Case #8: Big Lurch: “I Did It To You!”
Let’s start this one off with severe trigger warnings: murder, drug use and, no jokes, cannibalism. This one is not for the squeamish.
One of the most fascinating subgenres in hip-hop history is that of horrorcore. While rap has adopted violent death as one of its central subjects ever since the dawn of gangsta rap, horrorcore took this preoccupation to an absurd degree. With its emphasis on over-the-top gore and cartoonish levels of villainy, it was something of the hip-hop equivalent of black metal, so extreme that it’s on you if you start taking the lyrics literally. (In fact, among my metalhead friends back in my school days, Gravediggaz’s “6 Feet Deep” was the first rap album that it was officially cool to listen to.) Unfortunately, just like with black metal, there is a story of a practitioner going too far, the singularly disturbing tale of Big Lurch.
Big Lurch got his rap name from his surface similarities to the intimidating, oversized butler from “The Addams Family,” as played by actor Ted Cassidy (who actually had his own novelty hit, “Do the Lurch” back in the day). The MC had some success on the Texas hip-hop scene, and he collaborated with the likes of E-40, Too $hort and Mystikal. Unfortunately, he also picked up a nasty PCP habit and, apparently, the lines between the extreme fantasy world of his outrageous lyrics and our reality began to blur. On April 10, 2002, he murdered his roommate Tynisha Ysais. She was just 21 years old. One would normally insert allegedly here, but this was a rather clear-cut case, especially as authorities found him naked, covered in the blood, in the middle of the street.
That alone was horrifying enough but what truly made him infamous was what medical examiners discovered after his arrest: there was somebody else’s human flesh in his stomach. When combined with the bite marks that were found on Ysais’s body led them to an obvious and disturbing conclusion about its origins.
When we discussed Simon Bikindi a few weeks ago, we mentioned how his music ended up being brought in as evidence during his trial for genocide. Something similar happened with Big Lurch, as prosecutors brought in his own songs as evidence that Lurch was capable of murder. One of those songs was a track originally called “The Puppet Master,” but which was renamed “I Did It To You!” when Big Lurch’s album “It’s All Bad” was eventually released. It was renamed to capitalize on Big Lurch’s newfound infamy, a truly appalling decision by Blackmarket Records to capitalize on the fact that a young woman had just died in the most awful manner possible.
The lyrics, to put it mildly, didn’t paint a particularly rosy picture. In “I Did It To You!,” Big Lurch describes himself as a “hungry lion” searching for “fresh meat.” The whole thing is a litany of murder fantasies, not entirely too different from many other horrorcore songs, with the key distinction that the MC in question actually ended up fulfilling its promise. Other horrorcore artists may have compared themselves to Jeffrey Dahmer in a hook, but the fact that he followed through makes it uniquely shocking.
The song was hardly necessary to prove Big Lurch’s guilt in this case, the only defense he had was an insanity plea that the state ultimately shot down. Lurch is now serving a life sentence for murder putting an end to his music career, at least unless some notoriety-seeking indie label tries to release some prison tapes like they used to do with Charles Manson. His story will live on for as long as people are discussing the most gruesome stories in hip-hop history.
Case #7: Sublime “Date Rape”
You have to hand it to Sublime: it’s tricky to write an anti-rape song that ends with what amounts to a celebration of rape, but they managed to pull it off. On their 1992 debut album “40 Oz To Freedom,” Sublime gave us the extraordinarily problematic song “Date Rape.” Not only was there very little blowback but, in a testimony of just how different the 1990’s were from today, it ended up being their breakthrough radio hit.
Despite the fact it was structured like a cautionary tale, “Date Rape” was never really meant to be a “message” song. “I’ve never raped anyone at least as far as I can remember,” Bradley Nowell was careful to point out in one of the few interviews with the band’s late singer. “We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about how much date rape sucked. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad; if it wasn’t for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.”
