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Vice Blog

HOW TO RUIN MUSIC

Making great music is easy. All you need is a lot of booze and someone else with a lot of booze to listen to you make up songs about people within earshot off the top of your head.

Making terrible music, on the other hand, takes fancy instruments and years of music lessons and skill and self-confidence and expensive pants and dynamic range compression and influences and autotuners and blow jobs and publicists and sincerity. Really, unless you're friends with Steve Vai or something, it's kind of more trouble than its worth.

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Taking great music and turning it into terrible music is even more of a pain in the ass. Some space travelers from Planet Baby will tell you that all you have to do to ruin a song is play it over the speakers at Starbucks or change some of the lyrics to make it about Totino's Pizza Rolls. Other humorless losers believe that you can kill a song for the rest of time by adding a drum machine to it or letting someone who takes themselves very seriously cover it. Still more fags think that playing a tune all the way through on the kazoo means that no one can enjoy the non-kazoo version of that tune ever again.

They are all mistaken (and sad).

The only two proven ways to make a song you like sound bad forever are to get in a car crash while it's playing, or to hire a guitar virtuoso to noodle it to death. The car-crash thing is pretty straightforward--whenever the notes that were playing right before impact touch your brain, they trigger the memory and make your adrenal glands shit themselves all over your kidneys. Unpleasant.

Noodling, however, is far more insidious. On the surface it seems no different than a bad cover, but there's an ineffable quality particular to wanky, repetitive hammer-ons and bendy little treble notes that burns a subliminal imprint in your head which can never be removed. It's akin to watching a copy of Vertigo that's been intercut with spliced stills of child pornography. You probably won't realize that it's happened at the time, but the next time you listen to the song, your mind will go, "Wait, there's something missing here…" Then, after stroking its chin for a couple of minutes, it'll raise an index finger, say "Oh yeah," and start filling in the gaps with deedledeedlededwaaaahwaaaaahBEEEwleedooobeedoobeedooodlebeedandandan. Good luck ever thinking about enjoying that song after that.

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The crowning example of this dictum is the David Bowie bootleg Dallas Moonlight On April 27, 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan--living embodiment of how abjectly corny blues music can be and the only person whose death I have ever fantasized about witnessing--joined Bowie on a soundstage in Texas to personally destroy 29 of the man's greatest hits.

Wherever you stand on the Bowie fence, we defy you to make it all the way through this "bluesified" version of "TVC15" (formerly one our favorite songs) without shuddering your headphones off.

[audio: http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/blogs/en/files/2009/12/2-09-tvc15.mp3]

And before any of you try to deflect the trauma you've just been subjected to by making jokes about cocaine-descisions, please remember that Bowie's coke phase was in the mid-70s and was more or less excellent. This has nothing to do with snorting white lines and everything to do with smoking white grooves.

Here's one more little example just to prove our point. If the breathy phaser-jazz version of "Jean Genie" doesn't give you chills (especially 0:44), just wait for the monumental jizz-off at the end of "Star."

[audio: http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/blogs/en/files/2009/12/1-01-star.mp3]

OK, seriously, last one.

[audio: http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/blogs/en/files/2009/12/2-02-cracked-actor.mp3]