Your Thanksgiving was a disaster. Your wife warned you that her third cousin’s extended family “might” be coming to your home for Turkey Day dinner, but you never expected this to happen. Their trailer currently resides in your front yard, your house is being treated like a Red Roof Inn, mashed potatoes are somehow smeared on the walls, and the cousin’s teenage son is suggestively eying your dog with something that approximates lust.
You’re angry, frustrated, and a little depressed; to make things even worse, when you turn on the radio you are subjected to “Seasons in the Sun” and “I Will Always Love You.” According to Tom Reynolds, you’ve just heard 2 of the 52 most depressing songs ever written.
Reynolds’ hilarious I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard is the perfect way to kill whatever holiday cheer or faith in humanity’s collective taste in music you might still have left. Cynical, snarky, and sarcastic, Reynolds’ irreverent take on these songs and why they’re so depressing is the funniest critique of songs since Greil Marcus’ Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (wait… he was being serious in that book)?
With chapter names like “I’m Trying to Be Profound and Touching, But Really Suck at It” and “If I Sing About Drugs, People Will Take Me Seriously,” Reynolds’ book cannot be accused of subtlety. Yet Reynolds’ writing style and approach rarely becomes grating or repetitive. Although he never says it directly, Reynolds’ humor takes as its starting point the fact that these songs are so depressing, first and foremost, because they’re so god-awful.
From there, Reynolds’ witty jabs take care of the rest, and no clichéd rock image is safe from Reynolds’ biting humor. Absurd lyrics are exposed (on Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen”: “I don’t know of a single seventeen-year-old girl who would tell off the homecoming queen by saying she has debentures of quality; she’d call her a stuck-up bitch and key her Honda”); musical genres are mocked (on Evanescence’s “My Immortal”: “a song that does for piano ballads what the Hindenburg did for zeppelin travel”); and the flaws of supposed untouchable songs get a swift finger to the eye (on Springsteen’s “The River”: “I’d rather drag my scalp over a cheese grater than listen to it again”).
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Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Nice write-up. I might opt for Richard Thompson's "The End of the Rainbow" as a song designed to sow the seeds of doubt and depression at an impressionable age. A few lines:
Your mother works so hard to make you happy
But take a look outside the nursery door
There's nothing at the end of the rainbow.
There's nothing to grow up for anymore
And all the sad and empty faces
That pass you on the street
All running in their sleep, all in a dream
Every loving handshake
Is just another man to beat
How your heart aches just to cut him to the core
Life seems so rosy in the cradle,
But I'll be a friend I'll tell you what's in store
There's nothing at the end of the rainbow.
There's nothing to grow up for anymore
2 - Al Barger
Good one, Brother Gordon. Lots of good Richard Thompson songs you could use. I might go for "Withered and Died."
And "Macarthur Park" is a great song, a standard.
3 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
4 - syd barrett
dark globe is not a happy song either