The song’s defenders will point out that, technically, the song is about a rapist who gets his comeuppance at the end, so there’s an attempt here at a moral. Unfortunately, that comeuppance is that he’s eventually raped in prison in what’s presented as karmic justice: “Well I can’t take pity on men of his kind/ Even though he now takes it in the behind!” The implication is clear: prison rape is a fitting, emasculating and above all *hilarious* punishment. “Date Rape” is not the only example of this, prison rape was one of the go-to punchlines of the era (also see Ben Affleck’s character’s fate at the end of Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats,” which was released around this time). The band even shot a tongue-in-cheek music video with porn star Ron Jeremy in a dual role as the judge and the cellmate, if there was any doubt on that matter. The chorus invites the listener to sing along with the rapist in question and then to cheer the fact that he himself then gets raped.
Maybe the most famous person who spoke up in favor it was including Dr. Drew, who has never shied away to jump on the record for a chance to be painfully, wildly off-base: “My take on the song is that it very clearly discusses the consequences of date rape–the perpetrator ends up in jail and gets raped himself. To me, there’s a message there. It shows that date rape is not OK.” In other words, it jumped past the lowest possible bar in the fact that it wasn’t explicitly telling the audience to commit date rape.
In what seems to be a recurring theme here, the worst part of the song is that if you gave it different lyrics it would be great. It’s insanely catchy, a jaunty ska number that digs inside one’s head, even those who are (understandably) predisposed to hate the genre, and it’s one of the musical highlights of the rather sloppily uneven “40 Oz. To Freedom.” The result: the whole song nearly compels the listener to sing its chorus, which isn’t great because the chorus is “if it wasn’t for date rape, I’d never get laid.” The listener, essentially, finds himself in the shoes of the rapist himself.
Maybe Nowell would have matured with time, and “Date Rape” would have just been remembered as an ill-conceived relic of an extended adolescence. We’ll never get to know, he overdosed on heroin after the recording of the band’s self-titled follow up at the age of 28. That self-titled release, a sentimental favorite among those of us who were teenagers at the time, became a massive hit. The rest of the band has continued on in various incarnations to keep Nowell’s memory alive and/or bilk money out of several generations of fans (many of whom were not even alive at the time of his passing). As far as I’ve been able to tell, they still break out “Date Rape” on occasion. They should probably just stick with “Smoke Two Joints.”
Case #6: Simon Bikindi: “Nanga Abahutu”
When we talk about how bad songs can be, it’s often amusing to go extremely hyperbolic. Let’s use last week’s Worst Song as an example. When I was describing what David Bowie and Mick Jagger did to “Dancing in the Street,” I was tempted to joke that it was like they committed a war crime against Motown. The problem was that I already had “Nanga Abahutu” in the pipeline and this song actually might qualify as a literal war crime.
Seriously.
This one requires a lot of historical context. In fact this entry will be all historical context. Simon Bikinidi was a popular singer-songwriter in Rwanda during the 1990s, his music combined traditional folk melodies with elements that approximated rap. After the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda’s hardline Hutu-led government implemented a massive campaign of genocide against the Tutsi. Between 500,000 to 1.075 million people were slaughtered over the period of several months, it was one of the most horrifying events of the 20th century.
Okay, I understand that this is a lot to take in, but for the purposes of this blog post, what’s important is how the government coordinated the country-wide massacre. One of their key weapons—and it very much was a weapon—was Radio Television Libre des Milles, the radio station that constantly promoted anti-Tutsi propaganda. It also, as it happens, would air music that drew in young listeners. Along with monologues that compared Tutsis to “cockroaches,” this station would play Bikindi’s songs. They, essentially acted as the soundtrack of the Rwandan genocide, with the song “Nanga Abahutu” being a particular favorite.
“Nanga Abahutu” translates to “I Hate Hutus.” It was a diatribe against Hutus who were sympathetic to the Tutsi population. One part of the song has been translated as follows:
“I hate these Hutus, who can be led to kill and who, I swear to you, kill Hutus. Dear comrades, if I hate them it is for the better.”
After the Rwandan genocide, Bikindi was put on trial for war crimes. Ultimately, the judges didn’t really want to go down the whole rabbit hole of deciding whether or not his songs encouraged mass murder. Instead, they sidestepped the whole argument by choosing to prosecute Bikindi on more straightforward hate speech charges:
“Simon Bikindi used a public address system to state that the majority population, the Hutu, should rise up to exterminate the minority, the Tutsi,” the judgment read. “On his way back, Bikindi used the same system to ask if people had been killing Tutsi, who he referred to as snakes.”
