This Is Bad Music

I’m currently a student at Sydney University, studying music & psychology. One of my subjects requires us to write a weekly blog post on that week’s lecture topic. Last week’s topic was “This Is Good Music”. For your enjoyment, and here is my post for this week’s topic:

Last week I argued that we listen to music because of the way it makes us feel, and that good music is music that makes us feel good. This week I’m changing teams to argue that there is such a thing as objectively bad music, using as an example my own first chart-bottoming single: Everything Is Fucked:

The lyrics, melody and chord progression came to me in a yoga class while in Frog Pose for 7 agonising minutes, on a day when things weren’t going my way. I had been sick for many years with a mysterious chronic illness, both my parents had been diagnosed with cancer, and a girl I fell in love with had ditched me for a drummer named Dave. The straw that broke the camel’s back that morning was when my dishwasher broke down.

I recorded the song at Sydney TAFE where I was a student and paid good money to get it mastered. The brief I gave the lead guitarist was: “I want a screaming guitar solo that will make the listener’s ears bleed”. I made the music video myself after getting kicked out of Music Video class by the head teacher for commandeering a class I wasn’t enrolled in. I created a whole heap of supporting merchandise. Then I waited for it to go viral.

It didn’t.

I did earn about $7.50 in APRA royalties playing my own song at some open mic nights, but frankly it was an embarrassment. Only one person bought it and they were a friend of mine. It was a complete commercial and artistic failure. I made more money from sales of the ringtone than the song. The mere fact that I was pissed off with life didn’t justify writing a bad song. To top it off my Dad, who appears in the music video, ended up dying from the cancer. The whole thing was a disaster from start to finish.

Why, why, why; I asked myself?

Because it’s Bad music.

Despite one review that said “… this song is actually great …”, I think it really is a bad song. I had very little songwriting experience when I wrote it. Like Strauss’s Domestic Symphony it’s morally offensive, too explicit and overtly narcissistic. It also has too many glissandos. Like a naïve European hearing African music they hadn’t yet learned to appreciate, this is noise.

So yes, there are bad songs. The whole experience of them doesn’t go well: they are badly constructed, poorly received, and fail both artistically and commercially.

On the other end of the popularity spectrum is a song which was universally panned by the critics but nevertheless got over 3.5 billion views on YouTube and inspired its own unique dance moves. Since I quite like it, I want to contrast my bad song with K-pop legend Psy’s rather more commercially successful work: Gangnam Style.