My Music Monday

November's My Music Monday / Hi-Fi Friday theme is brought to you by the folk at gambrinous with griffonage: The Worst Song From Your Favourite Artists.

Unfortunately, I immediately agreed to this.

It's unfortunate because I fear (and expressed) you will click on these as some kind of train wreck of our musical liberries. Yes, that could be amusing.

It is unfortunate to admit that even our best loved bands do indeed make bad music.

"Bad" is all relative, of course. What one might like, one might not....and vice versa. And I'm finding myself tempering what I consider 'bad' even within the realm of this theme.

I'll start off with Crowded House.

Neil Finn is a master songwriter and arranger. He has a way with vocal and music arrangements that can be truly truly outstanding - and he usually succeeds far more than he fails. And yes, there are bad Crowded House songs ("Italian Plastic").  Of course, Finn might just finally pick better songs to don the album than they record. Their Afterglow album - songs that weren't actually even b-sides, but ones that didn't make the cut for any record surfaced, when it should have not.

So for my selection, I'm picking a song from their 2007 album, Time on Earth, with the song "She Called Up".

Here is the caveat: it's not a bad song.

It has a bad element to the song which actually pretty much ruins what could have been a very good song.

I find nothing worse in adult songs than using children's choruses.

Well.......maybe genocide is worse, but a children's chorus in an adult pop song is a strong strong second. But with that element, you can almost see what drives men to genocide.

Actually, there is something worse - adults imitating children's singing voices in a chorus. And that's what Finn does for "She Calls Up".

Admittedly, for years I would hit 'skip' on any device where this song showed up. And one day on Sirius XM, I let it play. I manned-up and powered through  the "la-la-la-la-la-la" shit and decided, "man, this really could have been a decent song".

I find myself letting it play if it comes up in rotation, though I will skip it if I'm in a mood - and I think you know how often that might be.

I'm not sure how I feel about the video trying to deflect a bad adult child-like chorus onto actual children themselves. It seems unfair to the kids.

And as Helen Lovejoy would say, "won't somebody think of the children?"