Teethgraters #2: Jeremy Gluck in OUTSIDELEFT

Teethgraters #2: I'd Go To The Ends of the Earth To Never Hear These Songs Again

This hated list comes from nonceptual artist, Jeremy Gluck. Jeremy has been entertainin', educatin' and oh mainly dividing opinion in the public sphere for decades. Plowing his own furrow. So in thrall are we, of how he moves, we wrote a joke, I'll share it. "If two buses came along at the same time which one would Jeremy Gluck get?"

That's right. There is no punchline, let me tell you, do I have to tell you? Oh just in case you didn't understand that already because of course by the time you get to where Jeremy is, he'll no longer be there.

What a thrill then to have Jeremy participate in our "tasteless series" (pr person for a mid-level indie star). From Ottowa to your heart, the music Jeremy Gluck Hates.

Over to Jeremy Gluck...

1. U2 - I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
This “song” to be presented as a key exhibit when the “artist” is on trial at The Hague for crimes against music.

2. U2 - Where The Streets Have No Name
Even given my generous vocabulary, and with a Thesaurus riding shotgun, a panel of Oxford and Cambridge academics in an advisory role, and the entire internet at my disposal for research, it would still prove difficult to encapsulate my loathing for U2. A few times I have attempted, out of a sense of obligation and despite shameful self-doubt, to listen to The Joshua Tree, the album from which this and many other now popular music standards, ooze in a pustulent procession. “Is it just me?” I would ask myself and then flagellate my senses with the quartet’s excrescences. (I did once make it halfway through the second track.) Alas, in our times you can’t watch a music documentary without Bozo giving his sage take on the artist. With his hair-transplanted, designer-shaded vanity he has polluted otherwise excellent documentaries on rock and roll bands not restricted to the Ramones and The Clash. Answer me this: If he is in awe of and in debt to the Ramones and The Clash why does his organisation sound like a robotised cash register having an orgasm? And therein lies the problem: Bozo believes not just in God (for whom read Himself), but that his “band” plays rock and roll. Let me be very clear: U2 IS NOT A ROCK AND ROLL BAND. No. U2 are what is called “a rock group”. In fact, they are a company. I dissemble. In short, U2 are a grotesque of everything anybody who loves rock and roll music holds dear. I’d rather be submerged in a vat of my own urine indefinitely than have to listen ever again to any of their “songs” and, of all of them, this one especially, which I would also drink it to avoid.

3. Gentle Giant - Um, just Gentle Giant. Probably most of you don’t even know and/or remember Gentle Giant. They were a group of the prog variety that were very popular in the mid-Seventies when anyone with self-respect was listening to the MC5, the Dolls and The Stooges. Those lacking self-respect, and additionally afflicted with an obsession with Lord of the Rings Lite literature, would gather in dimly-lit rooms after school, smoke mediocre dope and saturate themselves with the mellow sounds of this combo and their fellow-travelers. At least when you watch paint dry it changes color.

4. Any New Age music (it all sounds the same, what’s the difference?), or as I call it, “washing machine music”, evoking as it does watching the spin cycle on downers, this is Muzak for the spiritual hedonist. This genre persists but its vogue was mostly restricted to the Nineties. Really, made by and for what I term “Entitled Masters”, nice, pseudo-deep but ultimately harmless and often senseless white people, and made to this day as a form of “Raw Pow-wow” swill and drivel to be piped into sweat lodges for light relief when the “energy” “in the moment” gets too intense (it never occurs to post-New Age neophytes that we think of the past and future in the moment, in any case). Needless to say, it’s the rise of softsynths and suchlike that heralded the avalanche of this somatic filth, with any wingnut with a rudimentary Korg and instinct to channel and redeem their pain through their crappy low-end Korg scrambling to compose (sic) a paen to Gaia replete with dolphin cries, the waves and the wind. One cannot speak in terms of “songs” for this genre; it would make as much sense to distinguish individual stools floating in a sewer. Be here now. Again.

5. Once again, choice (and ignorance, because so repelled am I by it that I can’t be bothered to do the research required to identify specific songs) defeats me, but what is considered contemporary singer-songwriter material makes me - if it is not an untenable contradiction - apoplectic with despair. I’ve heard this sort of thing only in snatches, usually in supermarkets and Starbucks (not that I actually sit down there, I only go into the place for a slash), and then through gritted ears. What is it about otherwise seemingly normal young people that they want to play and listen to music suitable only for serenading those undergoing euthanasia? I call it “I stubbed my toe music”, because of its propensity for magnifying personal issues into Kilimanjaro’s of anti-nihilist angst. Naturally, most of them revolve around “love” in all of its most distasteful manifestations, a riptide of trite, tar-bloody treacle. Once upon a time, singer-songwriter meant Neil Young and other titans of the craft. Now, we reap from our radios what we have sown in analysis: obligatory compassion.