Correction, if you went to clubs in the 90’s.
You heard the man!
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Man you people who think that there’s nothing racist in Sweet Home Alabama just crack me up. It may not be George Wallace racist, but it’s a song which defends their decision in choosing the man as governor. And loving him.
Don’t like this interpretation?
Boo-hoo-hoo.
The song itself means nothing to me, but I find it striking how people can have such diametrically opposite interpretations of the same song.
Lordy, the lyrics are available:
They did not boo the governor. They love the governor and tauntingly boo his detractors. They even gave up on fighting racism ‘we all did what we can do’ (note the past-tense), now the idea is “we’ll ignore your corruption if you ignore our racism”.
It’s pretty blatant.
And then there’s the concluding verse:
“Governor’s true”? “Montgomery’s got the answer”? Doesn’t sound apologetic/anti-racism/anti-George Wallace to me…
Sad to say, I like a handful of these. Not quite getting the hate for “Hallelujah” though I’ll concede some versions are better than others (I prefer the one Cohen himself did on the 1994 live album to the studio rendition).
RIght there with the Eagles hate, though. Don Henley has written precisely two great songs (“The End of the Innocence” and “Boys of Summer”) and pretty much everything else is dreck. The smug, jaw-jutting, “life is existentially hard when you’re a coke-snorting 70s coastal dweller” vibe that was their stock in trade has always grated for me.
My most hated, though? I don’t listen to the radio any more, and haven’t had MuchMusic on my cable plan in over a decade, but from my younger days I’d cite a lot of idiotic teen pop like “Hangin’ Tough,” “Fergilicious” and “I Got A Feelin’” and crud metal like “Cherry Pie” and most anything by Poison.
Look, plenty fair. Different strokes for different folks.
BUT …
a) I can ‘do’ that opening cymbal bit with my tongue and my teeth … pretty well, I’m told, and
b) My wife and I stood there … in Montreux … on the Lake Geneva shoreline (and, yeah, I constantly did that opening cymbal part in beat-box form).
So I give that song special dispensation 
Drum cover … cued up to the appx. spot (<1min):
And I am, once again, mortified to discover how many of these intensely-detested songs I … kinda’ like.
:skulks off:
Usually written as:
In Birmingham they love the governor (boo-boo-boo) or even (boo! boo! boo!). Generally the band has indicated a distaste for Wallace. Quote: "A lot of people believed in segregation and all that. We didn’t. We put the ‘boo, boo, boo’ there saying, ‘We don’t like Wallace,’ " Rossington said.
However, We all did what we can do and the Watergate deflection is a pretty annoying shrug of a lyric. “Hey we’re not flat-out racists, but, well, what you gonna do” is pretty dismissive of the whole Civil Rights struggle if you ask me. I’d still put the song in the problematic pile, one way or another.
Well, he really just took over the name.
I rather agree: I just don’t like McDonald’s voice somehow. He can sing in tune and all that, but the sound of his voice just grates on my ears. Sure, he’s a good keyboard player but he was totally incompatible with the feel of the original Doobies.
“You Light up my Life” Debby Boone
FYI, that song is called “From A Distance” and is not a gospel tune.
You should hear “Achy Breaky Heart” by the Chipmunks.
Or maybe you shouldn’t.
Yes, that is what the song is named, and it is what I refer to as Christian Lite Music, because like other light music it is trite, pointless, and treacle-y IMO. It is my most hated song.
I had never heard that song before a few years ago when my favorite radio station played it. I wondered why that station played such a saccharine, vomit-inducing dreck, but the biggest surprise came when the jock announced “That was Bette Middler.” Really? Bette Middler? The woman who out-rocked the Stones with her cover of “Beast Of Burden” and amused me endlessly in the hilarious “Ruthless People”? Didn’t compute for me.
It’s basically her theme song nowadays, too.
So she found god? In a song? That’s always a bad thing, especially with such a bad song.
The Divine Missed Hymn
(not at all sorry)
The back story behind it is, to put it lightly, interesting, especially the life story of the guy who wrote it.
As for the Chipmunks’ “Achy Breaky Heart”, I forgot to mention earlier that when I did clinicals on the Indian reservation, they had a community radio station that would hire anyone as a DJ who was willing to do it, and there were some HS kids who would come in after school and play requests. At that time, early 1994, THAT was indeed the #1 request, which prompted another pharmacist, a middle-aged woman who probably never heard of “Beavis and Butthead”, to say, “What the hell is this crap?”
I like his voice well enough on its own, but it’s very distinctive. When I hear him on Steely Dan tunes his voice always jumps out of the song and says “Look kids! It’s Michael McDonald from The Doobie Brothers!” It’s distracting.
My contribution is “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. There have been a lot of songs mentioned that I don’t like but never hear, but I’d had my fill of Nirvana halfway through hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. So of course it had to be a big hit. Looking at the rest of my music you wouldn’t think Nirvana would be anathema to me, but there it is.
My most loathed song is probably “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton, she of the “four octave D3 to F♯7 coloratura soprano range”, extending into the whistle register.
When she got it cranked up at the high end, neighborhood dogs would howl and I feared that my skull might shatter into fragments.