RockRoast

Love songs have long been a staple of rock music and many of its various subgenres. That is perhaps why it is so amusing to come across a rock song that seems to give the concept of love the proverbial middle finger. So after a bit of thought and a lot of lyric-reading, I’ve drawn up a list of what I consider to be the least romantic rock songs of all time.

10. Queensryche – Fear City Slide
The main character in the song is sitting there with a gun, contemplating suicide, when the ghost of his dead lover whispers, “Trigger…pull the trigger!” I’m sure the lyrics were meant to lead into a heartwarming reunion in the afterlife. But something about your lover trying to convince you to kill yourself seems a bit wrong.

9. Simon & Garfunkel – I Am a Rock
Somebody’s a little jaded. The narrator of the song hates laughter and loving and has apparently suppressed every kind of positive emotion for fear of being hurt. It’s a pretty bleak song, and not one you often hear a young lad using to serenade a young lass.

8. Muse – Time is Running Out
Don’t play this one during a candlelight dinner. It contains several potentially awkward lines like “I want to break this spell that you’ve created” and “I tried to give you up, but I’m addicted.” But wait for when it all culminates with “you will suck the life out of me.” I really hope that this song is about alcoholism or something, but the amount of personification of the unnamed thing the narrator is talking to worries me that this song really is about a relationship.

7. The Rolling Stones – Under My Thumb
From what I’m told, if you tell a woman you’ll suppress her personality, control her life and generally treat her like an object, she won’t melt like butter. Who knew?

6. The Guess Who – American Woman
So, he’s trying to get rid of this woman that he worries he’s irrationally attracted to. It’s not exactly romantic to begin with, but the icing on the cake is “I got more important things to do/Than spend my time growin’ old with you.” If that’s not a burn, I don’t know what is.

5. Nickelback – Someday
You know the guy’s committed when he promises to fix the relationship “someday…but not right now.” The beginning of the second verse cracks me up, too: “Well I hoped that since we’re here anyway/We could end up saying/Things we’ve always needed to say.” It’s like he’s hoping to patch things up whenever it’s convenient. And the use of “end up” instead of a more voluntary, motivated phrase is also amusing.

4. The Cars – You’re All I’ve Got Tonight
Under the guise of being an “I love you no matter what” song, the lyrics tell a completely different story. I felt like an idiot when I finally realized that the song was really saying, “You’re the best I can get right now, so…I guess I’ll take it.”

3. Porcupine Tree – The Start of Something Beautiful
It’s not exactly a love song to begin with, but when the chorus kicks in things go sour pretty quickly. The chorus contains one of the most casual, dispassionate let-downs of all time: “Innocent, the time we spent, forgot to mention we’re good friends.” That, followed by the cruel, “You thought it was the start of something beautiful? Well, think again” makes this song deliciously unromantic. Whoever the narrator was talking to just got emotionally destroyed.

2. Meat Loaf – Paradise by the Dashboard Light
After spending well over five minutes telling the story of two teenagers making love in a car, this song takes an ironic twist. The female character convinces the male character to promise to love her until the end of time. Immediately following that, the male character claims that he is “praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive,” because he can’t stand the woman anymore and he’s anxious to be free of her. That’s such a horrible thing to say that, quite honestly, it makes me laugh every time I hear it.

1. Violent Femmes – Ugly
It’s song about a guy who doesn’t like some ugly person. And to add insult to insult, singer Gordon Gano begins chanting and screaming “Ugly!” at the end of the song, just to make sure he got his message across properly.

How’s that for pillow talk?

Over the next few days, I’m going to present several albums that don’t get the kind of recognition I think they deserve. These five records are all fantastic, and throughout the week I’ll be paying them their well-earned respect. They won’t be offered in any strict order, but I tried to arrange them starting with the best known and ending with the most obscure.

Panorama (1980) 
The Cars

Panorama was actually pretty successful in its day, reaching number 5 on Billboard and eventually going platinum. But modern critics seem to view it as a blemish on an otherwise illustrious career. Many current fans of the Cars are casual listeners who simply enjoy the stuff they hear on classic rock radio.

But Panorama has a dark, experimental mood to it that is missing from most other Cars releases. From the groovy yet eerie intro on the title track to the desperate shrieks at the end of “Getting Through,” to the deceptively upbeat synth riff on “Up and Down,” the album is solid the whole way through. Because of the brooding, moodier texture to it, Panorama feels more genuine, possibly because Ric Ocasek’s unconventional, often dispassionate lyrics are finally matched by their musical backdrop. And that musical synergy offers a unique side of pop rock that I haven’t seen successfully recreated anywhere else.

The Cars’ eponymous debut and their 1984 release, Heartbeat City, are usually cited as the band’s high points. But The Cars is too influenced by the album-oriented hard rock of the seventies and Heartbeat City is too influenced by the synth-drenched new wave of the eighties. The best the Cars have to offer is Panorama, halfway between the beginning and the end of their sonic evolution. It’s both punk rock and synth rock, but it’s a perfect stylistic fusion of the two. It’s forty minutes of genius.

And now, to finish what I started, after mentioning yesterday the bands whose music declined the most from one album to the next, I’m going to suggest three bands whose music improved the most between just two releases.

3. DREAM THEATER

Lackluster Album: “Falling Into Infinity” (1997)
Fantastic Follow-up: “Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory” (1999)

What Happened: Everything. “Falling Into Infinity” was the product of a tired band. They’d been hassled by their label to make their sound more mainstream. The consequent poppification of the album, combined with the band’s frustration, made the music somewhat angrier and uninspired. Luckily, their label seemed to learn its lesson and gave Dream Theater unbridled creative power for their next release. In 1999, with a new keyboardist, more freedom, and more hopeful prospects for the future, the band came up with “Scenes From a Memory,” an album that I consider to be one of the greatest of all time.

2. THE CARS

Lackluster Album: “Shake It Up” (1981)
Fantastic Follow-up: “Heartbeat City” (1984)

What Happened: Disregarding fan opinion. 1980’s “Panorama” was frequently criticized for being too dark and moody. So a year later, The Cars presented their audience with “Shake It Up,” which was obviously more upbeat, both musically and lyrically. While not everything on “Shake It Up” was necessarily rainbows and daffodils, the more positive approach did not match their sound, and much of the album feels flat and forced, indicative of why it became easily the worst of their eventual six records. “Heartbeat City” was a return to legitimacy for The Cars. And not only did its forward-looking, synth-drenched sound feel like a more genuine musical representation of the band, but it also rocketed them to the peak of their popularity.

1. MUSE

Lackluster Album: “Showbiz” (1999)
Fantastic Follow-up: “Origin of Symmetry” (2001)

What Happened: They just got it together. “Showbiz” is full of plentiful trademark Muse sounds, but they only seem to appear briefly and separately. As a result, while having a few momentary instances of brilliance, “Showbiz” sounds like a dispassionate garage band that just happened to score a record deal due to an oversight in the A&R department. But two years later, Muse put all the good pieces of their previous work together and discovered that they actually had something there. While “Origin of Symmetry” may not be their best release, the disparity between “Showbiz” and “Origin of Symmetry” is so vast that, if they were played simultaneously, they might just open a portal to another dimension.