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:

Queen – "Fat Bottomed Girls" (1978)

Fat bottomed girls,

You make the rockin' world go round

It’s your lucky day, boys and girls.  We’re finally looking at February in the rearview mirror, which means March has arrived.  And March is a great month for fans of 2 or 3 lines – yes, that means you, and you, and especially you!  

February’s “29 Songs in 29 Days” were chosen well in advance, so all the ideas for posts that popped into my head in February had to wait until that month was over to come to fruition.  That meant that by the time March 1 rolled around, my brain was so full of ideas for posts that it had swelled up like a tick that’s found its way into one of your nooks and crannies and sucked blood for a few days.

Remember Kirstie Alley, the comedienne who starred in the popular TV series, Cheers, and those fabulous Look Who’s Talking movies? 

A very young Kirstie Alley

Back in the day, I had a bit of a crush on Kirstie.  But once she turned 50, Kirstie started packing on the pounds.  By 2004, she weighed 220.

Kirstie became a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig, and lost 75 pounds by 2007.

But after her Jenny Craig spokespersonship ended, she gained all that weight back — and then some.  She topped out at 230 pounds in 2009.

Kirstie then started a company that sold organic weight-loss products, and shed a hundred pounds by using those products.  

Or so she said.  A class-action lawsuit – which she eventually settled – claimed that she lost most of that weight through exercise.  

Kirstie’s weight ballooned again after her appearance on “Dancing With the Stars,” and she went back on the Jenny Craig program in 2014.  In less than a year on that regimen, she lost 50 pounds and went from a size 12 to 14 to a size 6 to 8.  

Earlier this year, the (temporarily?) svelte Ms. Alley shot off her mouth to the Huffington Post in a story titled “Kirstie Alley Has A Brutally Honest Message For Middle-Aged Men”:

Kirstie Alley has been flaunting her dramatic 50-pound weight loss for over a year and it seems she might be ready to get back into the dating game. Just one problem – she's not impressed by her selection of men.

The 64-year-old actress recently told Entertainment Tonight about her dating dilemma as a woman over 50.  "I wanted to say something to men over 45.  Don't be so freaking boring!" Alley said.  "Don't have the life already sucked out of you."

Kirstie Alley today

They might seem like harsh words, but it seems Alley really would like to avoid dating much younger men.

"All it does is leave women to date young men and be really embarrassed, because we are dating guys in tank tops," Alley continued. "I want some men around my age that aren't boring, and act like they aren’t tired."

Alley announced her major weight loss just one year ago and announced back then that she was ready to "hook up," admitting she did some dating but hasn't met the one just yet.  We think Alley looks fabulous and that her perfect match is out there somewhere.

If middle-aged men have the life sucked out of them, it’s because they have to work at stupid, boring jobs.  Kirstie doesn’t have a clue how hard it is to earn an honest living – the hardest work she's had to do over the last 20 years was to sign the residual checks she collected for appearing in Cheers.

I’m not one of these guys who turns my nose up at women who are carrying around some extra weight.  (I can show you photos of some of the women I’ve dated if you don’t believe me.)

But I’d be hesitant to get involved with a yo-yo dieter like Kirstie Alley.  I can imagine picking her up for a date one night and finding out that she had put on 50 pounds since you dropped her off after your previous date.

Wake up and smell the cat food, Kirstie.  The numbers are not good for women your age.  At ages 50-54, there are equal numbers of single men and single women.  At ages 60-64, there are over twice as many single women as single men.  And by ages 70-74, the ratio is four to one.   Don’t forget – a lot of those guys are only interested in dating younger women.

It's a good thing Kirstie isn't interested in dating guys who are 20 years younger than she is.  Because that's only going to happen IN HER DREAMS.

Queen recorded “Fat Bottomed Girls” in 1978 – well before Kirstie Alley started eating everything in sight.  It's a politically incorrect song, and it's a bad song to boot . . . which should come as no surprise given that Queen may be responsible for more bad songs than any other rock group ever.  (It will be a cold day in hell before 2 or 3 lines features another Queen song.)

Here’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Radiohead -- "Paranoid Android" (1997)

When I am king

You will be first against the wall

I'm not sure who will be first against the wall when I am king.  There are a number of excellent candidates.  

