At 12:17 PM 3/30/2004 -0800, David Bash wrote:
>Wow, I must admire your fortitude for posting a "loathed list" of artists
>who many of us have deified on Audities.  I can't help but wonder (and this
>is not a rhetorical question) how much of the hype surrounding these bands
>has factored into your decision.  In other words, if the CDs containing this
>music had been done by Joe Schmo, would you abhor them just as much?

Good question, and not an insignificant one.  Let's review:

> Belle and Sebastian

Bear in mind that I haven't yet heard the supposedly far superior DEAR
CATASTROPHE WAITRESS, but even speaking as someone who as a general rule
absolutely LOVES weedy little twee-pop bands, I find their music far too
slight (I admit to liking about a third to a half of the first B&S album I
ever heard, IF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER), and there's an element of coyness
in their presentation that really turns me off.  I feel the hype is
undeserved, but I wouldn't say it's the hype that makes me dislike them.

> Bright Eyes

The songs just do absolutely nothing for me.  

> The Darkness

As I said a few weeks ago, I didn't like this style of music in the '70s
and I don't like it now, plus I think the whole leotards-and-feathered-boas
thing is a smarmy put-on.  "Authenticity" is a double-edged sword, and I
don't mean to sound like I think every band has to, as Johnny Rotten says,
mean it, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.  There are plenty of joke bands that I like.
These guys aren't one.

> Material Issue

I didn't like them a long time before I joined Audities and discovered how
beloved they were in many quarters, so it's not the hype.  Their songs
sound utterly generic and boring to me.  One exception: "What Girls Want"
has a killer guitar riff.

> Myracle Brah

This is certainly a case where I thought the hype was both entirely
unjustified and in the long run dangerous to the artistic viability of the
power pop scene, but when you get right down to it, what I dislike is the
band itself, especially the first album.  Dumb band name, unbelievably dumb
album title, and I already own BEATLES '65, so I don't need to hear an
album's worth of rewrites of it.

> Phantom Planet

God bless Jason Schwartzmann and all, but their first album was mildly
catchy but utterly inconsequential, and the second quite often lapsed into
plain awfulness.  I haven't bothered to seek out the third.

> Elliott Smith

I liked Heatmiser -- although I later realized that that was because I
liked Sam Coombs -- but Elliott Smith's solo records, even back when he was
this dude on Kill Rock Stars who practically no one had ever heard of,
leave me cold.  I admit that my opinion of him was severely soured by a
live show I saw in 1997 where he drove away practically the entire audience
by being alternately repellently arrogant and a hapless drunken buffoon.

> Velvet Crush (not including the duo's pre-VC work and much of the first
album)

It kind of goes back to what I was talking about with the Darkness, in a
different way: it seems like every Velvet Crush record finds them trying on
an entirely different set of stylistic clothes, and I don't think they do
any of them particularly well.  I do love the collections of Ric and Paul's
early solo and duo work, though.

> The Vines

I thought their debut album was extremely weak and unfocused, but let it
slide thinking "Well, they're probably better live."  Turns out that
they're in the running for Absolutely The Worst Live Band I Have Ever Seen.

> Paul Weller (solo career only)

I don't think Paul's solo career has ever been particularly hyped -- in
most quarters, it's mostly just been utterly ignored -- but as much as I
love both the Jam and the Style Council (a band that I think is SEVERELY
underestimated), I find Paul's solo records drab, boring, and irredeemably
dull.

I'm not saying that these ten acts are my least favorite in musical history
or anything (I think it's pretty hard to beat Limp Bizkit as the single
most useless band in the annals of pop music), just that it's easy to slag
off the usual suspects and perhaps more interesting to think of bands that
I'm "supposed" to like but don't.

S