The Perverse Joy of Listening to Bad Music

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I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.

This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s is unimpeachable; this album, however, deserves impeachment, conviction, and removal. If for some reason you make it past the double red flags of the cover art and title, well, here are a few comments posted on the music-collecting website Discogs: “I already know after one play that this will never spin again on my player.” “Easily in my all time worst.” “Always put off buying this as the cover is so awful but sadly the cover is the best thing about the record.”

I can’t disagree. And yet, once I put my used copy on the turntable—Playin’ My Thang mercifully never got a major-label CD release—I couldn’t stop listening. It’s so bad, and so good. There are many such records that I love and listen to frequently, although I cannot defend their quality.

Let’s lay out a few rules for the category, which I’ll call “bad-good.” First, the selection cannot be made for reasons of pure snobbery. I’m not here to pick on bands that just aren’t very good in general. Many people adore the Shaggs, the legendarily atonal outsider group, but it doesn’t belong here; we’re looking for bad music made by good musicians. Nor is this about looking down on any genre. These are bands working in genres that take themselves seriously (sometimes too seriously). I also differentiate between bad-good albums and guilty pleasures. A guilty pleasure is generally something that makes us feel good, even if it might be looked down upon by the self-appointed arbiters of good taste. My hipper music friends sometimes make fun of me for liking Sheryl Crow and dismiss her, but her songs are sturdy and catchy. Bad-good music must be objectively cringe.

Kicking off my bad-good playlist is the Brazilian keyboardist Eumir Deodato’s arrangement of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the Richard Strauss composition famously heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This recording reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1973, which is pretty incredible because it’s a nine-minute instrumental version of a classical work and also because it’s impossible to listen to without laughing. The track kicks off with a slinky electric-keyboard pattern under the famous fanfare and goes from there.

While we’re on groovy vamps, let’s move to “(You Think You’re) So Hot,” by the duo of Neal Schon (better known as the force behind Journey) and Jan Hammer (better known for his keytar-driven Miami Vice theme). Both men played in important early-1970s groups—Santana and Mahavishnu Orchestra, respectively—but don’t expect the same quality here. What you’ll get is a cocaine-funk bass line and dueling solos from Schon’s guitar and Hammer’s synth. It’s somehow both trashy and pretentious.

Changing vibes, next up is the great jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery’s version of Pete Seeger’s anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The tune’s earnest lyrics and singsongy melody don’t lend themselves to jazz arrangement, but that didn’t stop Montgomery’s producers, who slapped a faux-baroque-horn introduction and treacly strings all over it. Montgomery plays barely more than the melody. AllMusic says that “this strictly for-the-money effort can be safely passed by,” but I disagree: The combination is just too befuddling to hate.

This kind of ill-chosen pop cover was a staple of jazz in the late 1960s and ’70s. Montgomery’s fellow guitarist Grant Green had some excellent takes on popular songs (check out his rendition of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”). You won’t find any of them on Easy, his final recording, though. The critic Stanley Crouch once argued that Lionel Richie’s music has “so little melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character that even the most imaginative jazz musicians” wouldn’t perform it, but Green says Hold my wine cooler and breezes through the Commodores’ “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady.” Even stranger is a rendition of “Nighttime in the Switching Yard”—perhaps the only time a jazz musician has covered Warren Zevon.

But the peak of the bad-good category is, for me, Green’s previous record, The Main Attraction. The cover art is once again a tip-off: Green grins in a brown check blazer against a trippy black-and-white background. The title track, which filled all of side A on the original vinyl release, sounds like the theme song to a lost blaxploitation film you might find on TV in the middle of the night. Green doesn’t even play a note for more than a minute. Here again is a bloated horn section, this time augmented by wah-wah guitar. Yet the song just gets so deep into a funky pocket that I keep coming back to the record. (There’s a reason Green is a favorite source for hip-hop samples.) If you make it through all 19 minutes, you’re rewarded with “Future Feature,” a flute-driven jingle ready-made for a ’70s action-show soundtrack. It’s horribly cheesy, and it rules. Really, what else can you ask for from a song?

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Adam Silver Goes to War

By Tim Alberta

Adam Silver is one of America’s most powerful men. Part businessman and part diplomat, he leads a multibillion-dollar international conglomerate and exercises soft power across continents. But on the day we met, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association appeared aimless, drifting awkwardly through the roped-off VIP area of a sports-business conference in Nashville … The commissioner is carefully stage-managed. Media engagements are rare; rarer still are the probing questions that might be asked of someone leading a business valued at roughly $200 billion. Early last year, I’d approached the NBA about a profile—not just of Silver but of the game itself, a holistic look at the evolution of professional basketball. The answer: a hard no. Hence the trip to Nashville.

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