For this, and not technically his music, Bikindi was sentenced to 15 years in prison. From what I can gather, he was released in 2016 and then died of complications of diabetes in 2018. Those of us who love music will often talk about the power of music, the almost mystical hold it has on us, and its potential to change the world. What we don’t often acknowledge is the possibility that these qualities, in the wrong hands and in the wrong situation, could potentially make music extremely dangerous.
Case # 5: Mick Jagger & David Bowie: Dancing In The Street
Unlike most of the songs that we will feature here, this song was a hit. In fact, it was a rather sizable one. It also doesn’t feature any content that could be considered morally or ethically objectionable. Yet, still it’s terribleness is not only undeniable but so clear-cut that it acts as the undeniable nadir for two of the most important musicians of the 20th century. This is the story of Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s cover of “Dancing In The Street.”
The thing is that in theory, it should have worked. Jagger was the lead singer of what was, for sizable stretches, the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World. The chameleon-like Bowie spent a good stretch of his career as pretty much the coolest of the cool. “Dancing In The Street” is one of the greatest songs in pop history, the Martha & The Vandellas original, co-written by Marvin Gaye of all people, might have been the highest point in the history of perennially hip Motown. The original hasn’t aged in the slightest. It’s even survived a number of cover songs, the Grateful Dead even made a longform disco jam out of it that’s surprisingly fantastic. The Rolling Stones themselves reworked it for one of their all-time greatest numbers, “Street Fighting Man.”
And, yet, they ruin it here. Bowie and Jagger got every single part of this wrong. From the opening line where they shoutout all the countries to the heavily dated 80’s production to the hammy vocals. And then there’s the video. Oh my stars the video… just so many fashion mistakes and such powerful “dad embarrassing his kids while singing along to the radio” vibes. (Oh and one of the guitarists is none other than the notorious G.E. Smith, the mugging jackass famous for leading the Saturday Night Live band.)
It’s two musicians who were famous for being effortlessly cool just trying way too damn hard, to the point of exhaustion. It doesn’t help that they’re trying to capitalize on a boom in boomer nostalgia, this was right around the time of “The Big Chill” mind you, but doing so in a way that grafts on the most instantly-dated production tricks of the mid-80’s.
It’s that blatant appeal to the then-current pop charts that ultimately doomed it to be remembered so poorly. It act to recall a specific moment of time, but not a fondly remembered one, it’s an ongoing monument to that period when a sizable percentage of those who lived through the 60’s counter-culture found themselves yuppies dealing with mid-life crises. It’s the “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” in music video form. Bowie managed to survive this era thanks to a late-career artistic revival, buoyed by the support of the 90’s alt-rock generation who rightfully worshipped him (an early embrace of the internet didn’t hurt either). Oh yeah, it helped that he started making good albums again.
Jagger, of course, was fine with soldiering on as a figure of mockery for his utter inability to age gracefully (especially when compared to Keith Richards, who managed to maintain his dignity even while making cameos in pirate movies). Not that Jagger ended up caring, not with the Rolling Stones developing into a money-making touring behemoth, subsisting vampire-like on the nostalgia of his ever-aging audience.
Case #4: Throbbing Gristle. “Hamburger Lady”
Genesis P-Orridge, who left his plane of existence on March 14 was many things: one of the key inventors of industrial music with h/er group Throbbing Gristle, a revolutionary avant-garde artist with the COUM Transmissions collective, a prolific recorder of perverse electronica with the group Psychic TV, a gender rebel and one of the leaders of the Thee Temple o Psychick Youth network (where h/er behavior, according to reports, esclated into what amounted to physical and sexual abuse). Like many profoundly influential people, s/he left behind a historically significant body of work and a trail of personal wreckage. Fellow Throbbing Gristle member Cosey Fanni Tutti, in her autobiography, credibly wrote about h/er nearly killing her at certain points, along with incidents where s/he coerced her into sex. P-Orridge, for the record, accused Fanni Tutti of lying to sell her autobiography.
