Confession of a Hater
So I’m reading the Shamus’s perfectly nice recent article in these parts about that perfectly nice artist Stevie Wonder and I had the awful urge to leave a comment, but after for once thinking it over, I desisted. So now I’m writing this instead.
Because I have to admit I fucking hate Stevie Wonder. No, that’s not true, I don’t hate Stevie Wonder, but I do hate the horrible sappy life-affirming music he puts out. Now if Stevie had called it quits when he was Little Stevie I’d have no problem with the dude. If he had hung it up after “Uptight†he would be in my own private pantheon of almost-forgotten 60s greats like Dyke & the Blazers, and the Seeds, and of course Gabby and the Gazelles. But Stevie did not hang it up, and he went on to record crap like “You Are the Sunshine of My Life†and “Isn’t She Lovelyâ€Â, and most horrible of all, “Ebony and Ivoryâ€Â. Which brings me to Paul McCartney. I don’t hate the man, but I really hate his silly love songs, I hated them when he did them with the Beatles, and they just got worse when he didn’t have John Lennon around to cast a withering cold eye on him.
Let’s see, who else do I hate? Oh, yeah, Billy Joel; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Simon without Garfunkel; the Eagles. Hate him, hate ‘em, hate him, hate ‘em.
The Police? Please. Sting? Fuck off to tantric heaven, dude. A bunch of people I work with went to see the Police reunion concert. They loved them. Stewart Copeland is the best drummer ever, Sting still looks great and has the same voice he had back then. Really? That means I still hate them. The Police are the rock & roll quintessence of white boy smugness and I hate ‘em. Speaking of smugness, I never liked the Talking Heads and every other cracked-voice art-school band that followed in their wake.
I get tired thinking about all the crap I hate. I mean, I like the Grateful Dead (whom just about everybody else around here hates), but I hate Bob Weir’s songs and I really hate Deadheads, and I wouldn’t be caught dead going to one of these post-Garcia incarnations of the Dead.
And so far I’ve only talked about music.
I’m a writer and obviously I’m a contemporary or else I wouldn’t be writing this, but I hate just about any contemporary fiction I pick up. I loathed The Corrections. I was at my mom’s for a week and she had accidentally taken out a large-print edition of The Corrections thinking it was a thriller, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I tortured myself halfway through that book, hating every sentence and the onanistic self-loving personality underriding it all, and finally could take no more. I would have tossed it into the trash but it was a library book.
Don’t get me started on romantic comedies, let’s just not go into Bruce Willis, and I’ve already dealt with Robin Williams.
For years I worked in theatre, despite the fact that I have hated nearly every play I’ve ever seen. There’s something terribly wrong with me, I know.
Don’t talk to me about Bush and Cheney, those are givens. Me, I’m still hating Bill Clinton because if he had only kept his dick in his pants Al Gore would be president today and not Dick Cheney.
I’ll just close this before everyone totally hates me, but I do want to say one last thing; I hate magic tricks and I hate magicians. About ten years ago this woman friend of mine apparently thought she was doing me a favor by taking me to see Penn and Teller. God I hated that show, with that blustering big guy just never shutting the fuck up. I kind of liked the little guy because he never said a word. But why couldn’t the big guy keep his trap shut too? At least then I might have been able to catch a nap. But oh, no, it was ninety minutes of bellowing, I felt like I was listening to the mating cries of some magically boring tuxedo-clad elephant. And to make matters worse the dude had a ponytail.
And I really hate dudes with ponytails.
(Photo of Jacques Prévert by Robert Doisneau, neither of whom were haters. This has been another Newcritics exclusive and a Quinn/Martin Production, but you can check out my joint for charming little tales and poems of sunshine and love.)
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I am in absolute accord on your take on the Grateful Dead and I love that you tried to read The Corrections (never looked at it because I hate books like that) IN LARGE PRINT. The only thing worse would be the audio book of it shouted for the hard of hearing.
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Name another song writer that has produced better songs from the mid 60's up to the 80's?
Don't particularly like a lot of his lyrics either but I gotta disagree with you about the music.
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You should have seen / heard me when the (at the time) three surviving Beatles chose to work with The Anti-Lennon* for "The Beatles Anthology" sessions. I was so full of bile I had special agents from the American Liver Association trailing me with buckets...
