Song Morgue

There are some songs everyone knows—“The Humpty Dance,” “Free Fallin’,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Love Shack.” These songs are the glue that holds our rich and beautiful culture together. They teach foreigners to envy us, they bring happiness to children, and they heal the sick and feed the poor. But a lot of the songs everyone knows cause suffering in the world. Some beloved songs become so maddening after years upon years of grinding repetition that, if they took human form and came sociably bounding towards you at a party with two drinks, you would just shred their bodies with your bare hands. Suppose a handsome stranger came up to you at the bus stop and said, “Pleased to meet you, I’m Lou Bega’s ‘Mambo No. 5.’” How many seconds would pass before you rent his perineum with a pair of garden shears?

Here are two songs that have been strangled and wrung out by time until they were as lifeless as rag dolls. Out of respect, they should never be played again.

Tom Tom Club “Genius of Love”: When Talking Heads took a break in 1981, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz formed a duo named after their house in the Bahamas. Tired, they complained of all the thinking they were expected to do in Talking Heads. The couple said fuck it and went to the beach, where they set out to make an “anti-snob” record. Unburdened by cogitation, Tom Tom Club pulled the “anti-snob” thing off, creating dance music that even the dullest, most ordinary shithead could enjoy. On their self-titled debut, no concepts or ideas soiled the purity of Frantz’s and Weymouth’s dumb, stupid beats.

The single “Genius of Love” spent 17 weeks in the Billboard charts in 1982, and has never gone away. The first three or four hundred times you heard it, the song was jolly, funny, perhaps even a little subversive. Hey, she’s singing sweetly about getting out of jail! Hey, they like black people! But now, when you hear its chirping three-note synth motif in a car wash, drug store, bar, club, supermarket, restaurant, airport, hotel lobby, gas station, stadium, thrift store, dentist’s chair, laundromat, gentlemen’s club, food court, emergency room, public defender’s office, bus terminal, homeless shelter, or dialysis clinic, don’t you want to end it all? The song has been absorbed into the tedious rhythm of everyday life. Listening to it is like going to work.

The brilliant guitarist Adrian Belew—who had played in Frank Zappa and David Bowie’s bands, was then a member of Talking Heads’ best-ever lineup, and would soon front King Crimson—participated in the sessions. He contributed “maybe the two best solos I’ve done on any record” to “Genius of Love,” but engineer Steven Stanley erased them because he didn’t like them.

Guns ‘N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine”: When the muse visited, W. Axl Rose liked to vent his spleen at “police and niggers” on the streets downtown, as well as “immigrants and faggots” who “come to our country,” but he also liked to bare his tender soul on a ballad or two. Axl spent a lot of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ first album committing serious party fouls like fucking your sister up the ass (in her Sunday dress! Who paid for the dry cleaning?) and slam-dancing with Mr. Brownstone, but on “Sweet Child O’ Mine” he lent his sub-Rod Stewart animal cries to some of the purplest love verse in all of pop music. It’s not so much a song as a guitarist’s finger exercise harmonized by a child’s first chord changes and Axl’s caterwauling, but drunk people sing it all the time because they love sentimental bullshit. The smile of W. Rose’s beloved reminds him “of childhood memories / Where everything was as fresh as the bright blue sky,” her eyes remind him (again) “of the bluest skies,” and her hair reminds him “of a warm, safe place / Where as a child I’d hi-i-yide.” When he’s done hiding in her hair, does he fuck her up the ass, in her Sunday dress? Or does he save that for your sister?

Previously - Moe's Mailbag