Your First Least Favorite Songs

Hating stuff is boring. It’s easy, and unproductive. And yet we sometimes strangely seem to enjoy the act of disliking the music we dislike most; just check all the random internet lists and YouTube videos of “Songs You Love To Hate”. 

We may have fun with these things, but in this age of musical plenty, not to mention abundant access, isn’t it so much easier, and healthier, to focus on the stuff we like? Sometimes I suspect we focus on stuff we dislike out of some kind of insecurity within ourselves that we don’t yet understand. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. And let’s not even get started on “guilty pleasures.” 

That said, of all the things to expend energy on hating, songs are relatively harmless. And maybe investigating why we dislike specific songs can help us shape or understand our own personal taste. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is an innocent song, it doesn’t deserve hatred. Yet since the days I first endured its omnipresence on pop radio I’ve hated Captain and Tenille’s huge 1975 hit with a passion most reasonable people reserve for street mimes or political lobbyists. 

It isn’t any one specific aspect of the song that inspires my loathing, it’s sunk by a whole collective gathering of musical traits - any one or two of which might be inoffensive on their own in some other song. The bounciness, the sugar-sweet melody, the perky delivery, the overwhelming cuteness of it all - it’s a perfect storm of horrific American mildness.   

I’ve listened to the song recently, just to try to come to grips with it somehow, and I can recognize why so many people loved it. It’s a catchy, tight, perfectly Pop production. Light as air, well-meaning, fun. I even kind of like the way she says ‘whatever’ with the same kind of shrug that came so naturally to any number of grunge alterna-kids twenty years later.  

So maybe I just don’t want to like it. But, you know, taste is yours to do with as you please. It doesn’t bow to logic, and it doesn’t cave to pressure easily. We can nudge it in specific directions via willpower or intellect, but it mostly works from intuition and gut feeling. And my guts hate this song. Quite literally, actually. One night during the song’s reign of relentlessly bubbly terror I ate way too much Frankenberry and got sick, and in the moments of peak nausea I happened to be watching Captain and Tenille performing the song on television. So yeah, after that the song became an instant trigger for revulsion. Which explains why it endures in my world as a least-favorite song, a kind of anti-Jumping Jack Flash. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is innocuous enough, at least. It’s meant to be purely frivolous. At the other end of this spectrum is another monstrosity that hit big right around the same time, Barry Manilow’s impossibly portentous “I Write The Songs”. It was written by Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, who was perhaps inspired by Brian Wilson’s frequent musings on the power of music. Brian Wilson, however, surely never came up with anything as sodden and overwrought as “I Write the Songs”. The lugubrious, desperately dramatic piano and orchestral arrangement set the tone, and the words do the rest. Manilow sings from the point of view of the original inspirational spirit, the embodiment of music itself, no less than the author of the very first song. “I AM MUSIC / and I write the songs”. Oh brother. 

Even as a small child I thought the whole thing was an overblown embarrassment, though I definitely wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way or explain why. More likely I’d just squirm and grimace and wonder why the song made me feel the opposite way that “Pinball Wizard” did. The line that makes me shake my head even now is “I write the songs of love / and special things”. Seriously, what a terrible line. Special things? What a vague, weak, borderline nonsensical term. Argh. Again, though, this is just one irritating moment. History is filled with great songs with terrible, mediocre or inconsequential lyrics. It’s the bad lyric combined with the dreary pomposity of the music that makes it lethal. Damn, I feel dreary and pompous even talking about it - see what I mean about hating stuff being unproductive?  

Millions of people loved these songs, and that has to count for plenty. And the artists in question surely meant no ill will. John Denver was by all accounts a thoroughly decent guy - kind, thoughtful, funny, dedicated to philanthropic causes like environmental conservation and animal welfare. Disliking his music feels like a betrayal of common decency. 

Yet there it is, a song that stirs up an almost indescribable malaise right at the core of my soul:  “Sunshine On My Shoulders”. Denver’s 1974 number one hit should stand in stark contrast to both the bounciness of “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the pomp of “I Write The Songs” in that it is a relatively modest tune - a gentle ode to the wonders of nature. However, it earns its spot in my own personal pantheon of Songs Barely Preferable to Water Torture via the same unwieldy sappiness that permeates both of those other Billboard hits. It even has the same soporific tone and sloppy emotionalism as the Manilow song. 

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” Somehow this first line, and everything that followed, was more than just an irritant when I was younger. Maybe this goes back to what I said earlier about disliking a certain song because it hits a nerve that exposes some kind of deep-seated insecurity. But I like sunshine and happiness as much as the next guy, I swear! 

In any case, the song filled me with a kind of existential restlessness, a bland, hopeless feeling that I couldn’t begin to understand or explain, and can’t really now. Could a lousy but ultimately benign song really provoke that kind of feeling? What happens in our brains that music can sometimes inspire such an extreme reaction?  

I dunno, maybe I’m exaggerating the effect. Doesn’t feel like it though. This is a thing that music is also good for - it allows us to feel and process genuine feelings in a way that is more or less harmless to the world at large. More or less, I said. I mean, songs have provided some degree of inspiration or motivation for any number of people to do any number of things, but those actions are ultimately that person’s choice. Just as a famous for-instance, those Beatles songs that Manson and his followers unfortunately tapped as inspirations were innocent in and of themselves. 

“Sunshine On My Shoulders” eventually earned a measure of redemption in my world when in early adulthood I worked as a DJ at my hometown’s Country/AC radio station. We had the song on our playlist in its longer album version, one that stretched past the five minute mark. This meant when it was on I had time to run down to the bathroom or grab a soda, or talk mindlessly on the phone to my friends for a few extra minutes. So despite the weird unease it still inspired when I listened closely, it eventually served a function.   

The point is that taste is wildly, ridiculously, amazingly subjective. And subject to various shifty associations. Each of our own inner pantheons of favorite music is filled with artists and songs that other people loathe. In this day and age it’s so easy to find music to love and to avoid the music you don’t care for. Why not take joy where you find it, and ignore everything else?

PS, Carl Wilson (the critic, not the Beach Boy) wrote a whole book about the nature of taste for Bloomsbury’s 33 and 1/3rd series, using Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love as a jumping-off point. It’s way more than worth the time and it’ll tell you more about the vagaries of taste and subjectivity than I ever could.