Saturday, May 05, 2007
The Actual Worst Records... Ever
Close your earsWhat on earth possesses people to go out and buy Snow Patrol records? It's a good question, and one which, frankly, is beyond us. So we turn, as we do with all of life's big questions, to 82ASK who, in answer to that poser, reply "We really don't know. It may be a genetic defect or possibly the result of too much sun. We also have a theory that it may be because people like the name" which, while not really answering our question, does at least prove why we love 82ASK so much.
Anyway, it was inevitable that Snow Patrol would eventually turn up in our list of The Actual Worst Records... Ever. It was only a matter of when and for what song and, indeed, we did have an entry ready to go on Crashing Cars, but reluctantly decided to spike it when the Virgin Radio audience declared it to be the best song ever written of all time, ever, ever, ever. Clearly we were wrong to consider it to be a lazy piece of beige pointlessness with all the good qualities of a Hitler/Vernon Kay genetic crossbreed. After all, who knows more about music? Us or a group of people who still think Noel Gallagher is worth listening to, think black music begins and ends with Bob Marley and who consider music made by women to be nothing more than an amusing novelty which shouldn't really be encouraged. Ah, that would be us then.
But perhaps it was fortunate that the proud expression of their deeply held opinions depressed us so much that we briefly considered jacking the site in as Gary Lightbody - a man who barely has enough personality to warrant having a name - and the rest of the band - who don't even have that - had something else up his sleeve: a song duller, more irrelevant and infinitely more irritating than anything they'd yet come up with. That song is Open Your Eyes. If you ever met him you'd almost have to congratulate him on that feat, or you would if you weren't fighting the urge to extinguish lit cigarettes on tender parts of his body in the hope that some real suffering, as opposed to feeling alternately a bit achey cause he's getting older, or vaguely maudlin but not that fussed really, when you get right down to it, because girls aren't hugely interested in him which seems to be his main inspiration, might cause him to write a decent song for once in his life. And just for the sheer enjoyment of punishing someone who truly deserves it, of course.
Open Your Eyes is the former sort of song, although it's hard to tell as the lyrics consist mainly of Gary intoning "Tell me that you'll open your eyes" in a dull monotone for pretty much the entirety of the track. If even the writer of the song can't be bothered to come up with proper lyrics - not that he can be bothered singing it either, his performance coming across with the same sort of enthusiasm and passion as someone who's been given the task of reading Piers Morgan's new 'book' aloud to an audience consisting entirely of Piers Morgan - then it's hard to know exactly why we should bother listening to it. Although given that it currently seems to crop up on every single radio station every thirty minutes, no matter what genre the station claims to cover - we're convinced we heard it on the BBC Asian Network the other day - it's not really like you're afforded much choice in the matter, the playlist clerks' eyes presumably being closed to soporific qualities of the track. Or perhaps that's why it's being played so often. The listeners doze off with, much like the track itself, barely a murmur of protest, the radio still blaring away in the background, allowing the station concerned to claim all manner of ludicrous listening figures, happily ignoring the fact that the vast majority of their audience is dozing away, drool dripping unpleasantly down their chin and with the very real possibility that they've soiled themselves in the meantime.
Ah, we're back to Virgin Radio's audience again, aren't we?
Labels: Snow Patrol, Worst Records
