"Shit in a bag, set it on fire / Open your door, there's a bag on fire"

re: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/12/the_50_worst_so_43.php

It’s very easy in all the hullabaloo about democratization and access to forget that internet-enabled communications, which are supposed to provide direct access to music’s true taste-makers, have less mitigated than enhanced our species’ ability to churn out brain-hemorrhaging garbage. What’s impressive about this Village Voice article—and unintentionally appropriate, given this discussion about quantity over quality—isn’t only the scope and comprehensiveness of a list ostensibly dedicated to the absolute worst of an industry that, at any given time, is about 96% comprised of utterly worthless music, but the sheer weight of material dedicated to the topic. Every single entry of this top (bottom?) 50 list is exhaustively commented on. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Top-X-of-Decade list from the last month or two that matches the Voice blurb for blurb in terms of monolithic pop-cultural awareness. Truthfully, I haven’t heard of most of these songs. The pure geek audacity of the thing is breathtaking.

And so this list ends up simultaneously a commentary on the unending sludge emitted by our online information production economy and a part of the effluence itself, an invaluable illustration, as perhaps this very blog post may be, that to highlight the negative online is also to perpetuate it in exponential volumes—to build temples to deities that cared only for being looked at in the first place. Is it fair to say that the worse the music is, the more likely it is to take the space of something else, something (presumably) better? Why should so much energy and time be dedicated to something so obviously awful except to document the certainty of that awfulness? Is there truth to the notion that our increasingly irony-based culture renders the worst among the awful sort of like the best at being the worst?

Listening to some of these entries is, at times, hysterical and, at others deeply, deeply depressing. (#14 entry, Korn’s “Ya’ll Want a Single?”, is particularly cynical in its awfulness.) I admit that any list that spans so greatly will possess the minutia in which we so love to revel and display our anti-cultural literacy. (Korn is just beaten out by Korn bass player Fieldy Snut’s solo effort, the excruciatingly named and #10 entry Fieldy’s Dreams, with their immortal “Baby Hugh Hef.”) But there’s just no amount of cleansing irony, no degree of aw-shucks self-deprecation that can erase Nickelback’s completely earnest tribute to strip clubs “Something in Your Mouth”—a song about which little can be said except that it was written by a bunch of fucking assholes who, no matter what we say now, have already sold millions and millions of records.

Ultimately, the Voice very obviously poured a great deal of work into the list, and overturned many of the decade’s rocks looking for the squirming musical things that live underneath, and for that fact alone they should be respected if not commended. But looking back on the exercise I wonder how the writers feel now: do they, like me, feel shame when they see what our culture has produced? Is it enough to continue under the predilection that these supposed artists are from somewhere far enough from us that their stench can’t commingle with our own?