101 Albums You Should Die Before You Hear, Volume One by True Everett & Creney Scott & Orsborn Ngaire-Ruth & Heathcock Clara & Bighorse Amber & Phelan Keiron & Cage Lucy & Nichols David

Author:True, Everett & Creney, Scott & Orsborn, Ngaire-Ruth & Heathcock, Clara & Bighorse, Amber & Phelan, Keiron & Cage, Lucy & Nichols, David [True, Everett]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Rejected Unknown
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

John Mayer

Room For Squares (2001)

San Francisco 2005. Against my better judgment, I took the job as manager of a brand-new organic restaurant in the heart of the Marina District, a neighbourhood long maligned by the grittier parts of the city as a haven for young MBAs with a taste for Jägerbombs, Drakkar Noir, and running red lights in their SUVs, because Can’t you see I’m too fucking important to stop like the rest of you peons? I tried to keep an open mind, but within a week, I had to actively restrain myself from pissing in the quinoa. Thousands of Stepford automatons descended on us daily, bleached, bed-tanned, bedazzled, aggressively clueless, spoiled rotten, relentlessly whiny, and utterly vicious.

Brad, the owner, was into helicopter skiing, Bikram Yoga, hiking Machu Picchu, and dating models. He had cashed out some stock from his tech job, and decided to pursue his ‘health’ fetish by opening a restaurant. He knew absolutely nothing about running a restaurant, but that didn’t stop him from obsessively micro-managing every little thing. Every time he came into the restaurant, he immediately went to the back and changed whatever music was playing to the one playlist he had created.

Even 10 years later, with that job, that city, everything about that time deeply relegated to the distant past, any single song from that playlist can plunge me into a bout of seething existential despair. It is a master list of insidious, mind-numbing fuckery: full albums by Coldplay, Norah Jones, U2, Sarah McLachlan, Counting Crows, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Jack Johnson... At first I thought it must be a cynical play to the crowd – I know this is swill, but this is what these mindless yaps must be into. But after several months, hearing the same awful songs 10, 20, a hundred times, it was clear his motives were far more sinister. It was an exorcism of soul and colour, a persistent dulling of edges, until the room became so innocuous that it was ripe for corporate duplication.

It’s difficult deciding which album I despise the most. Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me is redolent with sadness, but not the aching musical melancholy that you consciously revel in, that makes you feel more alive. It’s the kind of sadness that makes you feel exhausted and hopeless, like giving up and drifting into a long, grey sleep, full of syrupy, anxious nightmares. As for the U2, Bono has long been a clown, and I have a hard time sustaining much wrath for clowns. And Coldplay…Coldplay is just plain dull. Bloodless, sentimental rich white guy pop, dry as a stale saltine, but hardly worthy of much fury.

Now, Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams I can sink plenty of animosity into. His bazoobie-bop scat-singing and chikka-chikka guitar and lyrics about banana pancakes make me fucking insane. It’s so laidback and loopy it topples into brain-dead territory. Yet the hooks are undeniable, which makes it even worse. No other music on this list so readily summons acai smoothies,