by Adam Carolla
Let’s start with a list of songs I never need to hear again:
“ADDICTED TO LOVE” BY ROBERT PALMER Robert Palmer is a guy who flies under the shit radar. He had three or four horrible songs made tolerable by the coke whores pretending to play guitar behind him. “Addicted to Love” is a shitty, repetitive song that, sadly, I could belt out on karaoke night even if the monitor was broken. That’s the tragedy, that’s where the lawsuit should come in. I know all the fucking lyrics to “Addicted to Love” and “Bad Case of Loving You” and “Simply Irresistible” even though I’ve never bought a Robert Palmer album. When the first lick in “Addicted to Love” comes on the car radio, I pounce on it so fast I’ve almost gotten into accidents. If the knob broke off and I couldn’t change the channel, I would drive into the first eighteen-wheeler traveling the opposite direction. This is the essence of this chapter—all the shit that’s foisted on us, how we can’t escape it because it’s ubiquitous in our retarded culture, and all of the imbeciles who not only defend these hacks but turn them into millionaires while my ears are being raped.
“COCAINE” BY ERIC CLAPTON Superslow and super-repetitive. The song should be called “Quaalude” or “Ether Rag.” It’s also ironic that just a few short years after Ed Sullivan told Mick Jagger to change the lyrics from “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together” and told Jim Morrison not to say “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” Eric Clapton is allowed to do a fifteen-minute homage to booger sugar.
“I SHOT THE SHERIFF” BY BOB MARLEY “But I did not shoot the deputy.” “Oh, our mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Bob Marley’s a legend and so is Eric Clapton and there’s something progressive, evolved, and cool about a British guy covering a reggae song. It still does not prevent the song from blowing hippo ass, not rhyming, and not making any fucking sense whatsoever. He shot the sheriff but he didn’t shoot the deputy? Bob Marley would make an awesome attorney. “Your Honor, while it’s true my client murdered the sheriff, he did not, however, shoot his lower-ranking partner. We’ll take our apology in the form of a check. Thank you.”
“I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL” BY JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS This song is a one-two punch of shitty and fucked-out. It’s the melodic equivalent of getting crabs from a fat chick. Lose-lose. It’s a simplistic, repetitive, uncreative chorus that never ends. If that isn’t bad enough, I’ve heard it 235,000 fucking times.
“BORN IN THE U.S.A.” BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (SORRY, LYNETTE) Bruce has got a lot of good songs—this ain’t one of them. Somewhere around the 166th time he screams he was born in the U.S.A., I start wishing I was never born at all.
“ABRACADABRA” BY THE STEVE MILLER BAND “Abra, abra, cadabra/I want to reach out and grab ya.” Lyrically, this song is an abortion. Steve Miller gets some kind of free pass musically, and I’m not sure why. His songs suck, whether it’s the joker-toker song, or “Take the Money and Run.” His lyrics sound as if they were written by an eight-year old who was stricken with fetal alcohol syndrome. Have you ever uttered this phrase: “I could go for a good Steve Miller song about now”? I’ve had notes left on my car windshield with more complex rhymes. Is there something I don’t know about Steve Miller? Did his wife drown his five kids in a bathtub? Does he have full-blown AIDS? Is there some reason why we can’t all say out loud how much his music sucks and what an insult his songs are to everyone’s collective intelligence? Right about now you’re saying, “Ace, don’t be so hard. ‘Jet Airliner’ is a pretty good song.” He didn’t write that one.
“STUCK WITH YOU” BY HUEY LEWIS (SORRY, JIMMY) Jimmy Kimmel’s favorite artist and one of the nicest guys in the world. So I’ll keep this short and give Huey the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure he was extremely high when he wrote this retarded nursery rhyme and never thought in his wildest dreams it would get picked up for airplay. This, by the way, is how you know you’re popular—when even your shittiest songs are getting a ton of airplay.
“THE GIRL IS MINE” BY PAUL MCCARTNEY AND MICHAEL JACKSON This song is lame enough while they’re singing, but when they start talking to each other and using each other’s first names, it goes into the gay stratosphere.
