I am in the midst of a years-long and not entirely rigorous discussion with a good friend about what constitutes the funniest moments of popular music over the last 50 years of so. I will more than occasionally call this friend and fill his voicemail with “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours),” a karaoke version of some lemon by Bob Seger or Crazy Town, or, very worst of all, Fallout Boy’s crowning underachievement “Uma Thurman.” He will return the favor with Billy Joel, Montel Jordan, Tone Loc, or whatever seems upliftingly ludicrous at the moment. Listening to tinny, distorted renderings of these flubby jingles and novelty songs on your phone, while taking a dump at work, is one of the only ways to convert mass-market pop schlock into real joy. It all suddenly sounds like the joke it really is*.
Seen this way, as a farce and sideshow, pop music is (sometimes) delightful. Songs that once drove you to despair when, say, you bagged groceries for a bedraggled regional grocery chain in the mid-90s, seem altogether thrilling when retrieved from YouTube in the middle of the workday and then deployed as an act of sonic vandalism against a close friend. “Roll to Me”** by Del Amitri is my gold standard. It’s plucky and upbeat to the point of something like catastrophic friendliness, which is perfect for the strained, enforced courtesies of low-wage retail and customer-service work.
But drug-store pop***, like Martin Page’s “In the House of Stone and Light,” is, no matter how repurposed, ultimately something to endure. It’s funny but not hilarious because you have to live through it, to really deal with it as it plays, until, for example, you finally get your medication and can leave the pharmacy. The funniest moments in music are, for me, brief jarring departures from, or perfections of, the larger ruins that contain them.
Ambition and breadth can, I acknowledge, summon great and hilarious stakes. Kansas’s “Carry on My Wayward Son” is funny for at least a dozen reasons, almost all of them deriving from the song’s titanic aspirations. It is longish, has an elaborate intro and outro, soaring, trite faux-epic lyrics, at least three bad solos, and more. It was never for a second not a classic, and it was certainly written to be one, despite having not one shred of insight or duende.
But is anything in “Carry on Etc.” as funny as the famous saxophone peel out in Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page?” I don’t think so. Seger’s confessional road poem has no shortage of ambition, and the stakes and context certainly matter (he’s very serious, very soulful), but that sax riff would have been funny just about anywhere. And it’s stuff like that that keeps you going when you’re pouring kitty litter onto a detergent spill in aisle 8.
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*Hopefully, it sounds just as funny to your neighbor in the next stall.
**I thought, all these yours, the song was called “Roll with Me.” I only learned its real title
in researching, if you want to call it that, this piece.
***Andy Kindler on Twitter: "The music at CVS is so bad I assume it’s a bit." / Twitter
Consider the Harmonica
Consider Kid Rock, the Woodstock ‘99 standout who, when he gained broad mainstream success in the mid-90s, dressed and flopped around like a suburban drug dealer who was shoehorned into success by a rich relative. In reality, Rock earned his own success through self-initiated branding research, which culminated in his “raprock…redneck image” that is explained well enough here (Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp - Wikipedia). Rock’s music, even at the highpoint of his evolution, was probably secondary to the adventure of fame and fun that it bought for him.
In the late 90s he released “Cowboy,” which is thoroughly Kid Rock but barely a song. Neither the rap nor rock elements quite manage to impose their reality, and the track sounds, from the first, like a foul-mouthed commercial or a made-up song from a movie. It’s full of both generic affluenza swagger and gray-market entrepreneurialism (Rock wants to travel and “chill” but also start a successful escort business). All of that is funny but it hardly matters. “Cowboy” doesn’t make an impression, though it is capable of interrupting you into awareness because it has a kind of emotional alarm clock built into its opening: the blaring but weirdly powerless harmonica riff, which lets you know, right away, that you’re listening to music of some sort.
Despite the fact that nothing else has really happened yet and that the song is called “Cowboy,” the harmonica still sounds like a bleating, colorless non sequitur. It is the ultimate gag effect before a total gag of a song. Imagine discovering, with a hasty gulp, that a barista had not, in fact, filled your 20-ounce paper cup with coffee but had filled it instead with ice-cold Bud Lime. That is what the harmonica feels like to me. I am never adequately prepared for it.
And while the studied exurban white idpol aesthetic fatuousness Rock had honed by this time certainly amplify and help explain the effect, the riff is just plain funny all by itself. You can quote it (“Mwaaaaaahem!” you say, leaning around your cubicle divider to distract a coworker who’s just taken an important call). You can imagine it elsewhere (in the middle of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” for example) to great effect. It has a life of its own.
I think also with joy and minor sickness of the guitar riff 02:57 into Creed’s “My Sacrifice” (Creed - My Sacrifice (Official Video) - YouTube); the dopey, loopy opening bassline to Sugarloaf’s “Green-eyed Lady”; the silly snarly guitar intro to “Enter Sandman”; the “ack, ack, ack, ack, ack” part of that one Billy Joel song; whenever Bryan Adams scream-sings oh and/or yeah.
This anthology of sacred and sour notes grows year to year. There is always something new to treasure in the waste. And while I didn’t write any of this shit, the laughter it inspires is all mine—or better yet, something to share with a tolerant and like-minded friend.