I’d never heard of Train and I listen to very little contemporary pop these days, so I just tracked it down and listened to it. For a pop song, it’s not that bad. It’s got a nice up beat, it’s got a catchy ukelele hook. It moves you along. Not a bad song for the road on a sunny summer morning. I can see how it would work on a soundtrack or in a commercial.
Lyrics? The beat and the sound took me past it and I didn’t hear most of them anyway. C’mon, it’s a pop song. There are much worse.
This one isn’t nearly as soulless and corporate as the vast majority of pop.
What does this even mean? At some point you gotta judge a performance on its own terms.
I’m not sure I’ll ever listen to this song again on purpose, but it’s hardly even in the ballpark of worst. song. ever.
Train is a big black hole of suck, and DoJ was their crowning glory. I am intrigued to learn of a song that might rival this. But I don’t want to waste minutes of my precious life finding out.
Eh, it’s ok. It’s background music. I am not looking to it for inspiration, I just want to hear some boppy music in the back of my head while I drive 30 minutes to school in the morning and mentally go over what I want to do today, and I don’t have a working CD player and it’s not important enough to look into finding obscure music that might be mentally leveled to whatever radio crap I might be listening to at the time. So yeah, I guess stuff like that stays on the radio because of people like me. You’re welcome.
Anyway, I heard Creed on the radio, man. When you’ve looked into that abyss, this song and any other simple dance-y tune is more than literally music to my ears.
I agree with you regarding your white-hot hatred of Train (though I reserve my most hate-filled hatred for Rascal Flatts, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Nickleback, Creed, and the Jonas Brothers), but I simply can’t get on board with your sentiment that “Sweet Soul Sister” is the single worst song ever recorded? Why? Because we live in a world that birthed someone that produced this assault on the ears: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwCt0YQPn7g .
Hey! That song was overplayed but it’s still enjoyable. 16 years after I tricked my mom and dad into buying me that album, I can still sing along to it. And that album had some great blues/hard rock moments on it, I don’t care what anyone says or how many P!nk albums she’s produced or who challenges me I will fight that to the death!!!11111eleventy. See?
NO, I’ve never had that argument before, why do you ask?
Besides, everyone knows that this is the most intolerable song on the planet.
Look, I acknowledge it’s all subjective, but to me, while it may be pop in a broad sense, it’s a certain kind of pop that presents itself as an acoustic rock ballad. Lady Gaga is pop. You don’t expect emotion in stuff from her or Girls Aloud or Goldfrapp or whatever. Whereas this is group with its roots in rock - a Led Zep cover band, according to Wikipedia - not synthesized bleeps, yet manages cynical lyrics and a vocal performance displaying all the soul of Britney Spears.
I mean that, while all things are appreciable on their own merit, you can also acknowledge when they’re clearly heavily influenced by something else. Personally I quite like Jack Johnson, and the Hawaiian sound he has came just at the right time in the popular imagination - but in my opinion that Jason Mraz dude is a pretender, with an almost-clinical duplication of JJ’s sound.
Nothing to add; just enjoying the thread. I don’t know what to do with Train - every snarky/dismissive jab in this thread is true, but damn Pat Monahan can sing; just great vocal chops. I find myself hearing his voice and getting drawn in and before I know it, I am yelling along to Calling All Angels…
Yes, you put it better than I could have. I don’t expect to listen to Lady GaGa, Miley Cyrus, or Justin Timberlake (is he even still around?) and get musical talent, meaningful lyrics, or whatever. But Train gives the illusion of being a legitimate band, but rather than risk doing anything “Scary,” they instead play it way too safe and sold out ahead of time!
To be fair, that is all nostalgia talking. That song wasn’t exactly that good when it was first made. I’m not saying the current version is better or even as good, but again, it doesn’t really matter since the original is only good for either camp value, or because you grew up with it in your teens or early 20’s.
Why do radio stations even bother to keep doing this? As another poster noted, they got away with it in the bad old days when there weren’t other choices.
Almost any time you have a severely limited playlist, there are going to be a few songs that a given listener doesn’t like, and when they are played over and over and over again that listener will be pissed off.
I can’t see how you can avoid having a lot of variety in radio programming today, unless you want to fail.
There’s a (IMHO) surprising amount of crap in Top 40 rotation at the moment, and readers with long memories may recall that I’m one of those people who doesn’t actually care about Music for the most part.
There’s some song in which a whiny emo kid sings about leaving his door open just to cry (I see it’s called Fireflies, by some band called Owl City), the aforementioned Hey, Soul Sister song, Little Lion Man by Mumford & Sons (only getting any attention because of the refrain “I really fucked it up this time”, IMHO) and a few others whose names I don’t know (because DJs don’t back-announce any more) but are still crap all the same…
Ya know, it never occured to me that this was about a white dude courting a black woman! It does clarify the gangsta / thug line, though it actually makes me cringe even more than I already did. I definitely never thought of Mister Mister as the go to band for the er, soulful black woman:dubious:
But, as I pointed out in another thread about awful music, this abomination contains the lyric
“. . .I’m so obsessed, my heart is bound to beat right out my untrimmed chest”
You say that as if “clearly heavily influenced by something else” is a fault. It isn’t. Most music is clearly heavily influenced by something else, even most good music.
I agree with your sentiment here. I particularly remember suffering through the Debbie Boone era. What bothered me even more though was all the great music they destroyed for me by overplay.
too many, far worse.