That Song That Was Good Once
I was flipping through the Rock Band song list yesterday for something I was in the mood to play, when I got to The Police.
“RAWKZ-ANNE,” Gini warbled behind me in a purposely off-key yowl. “YOO DOAN HAVE DO PUT ON DA RED LIGHT. RAAAAAAWKZ-ANNE – Good Lord, that song’s terrible.”
“No, no, it’s good,” I protested. “Or was. That’s, like, one of those songs that’s awesome the first ninety-nine times you hear it. Then you hear it that hundredth time and it curdles like a broken cream sauce. I remember really loving that song once. Sure, it’s like eating a big slice of tin foil pie now, but that’s just because of repetition taking all the beauty out of it.”
Later on, I selected Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” which is really how I think of Gini, but she dislikes it. “I’m so sad you don’t like this song,” I told her. “It really is beautiful.”
“It’s another hundred-song,” she explained. “Remember, I grew up in the 70s. I spent a whole summer listening to that over and over again.”
So here’s my question for you all: What song was once good for you, but has now been obliterated by a zillion repetitions? Feel free to describe the exact flavor of your hatred. I’m curious.
“Roxanne” may be a good song, but try being saddled with that name, and then hitting adolescence the year the song comes out, and going through puberty with gropy and entitled teenage boys. The song has never been good for me.
But personal stories aside, I have a low overplay tolerance. I hit the threshhold fairly early. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer was one of the songs that I would’ve been happy never hearing again.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Nothing’s Gonna Break My Stride
I dated a girl named Michele. Guess which song she couldn’t stand?
If I really hated a girl, I’d write a song named after her in the hopes it became a #1 hit.
The one song about a girl with my name us telling her to leave (just walk away, Renee…). Not so fun.
There was some silly little ditty named “Tracy” by The Cuff Links that came out in the late 60’s. Thankfully, it sank like a rock, but I had this one relative who had to sing it to me every time we’d meet. For years and years and years. In fact, I bet if I ran into him today, he’d croak it to me.
Im kinda glad that Angie was never a huge hit – other than my brothers playing it for me constantly as a kid, Ive only ever had a few people reference it upon meeting me. (And I was named after Angie Dickenson, not the song, even though it did come out a year or two before I was born.)
The Macarena. I lucked into hearing it in heavy play on a Miami video music channel I had satellite TV access to, about a year and a half before it broke out on English-speaking radio … and a year and a half of the Macarena, in heavy rotation, was enough to kill it for me altogether, even though, when it first came out, it was my favorite song.
Dragostea Din Tea – or as most people know it, “The Nooma Nooma Song.” A friend brought back a bunch of music after a trip to Spain and we listened to it hundreds of times. By the time it started playing on American radio we were already well sick of it and had to endure hearing it regularly for months more.
God, there are a million. Just about every song Ive liked that became a hit and got played on the radio a lot. I was in the 4th grade when the Beatles came along and now I can barely stand anything by them. I always say that if I could go 20 years without hearing them, I might start to like them again.
I think Im more susceptible to this than other people.
I never liked Roxanne that much. My mother wanted to name me that because she loved Cyrano de Bergerac so much, but felt Id be handicapped by being Roxy Fox. Im so glad; I hate that play AND the name and the song would have just been too much.