Overcoming Peer Pressure About Which Music I Should Hate

Like any other typical product of Murrkin culture, I have always been taught by peer pressure that it is very important to hate certain types of music. The earliest time I can remember that this made a strong impression on me must've been in or around 1973, when I was 11 or 12. In school, in music class, our music teacher not only played "Unsquare Dance" for us, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet -- she actually made us get up and dance to it. And I was really enjoying myself, doing the dance to the 7/4 our teacher had explained to us. Until I noticed the looks on some of the faces of other students. It seemed that this music was Not Cool.

Flash-forward over 40 years, and I heard "Unsquare Dance" again and realized that our music teacher had been underrated and that the peer pressure which had said that this music was Not Cool, was -- well, I shouldn't have listened to it. The peer pressure, that is.



A few years later, the Eagles were tremendously popular, and me and my homies didn't like them, and neither did the critics at Rolling Stone. All was in harmony -- until I learned that "Take It Easy" had been co-written by Jackson Browne, whom I, my homies and the critics at Rolling Stone all liked very much. And then things got even more confusing because Joe Walsh, just about the epitome of cool in my young world, joined the Eagles.

And then in the 80's, Don Henley put out some stuff I really liked: the single "Dirty Laundry," and after that, the album Building the Perfect Beast. I didn't like the entire album, but I liked more than half of it a lot. However, the critics who had hated the Eagles along with me still hated Henley, and their descriptions of why did not make sense to me.

Had I become uncool? Luckily for me, I paid much less attention to those critics by that time.

Then in 1989 Henley released "The End of the Innocence," title track to the album of the same name, with Bruce Hornsby and Wayne Shorter sitting in. I just assumed that this had to be cool with those critics. But eventually I found out that they had shit all over this one as well. Their opinions were meaning less and less to me.

There was also the matter of James Taylor. These critics seemed to hate James Taylor even more than they hated the Eagles. This never made sense to me. I've only ever hated 2 or 3 of James Taylor's singles.

Phil Collins was definitely uncool for me and those like me in the 1980's. But then, things started to get complicated again: "Abacab," by the post-Peter Gabriel Genesis, was pretty cool, I thought (to myself). And then came "Sussudio" and "Take me Home," which I absolutely loved. And then I read a interview with Miles Davis, and to my astonishment, he liked some of Collins' stuff too! (He referred to the keyboard-and-horns riff in "Sussudio" as "a bad jam.")

More complication: I noticed that some recordings by Peter Gabriel, unquestionably cool, contained drum and vocal tracks by Peter Collins!

It may have been the interview with Miles Davis, 1986 or so, which finally just pushed me over into listening to the music I liked and no longer caring whether people thought it was cool or not -- but it took several years to do that good work. During the same time, a quote by Cormac McCarthy kept rolling around in my head, doing essentially the same work, a quote about how you've crossed a major hurdle in life when you stop worrying whether people think you're cool (I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist of it.)

Back to the late 70's, and from there into the 80's and beyond: punk rock and new wave made a tremendous impression on me and others of my set. And then there came the times when some punk and new wave bands changed their styles, and some of us damned them for it and called them sellouts, and I didn't.

And finally there's Coldplay. I don't really understand why people hate Coldplay, and I don't much care anymore either. "Clocks" is a bad jam, your loss if you can't appreciate it. No, I don't particularly care to discuss it. Your loss, Jack!



"Clocks" was released in 2003, and "Viva la Vida," the Coldplay song which you may think is called "When I ruled the World," as I used to assume it was, and long after that, I finally learned that that awful single "Yellow" is by the very same band, released in 2000. If "Yellow" was the only record they'd ever released, then, yeah, I could understand the disdain. But the band who made "Clocks" and later music is clearly a completely different band, and members of the band have talked about how they made their second album, the one with "Clocks" on it, twice. They thought they were done, and then they thought about it and said, We can do a lot better than this -- and they did a lot better, if "Yellow" and "Clocks" are any means of judging.

I actually recently did a Google search for why do people hate Coldplay, and I found no good reason, just a bunch of nonsense.

The first song I ever hated entirely on my own, in fact, I can't remember ever hearing anybody else saying they hated it, and I never cared, because they're my ears: "Hey Jude," by the Beatles. But even this case has become complicated, because on the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's wonderful movie The Royal Tenenbaums is a very nice melody and -- oh my God it's an instrumental version of "Hey Jude" by the Mutato Muzika Orchestra, and I enjoyed several minutes of it before I realized Oh my God I'm enjoying an instrumental version of "Hey Jude," and I kept enjoying it even after I realized.

Maybe I'm just not a very good hater.

Yr Doin It Wrong

[PS, 22. July 2016: The song is now restored to its original version, the way it was originally posted 3 years ago, the way it appeared on the blog for several minutes or hours, before I said to myself that my Mom might read it. Well, my Mom is dead now and I am no longer able to upset her with things I've written. In this, the original version, the restored version, 1 word is changed, 1 word which rhymes with "song" and occurs twice in the song, which I had replaced with "song" in the edited version. It makes a lot more sense the original way. I mean, occasionally complete strangers will come up to a songwriter and ask, "Who said you could do that with yr song?!" but more often they're upset about something else which isn't any of their business.]

(Vivace a la Primus)

Yr doin it wrong
Yr doin it wrong
That's what she told me
All night long

She said Who told you
To do that with yr dong?!
Yr doin it wrong!
Yr doin it wrong!

She told me to go ask
John Shelby Spong
He said yr doin it wrong!
Yr doin it wrong!