*jeff lynne of elo
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Frank Zappa pointed out that for most people their choice in music is like their choice in clothes, cars, or wallpaper: they don't care about it much, they just want to project a particular image to the world. Not for everybody, though. Not for all of us.
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I sometimes use the word "sucks" as a substitute for saying I hate something. I've been told by past criticism professors and many others that I should avoid use of the term, but saying something sucks just feels better to me in situations where it’s undeniably warranted. Here’s an example using Viscount’s biblical truth above, "Jeff Lynn sucks, he has done nothing but ruin every record he’s ever produced by ego manically attempting to make them all sound like ELO, which sucks because ELO sucked". I’m far more selective about my use of the adjective, but in high school I used it quite liberally. Back then I hated everything because, well, everything sucked with the exception of the shit I liked. Now, I can hate things that others don’t without saying it sucks (i.e. I “get itâ€Â, but I don’t like it), but now the distinction is when I say something sucks it means that after careful unbiased consideration I hate it because it really does indeed suck (Newcritics readers take note).
You’re about 90% on the mark with the shit you hate Dan, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m currently listening to the Grateful Dead record I was told should enlighten me to the magic that allegedly is them, but so far five tracks into it, and after 20+ years of giving them a “second†listen, they’re one for five and still firmly in the “sucks†category with me, but I’ll stick it out and see if they can’t improve their standing on my shit that sucks charts.
“Sting? Fuck off to tantric heaven, dude.†Pure genius.
“For years I worked in theatre, despite the fact that I have hated nearly every play I’ve ever seen. There’s something terribly wrong with me, I know.†There’s nothing wrong with you at all, you’re just saying what we all know in our hearts to be true and are afraid to admit.
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Dan: I get dumped on for being "negative," "too critical," and "hating everything" when I say I hate stuff, as deserving as that stuff might be. So I try not to indulge. However, I was happy to indulge by proxy simply by reading your post.
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Frampton
Hemingway
Audrey Hepburn
American Idol
Woolf and Pynchon (but not Joyce)
South Park (but not the Simpsons)
ELO, Boston, Foreigner, Styx et al
Jackson Pollock
ER (but not House)
Maureen Dowd
The Cars, The Knack, et al
Musicals of almost any kind...
I'm sure more will occur to me and to everyone else.
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...Sting still looks great and has the same voice he had back then. Really? That means I still hate them.
LOL...
Stop it!
And Tony Alva, stop saying "sucks." It's not a very nice word.
And now I'm off to listen to "Isn't She Lovely." I downloaded it after I read The Shamus's (I hate when I don't know if my possessive puncutation is correct! With all those "s's" and everything!) fine, fine post.
So there!
Isnt she lovely
Isnt she wonderfull
Isnt she precious
LOL.
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This really is a great post. But for me it stopped at Chapter One.
If you list your LOVES and what they do to how, every time? Half the time? Few are perfect. I'll list mine.
The Grateful Dead, as I've said here before, will send screaming into the unknown night. That might not be all-out hatred, but my aversion to them is intense and personal.
Here, I can't resist throwing in another example. I once worked with a woman, who was as level-headed and good natured as anyone I've known, but a few notes from Joni Mitchell and she'd start screaming, tear at her hair, and run around searching for the source so she could kill it.
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Dear E. Glenn: actually I'm not on lithium but in fact I did run out of weed yesterday. Q.E.D.
Dear Marcus: as our Latin teacher Father Fahey at good old Cardinal Dougherty High used to say, when he wasn't whacking our wise asses raw with the heavy ribbed rubber soul of a boot, "De gustibus non est disputandum." But if you bring over some good weed I'll gladly sit down and listen to "Songs in the Key of Life" with you, which I believe I still have lying around here on vintage vinyl. (The fold-out sleeve is good for separating the seeds and stems.)
Tony: we tend to toss around the term "lol" a trifle liberally, but your comments really did make me laugh out fucking loud. As for the Dead, I wonder what album you're listening to? The only studio albums I ever listen to are "Workingman's" and "American Beauty", but what I really like is the live stuff, especially the Dick's Picks from around '69 to '73. I just can't get into '80s or 90s Dead although that era has its strange adherents. Maybe Jason Chervakis could recommend a good live concert for you, I think he's much better versed on the Dead discography than I.