I may never be king, of course.  But just in case, I've been practicing: "Ready.  Aim.  FIRE!!!"

Goya's "The Third of May 1808"
depicts a Napoleonic firing squad

I'm back at 2 or 3 lines world headquarters (we've got the upper two floors of the Wildly Popular Blog Building) after my extensively chronicled 12-day pleasure-business-pleasure trip to San Francisco, San Diego, and Granbury, Texas.  (If you haven't been following 2 or 3 lines recently, just scroll down and read the last couple of hundred posts -- then you'll be all caught up.)

Just before I took off on my trip, 2 or 3 lines reached a significant milestone -- "Shake Some Action" by the Flamin' Groovies became the 500th song we've featured.  Click here to read all about it.

You would think that 500 posts would give you plenty of room to fit in all the greats, most of the near-greats, and a fair number of the not-so-greats from the pop music world.

But you regular followers have no doubt noticed that there are some notable recording artists whose music has not yet been featured on 2 or 3 lines.

Radiohead (looking suitably angst-ridden)

One of the most notable of those missing groups is Radiohead, whose music was not only critically praised but also very popular (despite being somewhat user-unfriendly).  

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In 2000, a British survey of some 200,000 record buyers ranked three Beatles albums (Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album) as the #1, #3, and #5 albums of all time.  Radiohead's The Bends and OK Computer were #2 and #4 on that list.  That's pretty impressive.  (At the time the survey was taken, the band had released only three albums.)  

Radiohead remained popular through the following decade despite a major change in musical direction.  Rolling Stone readers voted the group the second-best artist of the 2000's, and two Radiohead albums (Kid A and In Rainbows) held down the #3 and #5 spots on the magazine's top-albums-of-the-decade list.

So how did I manage to write 500-plus posts without featuring a Radiohead song?

Believe me, it wasn't because I don't like Radiohead.  I have seven of their eight studio albums resting comfortably among the 48.3 days' worth of music in my iTunes account, and I listen to those albums frequently.  

But choosing just one Radiohead song to feature is like choosing just one of your children to carry out of a burning building.  (That simile may be a little over the top . . . but you get my point.)

The OK Computer cover

I could have picked any one of a dozen Radiohead songs for this post, but I chose "Paranoid Android" off the group's 1997 album, OK Computer.  It's a very complex song, but not quite as experimental as some of the group's later music -- so it's not as difficult for the average person to appreciate.  

(Not that 2 or 3 lines readers are merely "average."  Many of them are well below average, of course.  After all, this isn't Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.)

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"Paranoid Android" combines parts of three different songs written by three different members of the group.  The group was inspired by the Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun," which also stitches together several disparate song fragments.

Freddie Mercury, who wrote
"Bohemian Rhapsody"

Several critics have compared "Paranoid Android" to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."  One of them (Simon Williams of New Musical Express) went so far as to say that the Radiohead song was "not unlike 'Bohemian Rhapsody' being played backwards by a bunch of Vietnam vets high on . . . crack."  

I think Simon Williams may have been on crack when he decided to compare the two songs.  "Paranoid Android" is really nothing like "Bohemian Rhapsody."  

I'm sorry to break the news to you Queen fans out there, but "Bohemian Rhapsody" is either (1) a huge joke played by Queen on its fans, or (2) one of the most God-awful songs in history.

(You can click here to view the famous (infamous?) "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene from Wayne's World, which is one of most God-awful movies in history.)

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The animated music video for "Paranoid Android" is remarkably weird and seems to have absolutely no relationship to the song's lyrics -- which is not all that surprising, given that the creator of the video (Swedish animator Magnus Carlsson) did not have access to the lyrics until after the video was done.  

Despite the incomprehensible nature of the music video, MTV played it a lot.  As one MTV executive told an interviewer, "You can watch 'Paranoid Android' a hundred times and not figure it all out."  

I'm not sure what his point is.  After all, you can read something typed by a roomful of monkeys a hundred times and not figure it all out.  That's because it has no meaning to figure out.

Click here to view the music video for "Paranoid Android."

Click here to buy "Paranoid Android" from Amazon.