It’s a long, troubling, overwhelming legacy and we will not delve it into here. For our project’s purposes, we will focus on maybe h/er most infamous single recording, the immortal “Hamburger Lady.” When starting this project, my idea was to unpack exactly what we mean when we talk about “worst songs.” Most of these songs that we will discuss, to put it mildly, are failures: either musically, morally, ethically, lyrically, conceptionally or some combination thereof. “Hamburger Lady” is not a failure in the slightest: it is an unqualified success.
You see, Throbbing Gristle, a musical act who would experiment with creating the most upsetting music possible and “Hamburger Lady” might be their crowning achievement. This is a rare, perfect example of an artist going out of their way to create the Worst Song Possible. In doing so, they created something of an aesthetic triumph, something so visceral and vile that it’s impossible to turn off. After it’s over, one’s first instinct is to play it to one’s friends, to subject them to the sonic experience that you just barely survived.
Just barely surviving is, in fact, the overriding theme of “Hamburger Lady.” The song is an adaptation of a letter extract from “Blaster” Al Ackerman about a burn victim whose outside visage resembles raw hamburger. The doctors who can visit her without throwing up change out the tubes that keep her “alive” or, some semblance of living that mostly involves being in “pain beyond which a human mind” can endure. “She is dying,” P-Orridge croaks, in one of the few segments of the spoken word incantation that can be heard, “she is burned from the waist up.”
Most of the text is impossible to hear the first time around, as it’s recited through a gurgling voice distorter that makes it sound like it’s coming from the nightmarish tubes themselves. It almost forces you to try to make out what s/he’s saying, as if it’s forcing the listener to search out the lyrics themselves, which turns out to be a mistake. The awfulness is best experienced when you finally make out the horrible narrative of this poor woman’s suffering from this awful, inhuman GARBLING, like a broken semi-organic living oscillator that’s sprung to some horrible existence and is forced to give this report. In the background, in the closest thing the song has to a musical “hook,” is a distorted duck call that gives a repeated dying wail while P-Orridge sings (?) “Hamburger Lady.”
It’s the worst fucking thing you’ve ever heard. It’s the aural equivalent of the early, wild days of the internet when you and your friends, possibly while intoxicated, would jump on The Stile Project or Rotten.com and try to find the most disturbing, disquieting images and videos you could find. It’s an unforgettable experience, it’s brilliant and weirdly beautiful and I cannot recommend you ever listen to it ever- and you’ve already clicked play haven’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Case #3. Minor Threat: “Guilty Of Being White”
At age 19, Ian MacKaye was playing a major part in the creation of an entire musical genre. He was, however, still only 19 years old and, like all 19-year-olds, he was also doing incredibly stupid things that he would regret for the rest of his life. This is the story of “Guilty Of Being White” or How One Of Punk Rock’s Most Thoughtful And Admirable Figures Accidentally Wrote A White Power Anthem.
Before we get into it, no “Guilty Of Being White” was not intended to be a racist anthem. MacKaye wrote it about being the target of bullying as a white student in a mostly black high school, a very specific set of personal circumstances that, uh, he neglected to mention in the body of the actual song. In his defense, he had no way of knowing that a song that would eventually fill in the back-end of a seven-inch record would end up being part of a discography that would influence thousands upon thousands of punk bands for generations to come.
For the next few decades, MacKaye’s reaction to those who would call the song racist would consist mostly of acting indignant: “To me, at the time and now, it seemed clear it’s an anti-racist song. Of course, it didn’t occur to me at the time I wrote it that anybody outside of my twenty or thirty friends who I was singing to would ever have to actually ponder the lyrics or even consider them.”
Well how bad could these lyrics be, you ask? Well the main verse went as follows…
I’m sorry
For something that I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I don’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
Yeah. Yeeeeeeeeeeeah.
