them would be utterly different if he/ she/ they had produced only that one song?

I’ll kick this off with three suggestions.  God and all her competitor dieties know how much I despise Billy Joel, how I utter vile imprecations when “Piano Man” or “Only the Good Die Young” or “Just the Way You Are” or “My Life” suddenly intrudes upon my car radio, never mind his stomach-turning minor compositions like “River of Dreams” or “Big Shot” or “Second Wind” (a song written to persuade depressed teens not to commit suicide, and which would have pushed me right off the precipice had I heard it when I was nineteen), and let’s not even bother with his early period, with its intolerable Captain Jacks and Angry Young Men who’ve “passed the age/ of consciousness and righteous rage.” (Who knew that Mr. Joel had had a socially conscious period, sometime between lunch and dinner on a balmy afternoon in May 1970?) But I can’t manage to hate “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” no matter how I try.  By contrast, I have no trouble consigning the entire Phil Collins songbook to the nethermost reaches of Gehenna, for I break out in the full-body cold sweats every time I hear the whiny, pompous, one-hundred-percent-talent-free old gasbag, no matter what he’s singing.  And Billy’s in the same boat, which is why these guys dominate Lite Rock.  But still– if he’d been a one-hit wonder with “Hollywood,” I wouldn’t despise him at all.  Likewise with the far more innocuous (and more recent) Smashmouth, who in a just world would have shuffled off this mortal coil after “Walking on the Sun,” a reasonably enjoyable middle-of-the-road number with a semblance of something like a groove, as opposed to the garbage they’ve written since, which serves only to betray the fact that these guys couldn’t connect a verse to a chorus or a chorus to a middle eight if they were given EZ-DIY songwriting software.  Lenny Kravitz is another obvious case, having managed not to be boring beyond description just once, on the single, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”

Further suggestions welcome.  My only request, before I head off into the Northeastern tundra, is that you confine the suggestions to hideous and ubiquitous people who’ve written only one good song, as opposed to the Eric Claptons and Neil Diamonds of the world, who’ve written about three or four.

Posted by Michael on 03/07 at 01:36 AM
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