“BRASS MONKEY” BY THE BEASTIE BOYS It’s hard for me to bag on this song because if I couldn’t sing and had zero musical talent yet insisted on being in a band, I guess this is the kind of shit I would crank out too.
“BEAUTIFUL GIRLS” BY SEAN KINGSTON A great example of a modern shitty song. A lot of new songs sound as if they’re synthesized and it’s intentional. In the past, when they found some hot chick who couldn’t really sing, they’d clean it up in the studio—but the whole plan was not to let you catch on. Now there’s a whole new brand of music that sounds as if it’s being sung by a Roomba, which goes against the very essence of music. No soul, no human beings, no connection. When I was a kid, all the futuristic movies would show humans sitting down for dinner and on their plate would be a pill that said “Turkey” on it and another pill that said “Stuffing” next to it. That is what this feels like. Plus it’s just a straight rip-off of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.”
“AMERICAN WOMAN” The Guess Who recorded the eight-minute version of it in ’69 and Lenny Kravitz did the four-minute version that feels like eight minutes in ’99. If you want to have fun, you can play a little musical Who’s on First: “Who had the shittiest song of 1970?” “The Guess Who?” “That’s what I’m asking.…” To be fair to Lenny, I don’t think he likes the song; he picks his music based on a complicated algorithm that boils down to what song he looks coolest playing in front of a full-length mirror.
“MANEATER” BY HALL & OATES I know you guys love “Sara Smile” and “Rich Girl” and expect me to give Hall & Oates some sort of pass based on the work they did before “Maneater.” Well, guess what? O.J. has a Heisman and he rushed for two thousand yards. This is not only one of the worst songs ever created, it’s one of the worst artistic endeavors ever undertaken, and I’m including “Piss Christ” and those enema painter guys. It uses a shitty metaphor to illustrate a fucked-out theme, and just when things couldn’t get worse, there’s a horrible generic eighties sax solo. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my sax solos to have some relationship to the song they’re in. That sax solo sounds as if Hall & Oates reached into a pillowcase that said “Eighties Sax Solos” (picture Rob Lowe in St. Elmo’s Fire). The whole song was done on a Casio and represents everything that’s wrong with music. Imagine if you resurrected Hayden, Tchaikovsky, Janis Joplin, and Wes Montgomery, sat them down in a room, and played them that piece of cat shit rolled in AIDS jimmies known as “Maneater.” Then you told them, “This song made it all the way to number one.” They would never stop vomiting. Other than that, it’s an okay tune.
I know what you’re saying. Hey, man, those are good songs, I like some of those songs. Please let me address this. None of these songs are good. They suck by all units of measurement. Cosmically and artistically, they all represent horrible work by the artist. The fact that you like them is a combination of the man pounding them into your brain and your brain being malleable enough not to fend off the shit barrage that program directors constantly bombard it with. My brain has a hard candy outer shell that is able to ward off the John Cougar Mellencamps and absorb the John Hiatts. That’s why I get to write a fucking book.
The eighties were simultaneously the best decade and the worst decade for music. Everyone always does that “Oh, you were in high school in the early eighties, and that’s why you like all that music.” I don’t like the cars from the early eighties, I like the cars from the sixties. I hate the architecture from the early eighties, I like architecture from the twenties. Are you starting to get the picture? So shut the fuck up. I like the music from the early eighties because the Pretenders’ first albums and Joe Jackson’s first albums and Elvis Costello’s first albums were great, not because I was fifteen. But you wouldn’t know there was this much great music in the eighties if you ever tuned in to
the eighties station on satellite radio or watched any VH1 flashback eighties shows or listened to any eighties weekend on your local radio station. Then it’s a lot of “Union of the Snake” by Duran Duran, Wham’s “Young Guns,” “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, … it’s all the soundtrack to a really shitty Adam Sandler movie. It’s like we’re punishing ourselves. It’s called the Eighties Station, not the Super-Shitty Fucked-Out Horrible Songs from the Eighties Station. We could be hearing “Clubland” by Elvis Costello or “Stupefaction” by Graham Parker, but instead we get “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. This is the equivalent to getting a sack of trail mix, picking out all the smoked almonds and peanut M&Ms, and just eating the raw sunflower seeds. Why are we fucking doing this to ourselves? There’s tons of great music out there. Why are we forced to listen to the biggest mistakes of the decade? If we’re going to go this route, shouldn’t we take a number-two pencil and shove it into one ear until it pops out the other?