MacKaye would try to make the case that, in his mind at the time of writing, “Guilty Of Being White” was an “anti-racist” song. This is true in the sense if you’re the type of Fox News commentator who believes that a) Reverse Racism is an actual thing and b) being called out for being racist is as bad being racist. It is, rather nakedly and unashamedly, a song that angrily denies the realities of white privilege. You know, the reality that if you’re born with white skin in America you experience life in a dramatically different way than you would if otherwise and that this fact all is the direct result of hundreds of years of institutional racism and its various horrors (slavery, lynchings, segregation, racial profiling, etc). The fact that you yourself didn’t participate in these events, and aren’t actively being racist yourself, doesn’t mean that you aren’t benifitting from a fundamentally racist society.
In retrospect, 19-year old MacKaye was too immature and sheltered to fully realize this. The MacKaye who, as the leader of Fugazi and owner of Dischord Records, grew into one of the most important and influential figures in punk rock history certainly should know better. So it’s disappointing that he continued to defend the song even when white nationalist bands adopted the message, blaming them for not understanding it. Slayer, who infamously straddled the “are they just joking or are they actually Nazis?” divide for long stretches of their career, even changed its chorus to “guilty of being right.” At a certain point, if you have to keep explaining why a song isn’t *actually* a pro-white anthem, you just have to admit that the problem isn’t the fact that they’re hearing it wrong. You are, in fact, guilty of writing shite.
Case #2. Bob Dylan: “Neighborhood Bully”
Let’s start this with an obvious: Bob Dylan is the greatest singer-songwriter in American history. He’s one of the greatest geniuses ever produces by this country and he has built one of the greatest catalogs of any musician in the rock era. His legend is so established that he has spent the end of his career recording entirely unnecessary standards albums and it hasn’t affected his legacy one bit. (Even the Christmas album is good, though, I swear!)
The flipside of this is that Dylan’s misses hit harder than even the worst efforts by far-inferior musicians. Most of these low points take place in a decade that threatened to derail many a 60’s icon: the 1980’s. In this decade are plenty of songs that one could make an argument for being the worst of Dylan’s career—if this blog lasts long enough I will certainly bring up other nominees—but there might be no song that has aged poorly as Dylan’s attempt to wade into the most divisive topic of our times. Yes, this is Dylan’s Israel-Palestine song and it is a fucking car wreck.
“Neighborhood Bully” comes from “Infidels,” which is remembered as Dylan’s return to secular music after the so-called “Christian Trilogy” (“Slow Train Coming,” “Saved,” “Shot Of Love”). Despite that reputation, it still bears the imprint of his evangelical period. Dylan’s writing always was apocalyptic in nature, which is one of the reasons that, in retrospect, his Christian period doesn’t feel as out of place as it must have felt in real-time. The only difference during this period was that it had a distinctively Evangelical air to it, something which alienated a predominantly liberal fanbase. (Neil Young’s brief embrace of Reaganism around the same time, was probably the secular equivalent to this.)
By many accounts, one of Dylan’s major inspirations was the writer Hal Lindsey. Biographer Clinton describes Lindsey’s worldview as much: “According to Lindsey, current world events had been foretold in the apocalyptic tracts of the Bible, His basic premise, in The Late Great Planet Earth, was that the events revealed to St. John in Revelation corresponded with 20th century history, starting with the re-establishment of the Jews’ homeland, Israel. By identifying Russia as Magog and Iran as Gog—the confederation responsible for instigating the final conflict, the Battle of Armaggedon—Lindsey prophesied an imminent End.”
In this view of things, Israel’s importance isn’t so much about the survival of those of the Jewish faith, but rather that it’s important that a Jewish state exists in the area so that the End Times will come about. This is a belief that colors a lot of right-wing Evangelical thought today and something which colors modern day Middle East policy to this day. With this in mind, it’s hard to listen to “Neighborhood Bully” without imagining that the lyrics are colored by this vision of the world.
A different version of Dylan possibly could provide an interesting nuanced take on the situation, particularly given that he would obviously have reason to feel a connection to the country because of his Jewish roots. The best this proselytizing version of Dylan can come up with is a beyond-generic song designed pretty much solely to deliver the message “it’s unfair to criticize Israel’s actions, especially their military ones” with the subtlety of Gallagher’s sledgehammer hitting a watermelon.