Tom: I actually had a lot of really good times in the 80s on base physical levels, but, yeah, not too much of the music from that period is on my frequent-play list, with one notable exception, and, Kathleen, this begins to answer your comment: I am a complete and unapologetic fan of the Smiths. I just love Morrissey and Johnny Marr's songs, and I've never grown tired of them. In fact I'm listening to them right now.
The boy with the thorn in his side
Behind the hatred there lies
A murderous desire for love...
I hope that in some future pieces I can talk about some of my other loves. (And in fact in the "comments" to Tony Smith's piece above I have blatantly confessed to my love for Edith Piaf.)
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I pretty much give the benefit of the doubt to anyone trying to do something creative. I think that's a difficult lifestyle choice and god bless the folks who succeed at making a living at it, or just succeed at continuing to do it. I learn something from every creative act I witness and frankly I cherish the experience of witnessing it. There I go, in touch w/ my inner hippie again.
What I hate is stuff I perceive as hack work...cynical, made for market, devoid of any shred of effort at creative individuality or insight, pure creation by focus group. The Devil Wears Prada, for example, remains my example of the worst kind of movie anyone could ever make (didn't read the book). That, I hated. (Which is not to say I hate commercial, made-for-market stuff...just the stuff that feels empty of any creative spark, driven exclusively by market consideration.)
There's a load of creative stuff I don't get:
South Park.
Robert Altman (well, Gosford Park I hated because it felt like a vapid drawingroom/upstairs downstairs rehash, again, no creative spark).
Yes, Aerosmith (I hear the tightness, tho generally I favor looseness and improvisation; I love the bass playing. Joe Perry's good. The but songs barely qualify as songs--I need something a little more ambitious conceptually).
Deadwood.
Gilbert & Sullivan.
Nirvana.
Cat Power.
Reggeaton music in general.
Most 17th century English narrative poetry in rhyming couplets (I could never get through all of a Milton epic).
But the only thing in the arts I can confidently say I hate w/ blood in my eyes is camp. I'd rather eat broken glass than see a John Waters movie or a Charles Ludlam play. If I wind up in hell, my torture will be an eternal screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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Dan,
Terrapin Station on my main man Jackson's recommendation. Opening track was so good it didn't even sound like'em. Went downhill for the next four. Many more to come so the verdict's still out.
Man, is that Jeff Lynn a poopyhead:-)
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What does a Deadhead say when he runs out of dope?
"Turn this shit off!"
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I agree with Jason. I'm inspired or interested in most anything someone creates. Doesn't mean I like everything, but I hate very little.
Being the sap that I am, I always think of this Vonnegut quote:
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Most things to me are hot fudge sundaes.
Except that damn band my son listens to where the singer doesn't sing, he screams, cranked up to 11.
Is this singing, I ask you?!
Is it?! Is it?!!
Oh God. How I hate it!
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Is it?! Is it?!!
Oh God. How I hate it!
Well, some of it is singing, and the rest of it is in a style that's actually been pretty common since the birth of punk thirty years ago. But how old is your son? If he's a teenager, part of the appeal is probably that you hate it.
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...with a passion that burns fiery hot.
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Tony, that's a good choice for a live Dead from Jason. If you can't get into that then they're probably just not your cup of hash-infused tea.
Well, this has been fun. (I'm only waiting for Tom K to drop in and bring up Ronnie Reagan.) If I may expand just a little on my post, I'd have to say I don't really hate any of the crap I mentioned; I'd just prefer not to be exposed to it. And I realize now that I mentioned only very famous and lauded (and, yes, talented) practitioners of their various arts. Of course Stevie Wonder is an excellent musician; his stuff's just not for me because it's too sappy. I wouldn't even have mentioned him if he wasn't so, um, all-pervasive and inescapable.
I remember a few years back a writer named Dale Peck created a tempest in the tiny teapot of the literary world by beginning a review of Rick Moody's latest book by saying, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." Now I'm sure Mr. Peck knew that there were plenty of worse writers even than Moody of his generation, but what he was really saying was that he considered Moody to be the worst writer of his generation who was critically acclaimed and who sold lots of books.
We writer folk sometimes make our points by slight exaggeration.
I shall now take my bow and go write a poem about pretty flowers.
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Ha!
Signed (sealed, delivered)
The Shamus.
P.S. In the immortal words of Stevie Wonder: "When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer." Sounds sort of, uh, Morrissey-esque, eh? Cheers.
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Whatlike most about this post is that it reminds me of me.
I hate that.