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10. Polyphonic Spree


Has there ever been in a band in pop music who is more deserving of the pejorative adjective "mawkish" than the Polyphonic Spree? Constituted in some ostensible negative taste in the air, The Polyphonic Spree typically saw itself as some reaction to this negativity they made up to react to. The essence of this band is a blind naïve optimism that is supposed to represent a more primal intuition for loves and hugs. Draped in white dresses and jumping around like grade school children, The Polyphonic Spree gave a new definition to what bombastic music was, which is nothing other than not recognizing how bombastic your actually being in thinking your movement where everyone can sing and shout together is genuine…like children. Backed by a multitude of vocalists and instrument players, the Polyphonic Spree played faux-orchestral music within hackneyed major scales and the most banal of feel-good platitudes that was to fool the listener into hearing simplicity. Never saying anything important and certainly never sounding important, this bombast would fall only on easily fooled ears, who would then be easily fooled by the next band who publicly expressed its shiny happy love for the universe. Indie music in general had fallen for this conscious phase and showed why any merit the genre had ever garnered had only been from the advent of the coming-of-age "I wanna be me" attitude, in the case, where supposed optimism had sprung its puerile head from the ground to see if anyone was watching. For those who actually listened to music though, only one word would stand out in their head when listening to the Polyphonic Spree…tacky.
 
9. Can
 
 
One day Person A had read a magazine where Can's "Tago Mago" had been qualified as a landmark album. Person B, had fell into the same trap previously and spent 5 dollars on a used copy on this completely un-listenable album. Person B knowing he wanted a T-Rex album from Person A, offered to trade his copy of "Tago Mago" to Person A who wanted to hear it from reading about it in a magazine as a LANDMARK ALBUM! Person B got his wish as he procured for himself "Tanx" which was much lesser known and sometimes defamed in the press. Person A was excited to listen to a LANDMARK ALBUM that he had never heard before. After a week, Person A, disparaged, lonely, vexed, and not eating much asked for his copy of "Tanx" back from Person B. Person B gave him his copy back, and reticently they went to the local record shop together to purchase a copy of "Tanx" so they both had it. Both of them together went out to the street afterwards and laid Cans "Tago Mago" in the middle of the street. Together they spent the day watching the album case with the cd inside being run over by cars, trucks, bicyclists, and their own stampeding feet when traffic had cleared. That day, Person A learned a lesson, and Person B had too much sympathy for the experience of listening to "Tago Mago" to rub it in. The lesson was not formerly stated between them both as what was silently spoken was so loud, that actual spoken words would have been too soft. Even now, the silence is too strong, and too loud to want to formerly express what happened that day, and what each heard from THE LANDMARK ALBUM that was "Tago Mago." This lesson that they would never forget, and are best friends still today.
 
8. Franz Ferdinand
 

 
In the early 00's, indie music found its 15 minutes of calling the next thing revolutionary in music that sounded like music you could dance to. Instead of the lugubrious attitude that indie music thought it was condemned to embody, it found that the genre could attach itself to obvious beats and still remain underground in appearance. Like most new movements, the hyperbole that surrounded the band, in the case, Franz Ferdinand was enough to make the listener at least have to check out what was going on in the actual music. Besides the 15 minute flirtation with music that was consciously not afraid to act pop, there was little to desire in the music of this band. In the first place, the songwriting was below average. The chorus's were non existent, and the any sense of melody was diminished by the "heyyy look at me and this edgy new music" vocal delivery by Alex Kapranos. If one of the fundamental themes of this list is to highlight bands and sounds that fooled a listener into thinking they were actually good, no where is this more conspicuous than "this fire". A banal attempt at a rave-up song beleaguered by big beats, a shouty chorus, punk guitar, and absolutely no melody or authenticity. Their second album was even worse with the introductory single "do you want to", that shamelessly tried to recreate the jocular musings of "take me out" accompanied by lyrics that were supposed to be nuanced in this same jocularity but came across extremely hackneyed. The idea of edgy dance punk falls on its head in Franz Ferdinand when its realized that these songs don't want to be listened to after their immediate supposed comic appeal.
  
7. The Brian Jonestown Massacre
 
 
There has never been a band in the history of pop music who cashed in on the success of a film about them as much as the Brian Jonestown Massacre has. A band with players who can't play their instruments, no appearant melodic choruses, and a singer who can't carry a tune in reasonable pitch for the life of him, Brian Jonestown Massacre owed its success to the exaggeration of difference as the standard for quality in music. To show how flexible difference could be conceptually qualified, BJM exemplifies this more than any other band, because they actually never made a unique sound in their life. They were championed for being different from the immediate times, in their obsequious disposition towards 60's flower pop. It's one thing to ape decent bands from the past, its another to ape them and make them sound worse. It's with the popularity of drug addiction as authenticity and incandescent pictures in music magazines that BJM became popular. This medium became focused in a movie about them and the Dandy Warhols called "Dig!". The sheer amount of people who obviously knew nothing about music but would claim BJM as "the next Dylan" in every video shot had proved that no other band had come as close to BJM in being this mythologized. The idea that something would be good in the first place because it's the "next Dylan" goes to show how inconsequential these managers and A and R types are in knowing anything about music besides quixotic headlines in a band's profile in a modern music magazine. If you don't believe me on the quality of BJM's music though, don't take my word for it and go see them live. I'm pretty sure your first band you started in 8th grade sounds as sonically coherent as this band on their best day.
 
6. The Cure
 

 
The Cure had a resurgence in popularity in the past 2 years mainly from children below the age of 17 who identified bright lipstick with interesting music. Interesting music was supposed to be the selling point for The Cure who wore its theatrical badge on its sleeve as publicly as Fred Astaire liked cajoling single women. The Cure, always failing to deliver sweeping chorus's that the production wanted to reach and always relying on the melodramatics of Robert Smith's vocals, saw its popularity ascend with its somber appeal to disenfranchment, the best idea for any band who is interested in selling music to 13 year olds. "Boys don't cry" resurfaced in its puerility. What was called simplicity in this song was privileging a lachrymose personality for the sake of its own self. "Lovesong" made it chic to over exaggerate the idea of love to aggrandized proportions, to the point of fictionally creating problems out of thin air for children to pretend the most basic of romantic tragedy's to. All in all, the image of The Cure monstrously trumped any listening experience which was devoid of a strong sense melody and any sense of artistic restraint. In the age of expressionism ("express yourself"!) The Cure could find it's way to fame by having big hair and playing songs mostly in minor keys, and when a song was played in major, like "Just Like Heaven", the children would jump up and down on their beds in their lovesick personality's that required no effort, no responsibility, no sense of magnanimity, in other words, the definition of modern love as being childish.

  
 

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