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,,,
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin.”
Dylan, embracing the heavy-handed irony of his protest song days, then puts words in the mouths of these countries: “What’s anybody indebted to him for?/ Nothing, they say. He just likes to cause war.” Then there’s the line “he’s got no allies to speak of,” which… feels like it’s ignoring at least one obvious exception.
Certainly, if you were (or are) sympathetic to this message, you’re glad to have Dylan out there spreading the word. It just feels doubtful that even the most sympathetic of potential listeners have actually bothered to spin the song more than a handful of songs because quite frankly it’s embarrassing. “Israel isn’t actually the bully, it’s the kid getting picked on” is barely surface-level analysis and the song itself is just strident enough to be alienating and too simplistic to say anything deep about its subject.
Which, I mean, it’s an incredible challenge to write about Israel-Palestine within the confines of a pop song, but Dylan is absolutely mailing it in here. Tony Attwood, in his analysis, pretty much nails it on its head with the subheading “How not to write a song in praise of something.” Attwood makes a strong case that the problem isn’t Dylan’s particular stance, it’s the execution: “If you are going to do a political song, you don’t have to be balanced (no such song ever is), and your facts don’t have to be inclusive (ditto). But you have to avoid lines which are just so incredibly wrong that they bring the whole song down and make those who don’t believe dismiss what you have said.” This is like Dylan writing a book report for a book about Israel that he didn’t actually read.
Perhaps it would have worked better if the arrangement did it any justice, in the same way that some of the more iffy lyrics of “Slow Train Coming” are buoyed by an all-time Jerry Wexler production. “Infidels,” which otherwise has some of Dylan’s best material of the 1980’s, has aged rather poorly sonically. Despite the contributions of reggae-aces Sly & Dunbar and a slumming Mick Taylor, the performances are perfunctory, as if they’re just sort of grinding through the song to get over with it. It’s actually somewhat fitting for a song that comes across like a tossed-off Facebook rant more than anything else.
Maybe the most frustrating part about “Neighborhood Bully” is that it’s on the album at all. Around the same time, Dylan recorded a song called “Blind Willie McTell,” which is pretty much universally acclaimed as his finest song of the era (and one of the best songs of his career, which is saying something). For reasons that nobody has fully been to explain, he left it—and the also stellar “Foot of Pride—off the album while “Neighborhood Bully” (and the nearly as bad “Union Sundown,”) stayed where it was. “Blind Willie McTell” ended up being buried away deep in his Bootleg Series, which is where this song properly belonged.
3/4/20
Case #1. Frank Zappa: “The Illinois Enema Bandit.”
There are plenty of bad songs out there, but what makes certain songs “the worst?” That’s what this project will attempt to discover, but I suppose the best possible start would be with a song where almost every single element of the track is just absolutely, terrifyingly poorly thought out and horrifically executed. The genesis of this entire project came when I was relistening to an album about an artist I absolutely worshipped in high school and then came to have second thoughts about.
The story behind “The Illinois Enema Bandit” begins with the titular criminal. Michael H. Kenyon would rob exclusively female victims, including an assault on four women at a sorority house, and occasionally give them enemas. He was sentenced to prison time in 1975 and eventually was released in 1981. At the time surrounding his arrest, Frank Zappa, who was constantly on the lookout for outrageous sexual content to string alongside his adventurous, complex composition, apparently thought this was absolutely hysterical. So, he decided to write a song about it, called either “The Legend of the Illinois Enema Bandit” or just “The Illinois Enema Bandit,” depending on which release you happened to stumble across.
On the most famous recording of “The Illinois Enema Bandit,” found on the double-live album “Zappa In New York,” the relevant background information is imparted by veteran TV announcer Don Pardo, whom Zappa had recruited after a disastrous stint on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
“This is a true story about a famous criminal from right around Chicago. This is the story of Michael Kenyon, a man who’s serving time at this very moment for the crime of armed robbery. It so happens that, at the time of these robberies, Michael decided to give his female victims a little enema. Apparently, there was no law against that; but his name lives on: Michael Kenyon, THE ILLINOIS ENEMA BANDIT!”