That's what he told me
All night long
He said Who told you
To do that with yr dong?!

Yr doin it wrong!
Yr doin it wrong!
So they all tell me
All night long

They scream hibbity blibbity
Hee hoo hong!
Yr doin it wrong!
Yr doing it wrong!

They gather in my front lawn
In great big throngs
N yell Yr doin it wrong!
Yr doin it wrong!

They claim they'll send me off
To Hong Kong
Fr doin it wrong!
Fr doin it wrong!

They blame me fr their relapse
On the bong
Because I'm doin it wrong
Because I'm doin it wrong

I am the Monkey
Which is Wrong
Of course I'm doin it wrong!
Of course I'm doing it wrong!

I Am The Wrong Monkey, Hear Me Roar

Hearing The Three Degrees sing "Everybody's Going To The Moon" in The French Connection hasn't actually been the worst experience of my life. It wasn't actually even the worst experience I've had in the past week. The one comment I've gotten so far, about the post where I said that, was actually almost as traumatic for me as those several minutes of movie soundtrack. I suspect that the person who wrote that comment may not have read the entire post before commenting on it. I actually end up saying some nice things about The Three Degrees, and speculating that maybe the scene in the movie where they sing comes off so badly for me because of the way it was recorded, which may have been completely out of their control. Be that as it may, of course, everyone has the right to think whatever they want of anything I write, just as I have every right to dislike some recordings by The Three Degrees, such as that one, and to like some of their other recordings, such as "When Will I See You Again," the favorite soul song of the 70's of Bill from Kill Bill.

The point I'm rambling toward here is that I write some things on this blog which I don't mean for people to take anywhere near literally. The title of my previous post is one example. Other examples are when I refer to agnostics as the worst people in the history of the Earth, or imply that all Buddhists annoy me, or put a tagline under the blog's title which reads Ce n'est pas le faux singe, or for that matter, the blog's current tagline: as far as I know I don't actually have any mortal enemies and no scheming supervillain named Cliche Man exists. Or for that matter, my identity as The Wrong Monkey. I'm not a monkey, and I'm not always wrong, and we all know that, and that is supposed to set the tone for the blog: you can't always be sure whether I'm being entirely serious. Every now and then I'm asking my readers to take a moment and think about what I'm doing. Sometimes, there's no getting around it, I'm just messing with you.

I'm not blaming that commenter for being angry, not at all. On the contrary, I feel bad for upsetting him or her. I really do. It's perfectly understandable that someone might visit this blog for the first time and completely misunderstand what's going on. That's one of the unfortunate things which often happen with writers like me who are often sarcastic. Jonathon Swift, I'm almost entirely certain, never intended for people to eat any human babies. Not even Irish ones.

Similarly, I don't actually think that agnostics are the worst people in the history of the world. Of course I don't. As a matter of fact, I suspect that some of them are perfectly adorable. The thing is that, being who I am and doing what I do, occasionally I come across agnostics who insist that agnostics are the smartest people ever, smarter than religious people and also smarter than atheists. This aggravates me, not only for the sake of myself and my fellow atheists but also for the sake of the religious believers I know who happen to be much brighter than the agnostics who claim to be the pinnacle of human intellect. That actual pinnacle doesn't hold very many people, and the number of people claiming to be the pinnacle is of course many times greater than the people who actually are (Newsflash, morons: if you're actually extremely intelligent, you don't have to tell people that you are. They can tell.), and so most of the people claiming to be the state of the art in brains, whether they're agnostic, atheist or religious, are just smug clueless swine, and I deal with my frustration with them by coming to this blog and being a big silly poopy-head myself, and I make myself laugh and hopefully I make a couple of other people laugh as well, and the world continues to spin.

Similarly with Buddhists. I get along fine with some of them. Unless we start to talk about Buddhism, and they claim that their religion is not actually a religion. There are no Buddhist gods! they insist. What-everrr! The Dalai Lama and, oh, for instance, the Buddha are treated as at least demi-gods by many Buddhists, and the Buddhists who say they're not religious are just in denial. And no, Buddhists, I don't want to debate that with you, any more than I want to debate the Virgin Birth with a conservative Catholic, and for very similar reasons.

Which of course in no way means I can't get along with you otherwise, or with that conservative Catholic, for that matter.

It might be too late for me ever to be friends with the commenter I offended with my previous post, and that would be unfortunate. But there might be a chance, if that person realizes that that post was meant as a (greatly exaggerated) description of my own personal experience, and that I don't believe, nor did I wish to imply, that my opinion about that nightclub scene in The French Connection is more important than anybody else's opinion. If that person enjoys a recording which I don't enjoy, well then God in Whom I don't believe bless them and that's that. Well no, actually that's not that. Sometimes I'm the lucky one, the one who gets it and is moved by a piece of music which a lot of other people only sneer at: at those massive jams in Phil Collins' "Sussudio" and "Take Me Home," at "Disco Inferno," at ABBA, at Miles Davis playing "Time After Time." They sneer, and they're wrong, I know that they're wrong and that I'm the lucky one, because I can actually hear it, and that's that. Am I going to turn right around and say somebody is wrong because they say they can hear something wonderful that I don't hear? No way. Not in a million years. I will not assume that I'm not completely missing something. And as far as this blog is concerned, I'm neither a record exec nor a music critic nor even a particularly gifted musician, I'm just a clown who now and then chooses to be very, very silly, who, nine times out of ten, given the choice, would much rather make someone smile than be taken seriously. I am The Wrong Monkey. Hear me roar!