Indulge me for a moment while I directly address the gentleman who programs the Sirius XM eighties channel that’s in my wife’s car.
Dear Fuckstick:
You obviously don’t know shit about music or you’re a maniacal madperson who is trying to sonically punish those who pay a premium for satellite radio. If I hear “People Are People” by Depeche Mode one more fucking time on your piece-of-shit eighties station, I’m gonna buy a black-market Soviet ballistic missile and shoot down your fucking satellite.
THEY WERE SO GAY AND WE WERE SO NAÏVE
The Village People broke when I was in junior high. And even though they all had bushy mustaches and were singing about cruising YMCAs and shipping out with the navy, none of us had a clue they were gay. One of the guys was just dressed as a leather homo. He didn’t even have an occupation other than sucking cock. And we were still like, “Those guys must pull down a ton of chicks. It’d be awesome being one of the Village People. You must get pussy every night.” It’s not as though we didn’t know what gay was, we just couldn’t do the Village-dude math. And none of our dads or older brothers did it for us. Somehow in the era of disco, everyone was gay and no one was gay. Between the coke and the mirror ball, we were all temporarily blinded.
Another swish we should have seen coming was Rob Halford from Judas Priest. He dressed like an extra from The Beastmaster, no wife, no kids, man-gina goatee, and a studded codpiece. “Ram It Down,” “Point of Entry,” and “Hell Bent for Leather” are just a handful of their super-obviously gay titles that we didn’t get.
When Queen came out with that album that had all the nude chicks on the bicycles, I was like, “Freddy probably personally nailed every one of those bitches.” Freddy was giving us obvious clues, we just weren’t picking them up. It’s like we were standing under a gay basket, he threw us a no-look pass, but we missed the layup. His balls just clanked off our rim. The band was named Queen, he adopted a massive overbite and a biker-cop mustache, and yet we still didn’t get it. So he finally threw in the towel and said, “Fuck it, give me AIDS.”
REGGAE MUSIC
Reggae music sucks but no one except me will say it. Bob Marley’s “Jamming” is one of the shittiest songs ever made. And no one ever utters a word about it because somehow you’re either uptight, racist, or square if you don’t like reggae music. Here’s my problem with reggae music: You only need one reggae album in your collection to officially own every reggae song ever recorded because they are all the same.
Having a collection of reggae music is like having a collection of garbage disposals in your kitchen. If you’ve got one, you’re covered. Here’s how you know reggae music sucks. Whenever you argue with someone about reggae music they go, “Are you telling me that with your feet in the sand and the Caribbean as far as the eye can see, sipping rum out of a hollowed-out pineapple, that reggae music doesn’t sound great?” Of course it does. A recording of my mom getting raped would sound good under those circumstances. What if I made that argument? “Are you telling me you don’t enjoy Ben Folds when you’re getting your cock sucked?” Nobody else works where you are and what you’re doing into the music argument, just reggae defenders.
LED ZEPPELIN
Not only one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but one of the most secure. We’re living in a time of shameless self-promotion, where Ed Hardy T-shirts have “Ed Hardy” printed on them 250 times, Fergie’s first single was called “Fergalicious,” and every player in the NFL refers to himself in the third person. (I have a theory on the whole athlete-third-person phenomenon. They don’t do it because they’re pompous, they do it for when their wives confront them with a pile of text messages from their mistresses. That way they can say, “Debrickashaw Jackson doesn’t cheat. Debrickashaw loves his family. That doesn’t sound like the Debrickashaw Jackson I know. But if you want, I can talk to him next time I see him.”) So it’s refreshing that Led Zeppelin intentionally made their song titles confusing. Here’s a list of Led Zeppelin hits. I guarantee you know every one of them, but not by title, because they’re not mentioned in the lyrics of any of these songs.
