The Critic's Nightmare

I came to a realization last weekend while I sat in the audience and watched a concert given by the Louisville Winds*, of which my youngest plays in.

It was a pops oriented concert with a lot of standard wind ensemble fare --John Williams soundtracks mixed in with arrangements of some older popular tunes-- and then this made an appearance:

Oh yes. 

MacArthur Park, that song written by Jimmy "Wichita Lineman" Webb that Richard Harris sung in 1968.

I'm being generous when I say it's a song, because to a lot of people --myself included-- that song feels like so much pretentious bullshit. 

While introducing the piece, the Winds' music director admitted that the song has its detractors, but she programmed it anyway. And much to my chagrin while the Winds played, there were people humming along or softly singing the lyrics. Including my wife.** 

Okay, I thought, I'm going to have to re-evaluate a few things.

I got on good ol' Google and punched in the "is MacArthur Park one of the worst songs" query, and got a Wikipedia link to an aggregate list of songs across the decades that groups have considered "the worst songs ever". Among the songs on that list were:

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da by The Beatles

True by Spandau Ballet

Sussudio by Phil Collins

Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

What's Up? by 4 Non Blondes

Barbie Girl by Aqua

Nookie by Limp Bizkit

You're Beautiful by James Blunt

Rockstar by Nickelback

Yummy by Justin Bieber

and of course MacArthur Park.

What, no Bee Gees? No Kajagoogoo?

I sighed and listened once more to Richard Harris' rendition of MacArthur Park, searching for why that song resonated with so many people. 

To be fair, you can tell the song was written and orchestrated with an American Musical in mind. Richard Harris had just starred in movie version of Camelot, so he was used to singing in that manner, as can be seen with his rendition of Camelot on the Ed Sullivan show:

And yes, the orchestration of MacArthur Park is overdone in a way that would resurface years later in The Grateful Dead's Terrapin Station, and an orchestration that according to the liner notes of The Best of the Grateful Dead CD the band hated.

So I could see how it pushed all the right buttons at the right time which catapulted the song into global popularity, but to a lot of people --including me-- the song is just pretentious bullshit.

***

And THAT was when it hit me: ALL music is just pretentious bullshit to somebody.

It's more a matter of the reality being that you can't please everybody, so what one person loves another person hates. Sometimes popularity breeds contempt, such as how Toto's Africa was so overplayed in the early 80s that I simply couldn't listen to it for well over a decade.*** Other times a generation came of age hating that what the previous generation liked, such as how those of us who lived through Disco as kids grew up despising the stuff, yet the generation after us was quite okay with Disco.****

Even some of our generation came out as being fine with Disco. Such as the Foo Fighters.

I guess I should have known better, since after all I'm a huge Rush fan. Rush is one of those bands that had a cult following, yet were frequently dissed by the major music critics of the day. 

So that I liked a band that was often overlooked or dissed by the music tastemakers should have given me the clue that it's okay to like something other people don't, and that maybe songs or bands I don't like do have some merit after all. 

***

Yes, I can roll this back to gaming... and pretty much everywhere. Outrage and dismissiveness brings eyeballs to whatever you're opining about, and in this modern internet world the concept of shades of gray seems to frequently get thrown out the window. 

This little revelation is just a corollary to the black and white we paint ourselves into, because it's so much easier to view things through that lens rather than actually use our noggin and understand the shades of gray***** that life is populated with. 

From XKCD #2184.

*A community driven wind ensemble in Louisville (naturally), composed of people from high schoolers up through retirees. It's not affiliated with the University of Louisville, but several students in the School of Music play in the Winds and that's how my youngest found out about it.

**I knew she liked the song, but I figured she was an outlier.

***And in the strange case of deja vu, Weezer's rendition had the same fate. Good thing I don't listen to the radio that much these days or I'd have been driven crazy by the same song twice in my lifetime.

****My wife and I were at a wedding in the late 90s, and one of the people at our table at the reception worked as a DJ in his spare time. When Stayin' Alive came on during the reception, we watched in stunned amazement as all of these teenagers flooded the dance floor. "Oh yes," our table-mate informed us, "the teenagers all love this disco crap. I put on Disco Inferno on request once, and all of these big high school football players ran out onto the floor and were boogieing away, doing the Saturday Night Fever dances."

*****Or the 50 Shades of Grey. /rimshot