So Rolling Stone has just put out its list of “The 50 Uncoolest Records” — a list that includes absolutely fantastic stuff by such musical luminaries as the Carpenters, the 5th Dimension, Neil Diamond…
Hell, it even includes Bread’s Greatest Hits. Bread…!
Bread “uncool“? You’ve got to be kidding me! I mean, since when did getting laid become “uncool”…?
…Or are the chicks these days not falling for the whole David Gates-and-a-bottle-of-Chablis, afternoon delight schtick anymore…?
Next thing you know, Dan Fogelberg’ll be “uncool.”
Stupid hip hop’s ruining everthing.
I actually got angry at that list. How could they possibly include Weezer, Bread, Meatloaf… and Supertramp! I’d like to see the bullshit the compilers of this list listen to. 2 to 1 they have N’Sync in their cd changer.
Hey…Get a handle on that blood-pressure there. I clicked on the link. Notice the headline actually says “50 Uncoolest Records (that we love) You know what’s really cool? When you discover that coolness itself is just about the uncoolest thing on Earth.
If coolness is the uncoolest thing on Earth, then is uncoolness the coolest thing? If so, after your conversions, we’re back where we started, uncoolness is uncool and coolness is cool.
Think I get your point though.
You know, most of the songs on these albums would be the ones I used to use when I wanted to annoy the Associate Production Editor of Billboard while we were waiting for the editors to finish giving us the editorial changes so we could get the hell done and home.
We’d name really bad pop songs that never leave your mind. He always hated it when I mentioned “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero”. Or “The Night Chicago Died.”
Ya know, when I was a teenager I thought Bread and David Gates were one of the best bands ever. Later, I realized if I ever want to commit suicide, all I have to do is listen to “The Best of Bread” and that’ll do it for me. Listen to “If” enough times and you’ll shout out, “Bring on the razors, PLEASE!”
I started to read the 50 Coolest records, and it just made me want to shove some record dweeb from RS into a wall until his yellow frameless glasses cracked on the sidewalk. “There’s this K-Tel collection from 1976 of African funk that you can’t find anywhere…” This kind of too-pure hipster bullshit brings out the worst in me.
I used to be on a ska music listserv that would start a thread every few months about what kind of non-ska music people listened to. Everyone would try to outobscure each other until a friend of mine wrote a long essay about how he liked to go to the maternity ward with his stethoscope and listen to the heartbeat of a specific fetus. He went on and on about how awesome it was until the frat boys started showing up with stethoscopes and backwards baseball caps, crowding him out and moshing, and totally ruining the scene.
I knew it was going to be an interesting list when I saw the first album, which is in my collection (not my favorite Carpenters album, FWIW). It turns out that I have only three of the “uncool records I should go out and buy immediately”; the other two were Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” and Bread’s “Best of Bread”. Oh well, I can’t even do uncool very well.