Black Dog
D’yer Mak’er
Immigrant Song
Moby Dick
Over the Hills and Far Away
Four Sticks
Trampled Under Foot
The Wanton Song
The Battle of Evermore
This is why “Stairway to Heaven” is Led Zeppelin’s most requested song. Because no one wants to call the radio station and say, “Could you play that one that goes ‘Da-da-da, I live for my dreams and a pocketful of gold.’ ” The song titles are complex, but when it comes to the album titles, they lay them out like IKEA instructions: Zeppelin I, Zeppelin II, Zeppelin III, Zeppelin IV. The fifth album, Houses of the Holy, is where they regain their insanity. Just to fuck with you, it does not contain one of their few hits that has the title in the lyrics, “Houses of the Holy.” That’s on Physical Graffiti. The antithesis of this is another great rock band from the seventies. The name of the band: Bad Company. The name of the first album: Bad Company. The name of the first single … wait for it … “Bad Company.” Paul Rodgers also named his first daughter Bad Company.
Here’s a tip for all you folks who enjoy Kenny Chesney or Céline Dion but are scared you’ll get your ass kicked by hipsters at the cool-guy party. If anyone asks you what’s in your iPod, you just tell them Motorhead and Radiohead—or if you like, you can put the word early in front of any artist’s name, and it works. “I’m into early Clapton.” “I’m into early Billy Joel.” “I’m into early John Tesh … before he went corporate and lost his edge.”
In conclusion: Artistically, we humans are capable of such great work as The Wizard of Oz, Songs in the Key of Life, and All in the Family. Yet we choose to drown ourselves in a sea of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” and Cougartown.
MOTHERFUCKING
NATURE
I’m fascinated by nature because it’s got a lot of range. On the one hand, it seems boring. It’s got a lot of browns and oranges and colors from furniture in the seventies. And then once in a while you’ll see some multicolored fish from an exotic locale and think, Holy shit, how did nature come up with that one? Sometimes nature’s so straight, Republican, and uptight, and other times it’s like the gayest guy ever. The peacock? Come on. That’s a gay-pride parade on two legs. The word peacock even sounds gay.
It’s not just animals. Think about the range pumpkins have. There’s the minipumpkin you put out for the table centerpiece on Thanksgiving that’s the size of an apple, and then there are the ones that collapse the suspension of the farmer’s truck they’re sitting in. The ones you see at county fairs. There are big humans and small humans. But the smallest go sixty pounds and the biggest go six hundred. With pumpkins it’s seven ounces versus seventeen hundred pounds. And they look exactly the same.
And we have a lot of range in our reactions to nature, and it doesn’t necessarily follow logic. Take our feeli
ngs about bats. All bats do is eat grasshoppers and mosquitoes and sleep in a belfry, yet we’re completely freaked out by them. Even Hollywood can’t decide how to feel about the bat. Think about Count Dracula and Batman. No other animal has had that kind of cinematic range. There’s no manatee that either saves a city or comes in at midnight through the French doors and rapes an ingenue.
Or bugs. We’ve decided there are good bugs and bad bugs. For some reason we hate cockroaches, but what did a cockroach ever do to anyone? Bugs really tell you a lot about human nature. If you live in the United States, unless you’re one of the four people ever to be killed by a black widow spider, bugs should be neither here nor there. Yet we spend a lot of time thinking about them, talking about them, and figuring out ways to get rid of them. They’re almost a metaphor for how our psyche works. They’re small, mean us no harm, and pose no discernible threat, yet if we know there’s one in the bedroom with us we can’t go to sleep. Also, we don’t really define bugs along the lines of whether they’re dangerous or not; we define them aesthetically. What’s the difference between a moth and a butterfly except one is gray and one looks like the gay flag?
SPIDERS I love the idiots who say you should be happy to have spiders in your house because they take care of the bad bugs. That’s like saying, “I like to keep a Crip around the house. It keeps the Bloods out.” Also when’s the last time you walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and saw a spider locked in mortal combat with a silverfish? I used to put them outside, but then they would just go out, fuck, get pregnant, and come back in. There’s a reason they’re inside. They’re not lost. They came inside for the same reason you came inside. It’s warm and there’s food.