Bruce Springsteen – "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" (1973)

And my machine, she's a dud

I'm stuck in the mud

Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey

Which isn’t a bad description of Bruce Springsteen’s entire musical oeuvre.

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Springsteen has one unarguably great song to his credit – “Born to Run.”

But most of his other most popular songs – “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Hungry Heart,” “Dancing in the Dark” – are awful.

Then there are his oh-so-sensitive-and-serious songs – lugubrious downers like “Streets of Philadelphia” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

Ugh.

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I’m sorry to be so negative, but my trivia team pissed away a healthy lead tonight and finished out of the money – meaning no free beer for us – for the third straight week.  So I am in a bad, bad, BAD mood.

But that’s not why I’ve decided that Bruce Springsteen is OVERRATED – I decided that a l-o-n-g time ago.

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I wouldn’t have a problem with today's featured song if it was an instrumental, or the lyrics were sung in a language other than English.

But what are you supposed to do with triter-than-trite lyrics like these?

I know a pretty little place in Southern California

Down San Diego way

There's a little café

Where they play guitars all night and all day

Or this:

Now, I know your mama, she don't like me

‘Cause I play in a rock and roll band

And I know your daddy, he don't dig me

But he never did understand

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Here’s a comment I came across while listening to “The Ghost of Tom Joad” on YouTube:  “He’s just as talented and insightful as Bob Dylan.”  Talk about damning someone with faint praise.

To be fair to Dylan, I don’t recall that he ever wrote lyrics as creepy as these lines from “Rosalita”:

The only lover I'm ever gonna need

Is your soft, sweet, little girl’s tongue

(Gag me with a spoon.)

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Click here to listen to the studio version of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Queen – "Fat Bottomed Girls" (1978)

Left alone with big fat Fanny

She was such a naughty nanny

Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me

Most of the recording artists who I have classified as overrated have released a few good records.  The problem is that there is way too much dross relative to the amount of gold in their music.

Elvis Presley, the Grateful Dead, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen . . . all of them pumped out a lot of crap.  But every once in a while, they produced a gem. 

Queen is different.  Every single one of their records is plain old unlistenable.

Leonard Pinth-Garnell would have agreed:

Dan Aykroyd as Leonard Pinth-Garnell

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Queen’s 1981 Greatest Hits album is the biggest-selling album of all time in the UK, with 6.3 million albums sold as of December 2018. 

Think about that. 

The songs on that album include “Killer Queen,” “You’re My Best Friend,” “Somebody to Love,” “We Are the Champions,” “We Will Rock You,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Bicycle Race,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” and – last but not least – “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Respondents to an informal poll conducted by humorist Dave Barry in 1992 chose Richard Harris’s recording of “MacArthur Park” is the worst song of all time.  I assume that “MacArthur Park” won only because there are so many bad Queen singles that the anti-Queen vote was split among them.

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Which of the Queen singles listed above is the worst?  

I would say “Bohemian Rhapsody” because it clocks in at almost six minutes, which makes it the longest cut on the Greatest Hits album.  (Six minutes doesn’t sound that long until you spend six minutes listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” from start to finish.)

How would I rank the other songs on that album?   They’re all tied for second worst.

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Queen’s Greatest Hits doesn’t appear on the list of the 100 best-selling albums in the United States.

I’d like to think that’s because Americans have better taste when it comes to pop music than Brits do.  But I was quickly disabused of that notion when I looked at the list of the albums that have sold the most copies in the U.S.

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“Fat Bottomed Girls” is a one-trick pony of a song, and utterly tasteless to boot.  But it’s probably my favorite Queen song . . . which says a lot about their oeuvre as a whole.

Click here to listen to “Fat Bottomed Girls.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Prince and the Revolution – "Purple Rain" (1984)

If you know what I'm singin’ about up here

Come on, raise your hand

(You’ll note that my hand isn’t raised.)

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I never got Prince.  He recorded a few good songs, but I find a lot of his music (including today’s featured song) very, very tedious.

OVERRATED!

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Click here to listen to “Purple Rain,” the title track from the soundtrack album of the same name (which has sold over 25 million copies worldwide).

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Dave Matthews Band – "Too Much" (1996)

Traffic jam got more cars

Than a beach got sand

Suck it up, suck it up, suck it up

Today is the first day of February.

If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know that means that it’s time for “29 Posts in 29 Days.”  To quote our old pals Gilbert and Sullivan, “Oh joy! Oh rapture!”

Having two 2 or 3 lines posts a week to enjoy is pretty darn special . . . but having a new 2 or 3 lines post every day for an entire month is much, much specialer.  Even if that month is February, the shortest month of the year.

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This year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” will feature songs by recording artists that I believe are underrated and overrated.

Many of you will disagree vehemently with one or more of my choices.  Whenever this happens, I would ask you to repeat this famous maxim to yourself: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I would also ask you to remember that whenever we disagree on whether an artist is overrated or underrated, 2 or 3 lines will be right and you will be wrong.  Capisce, kemosabe?

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You can expect my February posts to be short and sweet.  After all, I have to crank out a new one every day, and I’m a very busy man – for one thing, my current Netflix “My List” has dozens of shows, with more being added regularly.

The “overrated” posts will usually be quite succinct – perhaps even terse.  The music of those artists will speak for itself, and the words that music will speak is “I SUCK!”

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Here are some quotes about the Dave Matthews Band from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website:

They have been called a college band, a jam band, a pop band . . . . Hailing from Charlottesville, Virginia, the band formed in 1991 and cultivated a trademark sound that includes long, intricate solos, non-traditional rock & roll instruments, unique time signatures, and an electric live show.  

[NOTE: “College band” = a band whose audiences are composed mostly of blackout-drunk students.  “Jam band” = a band that does not know when too shut up.]  

The band quickly generated strong word of mouth thanks to endless live shows and an active tape sharing community.

[NOTE: “Endless live shows”?  Truer words were never spoken.  (I didn’t say “endless” – that’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame talking.]

Dave Matthews Band became the top-selling live act from 2000 to 2009 and is the only band to have seven consecutive albums debut at #1.  

[NOTE: It’s truly astonishing that a band can crank out seven #1 albums and not have one single song worth listening to.]

The band has influenced a generation of acoustic-driven singer-songwriters like John Mayer, Jason Mraz, and OAR.

[NOTE: In other words, not only has the DMB produced a lot of crap music itself, it’s inspired many others to produce a lot of crap music.]

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This just in: although they won this year’s fan vote by a wide margin, the DMB were not included in this year’s group of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

That is encouraging news for those of us who had pretty much given up on the RaRHoF.  But it was discouraging news for those of you who were still clinging to the hope that Americans aren’t a bunch of stupid wankers.

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So what’s the final 2 or 3 lines verdict on The Dave Matthews Band?  

OVERRATED!

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Click here to listen to “Too Much,” which was released in 1996 on the group’s biggest-selling album to date, Crash:  

The aptly-named song is too much, all right – like about four minutes and 22 seconds too much.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: