At the Risk of Being Unpopular

My stance on music has been made very clear.  I have sung the praises of music that I love, especially the music of my teenage years.  Now I'm going to tell everyone else why the music they like sucks.

You're probably thinking that I'm going to take the easy route and trash modern pop and mainstream rock music.  Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Nickelback, and the like.  Nope.  Too easy.  Everybody on the Internet has made fun of all those "musicians" at least 17 times.  No, what I'm going to do is tear down classic rock bands that are almost universally regarded as geniuses.

1. AC/DC
They've been around, with various lead singers, since the '70s, but I didn't really get to know them until they made a resurgence in 1990 while I was in the seventh grade.  "Thunderstruck" was a huge hit when I was 12.  And, man, did I hate it!  My biggest beef is with current leader singer, Brian Johnson.  He's the man who somehow became hugely famous and loved by Generation X for perfecting the technique of singing through his nose.

What the eff is he doing?  How is this man leading an internationally famous rock band?  I'm not the kind of person who thinks a man has to be a good singer to be a good lead singer (I'm a Radiohead fan, after all), but come on!

My other beef with AC/DC (besides all of my Mormon friends claiming "It stands for 'After Christ/Devil Comes!'" was lead guitarist Angus Young.  I freely admit that Angus Young has a lot of skill when it comes to playing guitar.  Take another listen to "Thunderstruck" up there and try (I know it's hard) to ignore Johnson's vocals.  That is actually a pretty cool riff that Young is playing.  But then you get crap like this:

Pay particular attention to the guitar solos.  As someone who has dabbled with playing the guitar, I recognize that what Young is doing in this song is very hard to do, and takes a lot of skill.  But hard to do does not equal pleasing to listen to.  Yes, he's demonstrating amazing skill.  But it's a bitch to listen to it, and I always hate it when this song pops up in a mystery set list while I'm playing on Rock Band.

2. Metallica
My older cousins were (and still are, I assume) big Metallica fans.  And I remember walking around in the Philippines and being forced by my companion to stop outside someones house because "Enter Sandman" was playing.

I hate that song.  I remember being a young teenager, before good music was invented, and growing depressed because this song was a big hit.  It's dreary, boring, and takes itself way too seriously.

Metallica  is a funny one.  What kills me about them is that they have the potential to be a good band, but they choose to suck.  Take, for example, the song "Battery."

It starts off as a beautiful, soulful, acoustic instrumental.  Then, at 1:05, turns into fast noise for the sake of fast noise.  "This song is awesome!" James Hetfield said as they were making it.  "Yeah," Lars Ulrich said.  "We better pick up the suckitude before we get end up with a full-length good song on our hands."

By the way, the best Metallica song is a cover of an old Irish folk song:

3. KISS
Yes, the old Knights in Satan's Service themselves.  Is this really the band that (if the movie Detroit Rock City is to be believed) had parents in a panic back in the '70s?  Seriously, people?  A bunch of men dressed in outlandish costumes with make-up that looks like it was applied by an 11-year-old girl singing about how the like to rock and roll all night and party ev-er-y day?  If only that was the most evil thing in the world!

It's a harmless, juvenile song about things that every teenage boy thinks about.  And doesn't even have that heavy of a beat.  And ALL of their songs are like this.  If not for their attention-grabbing appearance and Gene Simmons slightly-longer-than-normal tongue, they'd be nothing but a bland rock band that everyone forgot a few years after they came on the scene.  It pains me that KISS is the favourite band of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo.

4. Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper is in the same boat as KISS: bland, boring, juvenile rock star who is more famous for his image than his music.  What's his biggest hit?  "School's Out For Summer."  The man who would have us believe is the personification of evil is famous for songs that quote old school-children rhymes: "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers, dirty looks."

5. Van Halen
People are always telling me what an amazing guitarist Eddie Van Halen is, but I don't see it.  I have never heard a Van Halen song that I liked, but I'm still hearing this crap on the radio:

They just plain sucked.  I would have been ecstatic when they broke up if they hadn't just replaced David Lee Roth with the absolutely dreadful Sammy Haggar.

6. Led Zeppelin
This might be the most controversial one on the list.  I haven't met a lot of people who don't like Led Zeppelin.  Yes, they were pioneers, but they were pioneers of a genre of music that I hate.  "Stairway to Heaven" is okay, I guess.  Everything else sucks sweaty, British balls.  Robert Plants voice just grates on my nerves, especially in songs like this:

So that's all the bands I'll talk about for now.  I'm glad this blog isn't famous, because this would have just opened the floodgates of hate mail and inflammatory comments.