There’s a bit of genuine satire that unearths the potential of this song: a mockery of a justice system that would care more about the contents of people’s wallets than the integrity of women’s bodies. Zappa had no interest in that, what Zappa found great was the idea of women getting a college education being debased against their will. In Zappa’s retelling, Kenyon’s motivation is simple: “it might just be what they all need,” he eventualy says (or sings) in his defense.
There’s probably some backstory involved to explain just how Zappa reached the point where he was convinced that this was the moral of the story. Zappa never completed college and had nothing but contempt for the experience, combined with more than a little bit of a rather obvious inferiority complex. You combine that with a history of lyrics that were often at best misanthropic and often just straight up misogynistic and you get the perfect cauldron for a song as ugly as “The Illinois Enema Bandit.”
In the end, the Bandit is caught and, in a callback to an old blues song tradition, women in the jury (!) beg for his acquittal (!!). It’s an ultimate fantasy, like the women in the song themselves are making it okay for Zappa to indulge in his weird sexist revenge fantasy on “uppity” women.
Here’s the worst part about this song: when the lyrics stop and Zappa launches into the guitar solo, the results are legitimately phenomenal. A relatively generic, by his standards, blues vamp mutates into something beautiful, with Zappa bending the strings and practically spinning a whole new composition out of thin air. As soon as all the sophomoric sex talk stops and he just focuses on the notes themselves, it’s the kind of thing that keeps me listening to his music long after being exhausted by his infinite shortcomings as a public figure/songwriter.
At this point in his career, it was clear that Zappa’s lyrical inspiration was running low and he was attempting to top himself in outrageousness and offensiveness whether out of a sense of desperation or out of just boredom. However, his love for composing never went away and at this point, when the comedic nonsense all stopped and he just concentrated on playing, the results were gorgeous. His audience seemed to know this, to the point where he released an album consisting just of the guitar solos cut out from performances of individual songs. It was called “Shut Up And Play Your Guitar.”
Yet, the songs with lyrics were what sold the best, so Zappa kept plastering his concepts with jokey novelty numbers with the hopes of occasionally landing sideways into something approximating a hit. It would work, on occasion, as “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,” “Dancin’ Fool,” and later “Valley Girl” ended up giving him just enough radio play to keep him a viable recorded artist, free to release albums of complex jazz-fusion, orchestral compositions and elaborate double and triple concept albums of varying degrees of listenability.
Unfortunately, as someone who prided himself in going past all conceivable lines of good taste and dignity, the results often ended up coming across as mean-spirited and sociopathic. They have also aged horrifically, at least lyrically, sometimes for reasons that were entirely his fault and other times just future events putting his recordings in radically different contexts.
At the end of the version of this song in “Zappa In New York,” Zappa goes into a rambling bit of improv that might have completely gone past most listeners. “Wait a minute,” Zappa suddenly announces, “this is for Roy Estrada wherever he is,” and then launches into a nonsense ditty that goes (If I’m transcribing this properly) “wanna… wanna… wanna enema. An enema!” Roy Estrada was the bassist of the original Mothers of Invention, who was also known for his super-high pitched voice—very handy when it came to Zappa’s many faux-doo wop numbers—and on-stage hijinks. He left the Mothers to become the founding bass player in Little Feat alongside former Zappa associate Lowell George. Shortly after the release of “Zappa In New York,” Estrada would resurface in Zappa’s live “Baby Snakes” movie, mostly contributing nonsense vocals and in one disturbingly memorable scene, molesting a female doll.
In December of 1994 Estrada was convicted of committing lewd acts with a child in Orange County. In 2012 he pled guilty for repeated sexual abuse of a female family member. He will not be eligible for release until 2036. While it’s hard to imagine that Zappa would ever have any idea about Estrada’s proclivities, it gives an otherwise indefensible song an additional gross layer: here is a song ironically celebrating sexual assault that ends in a shoutout to someone who later would be sentenced to essentially a life sentence for child molestation. On a strictly moral listen, it’s difficult to top “The Enema Bandit,” although further entries in this project will certainly make an attempt.
2/26/2020
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World's Worst Songs 