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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3327 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm not much of a music head, but I do watch and review a lot of movies and was struck at how neatly your 5 star rubric matches to mine for movies, like almost to a T. Even the 4.5/5 star distinction where a 4.5 star is basically perfect, but to get that last little mmph it needs to move me in some way, or change me. Transcendent, yes!

Do you have some examples of 0 stars? I would enjoy seeing those

I was going to include the zero star albums as a separate "Bonus Feature" one of these weeks, but since you asked:

The first broad category is experimental garbage by minor artists who seem to specialize in experimental garbage. Daniel Higgs manages two enteries in this category; Magic Alphabet is 42 minutes of him fooling around with a Jew's Harp, and Say God is a weird quasi-religious mess where he plays harmonium and does that sing-songy chanting that priests sometimes do. Also in this category are Eric Copeland's Strange Days, which sounds like a mashup of random snippets taped off the radio unartfully combined, and The Messy Jessy Fiesta by Blectum from Blechdom, an Indie Electronic duo who obviously don't have any musical training and have the musical sophistication of a 13 year-old fooling around with a cheap keyboard.

Moving into slightly more mainstream territory, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's debut album Answering Machine Music is a bunch of generic emo songs set to a programmed Casio keyboard and other cheap instruments. The Moldy Peaches are best known for the annoying song that appears at the end of the movie Juno and their lone album (which contains the song) is similar crap that sounds like teenage poetry set to simple melodies and recorded in the cheapest way possible, on purpose. And of course there's Lou Reed's classic Metal Machine Music, the first entry we have by a mainstream musician, except that the four sides of guitar feedback were recorded as an intentional Fuck You to his record company so there's an asterisk here.

Moving on to albums by mainstream musicians that were intended to actually be good. First we have Rod Stewart's 1984 album Camouflage, which includes "Some Guys Have All the Luck", easily his worst single, and the rest of the album is even worse, just a gloss of bad '80s production over unmelodic crap. Jeff Beck's 1985 album Flash is something of a twin to this (Stewart sang on an awful cover of "People Get Ready" and Beck played guitar on some cuts from Camouflage) and is bad for all the same reasons. The Beach Boys 1992 album Summer in Paradise is nothing more than a Mike Love cash-in that sounds like it was recorded entirely with 1992-era Pro Tools presets. Finally, there's Queen's soundtrack to Flash Gordon which is incredibly kitschy and, to my recollection, is mostly dialogue from the movie. It should be mentioned that, apart from Flash Gordon, all of these mainstream records include terrible covers, proving that songwriting isn't the only problem here. In addition to the version of "People Get Ready" from Flash, Stewart's Camouflage contains a cover of "All Right Now", and Summer in Paradise has an awful cover of "Hot Fun in the Summertime". To put an exclamation point on this, Jeff Beck released a zero star single around the same time, a cover of "Wild Thing" that's worse than anything on either his or Stewart's record. It also gets bonus points for having the worst picture sleeve in the history of music, a photograph of what appears to be a clown from an S&M club.

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