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Suddenly getting emotionally attached to a shit song

Started by grassbath, November 16, 2019, 02:12:00 PM

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grassbath

I have never liked the band Stereophonics.

Yet, in the last 72 hours, I have played Stereophonics song 'Dakota' approximately 20 times. The first of these plays was the first time I had ever listened to 'Dakota' of my own volition.

There was a jam night in the pub on Wednesday and it was covered by a bunch of chancers of radically varying ages (singer about 16, bassist pushing 70), and it hit me like a thunderbolt. While two friends loudly debated the merits and demerits of Stereophonics in each others' ears, I was transfixed by the shit poignant lyrics and shit soaring mid-noughties radio-rock chorus, which came through loud and clear even in the clutching hands of the intergenerational all-stars. 'You made me feel like the one.'

While writing this post I have listened to it twice more. It's now likely to be relatively high on my end of year most played songs on Spotify.

Have you ever suddenly become emotionally attached to a shit song?

sponk

Sleep deprived and working the night shift in a terrible food factory they were playing Someone Like You by Adele. I'd recently broke up with my ex and got SAD! and started crying while filling a bathtub sized plastic tub with huge blocks of mozzarella cheese.

purlieu

Nah, 'Dakota' is a great song. I remember when it came out and lots of people had to deal with the concept of liking a Stereophonics song (or, at least, one released since their debut album).

I dunno, my emotional attachment to a piece of music is all that really matters to me.

McFlymo

First time I sat through The Greatest Showman (it was a work thing, honest) I genuinely found myself welling up at "Never Enough". I was angry at myself for being very intellectually opposed to the broad strokes, cliches of Disney, yet emotionally betrayed and a total wimp: won over by the most basic plays on my heart strings.

alan nagsworth

Quote from: sponk on November 16, 2019, 02:18:45 PM
Sleep deprived and working the night shift in a terrible food factory they were playing Someone Like You by Adele. I'd recently broke up with my ex and got SAD! and started crying while filling a bathtub sized plastic tub with huge blocks of mozzarella cheese.

Oh my god I came here to post about this song.

When I broke up with my girlfriend of three years we went to the pub to talk things through and it was extremely emotional as we discussed how things would never be the same and we had to move on, it was absolutely devastating and I was in a dreadful place mentally and I just couldn't cope. I got an uber home and this song came on and I sat there in the back seat and silently cried my eyes out. It was one of the saddest points in my entire life. I was ruined and that song just fucking sealed it. I can never hear it without thinking about that time. I get all distant and completely removed from where I am when it comes on. It'll probably be that way forever. In that taxi, crying, like a fucking romcom made real, unbelievably cliches but that's just how life is sometimes. There's a reason those movie scenes exist. That's happened to people, and it happened to me and I'm not ashamed to admit I was completely washed away in it.

Dakota is definitely a good song. Just goes to show that everyone has one in them, even that beetle browed, po faced cunt Kelly Jones.

McFlymo

Oh! After reading your story, Alan Nagsworth:

I Can't Make You Love Me - Bon Iver's cover especially, after my ex dumped me. .... Was bawling my eyes out with it, but it felt right in all the cheesy ways it should have.

It's a lovely song though. Smaltzy as fuck as it is.

Brundle-Fly

The Babs Fletcher mawkish sit-com theme for Agony kills me. One lyric in particular because it used to make my ex burst into tears.

Stings even now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFmdM5-r1CU



alan nagsworth

Quote from: McFlymo on November 17, 2019, 12:55:22 AM
Oh! After reading your story, Alan Nagsworth:

I Can't Make You Love Me - Bon Iver's cover especially, after my ex dumped me. .... Was bawling my eyes out with it, but it felt right in all the cheesy ways it should have.

It's a lovely song though. Smaltzy as fuck as it is.

That's how it is sometimes. You see all these shite sob stories and you're like, what a load of fuckin mawkish waffle, I'm glad I have the emotional intelligence to not be affected by this. But you are. You are affected by it, because sometimes the glaring sad bits of your life are completely reflected in songs of heartache and emptiness and longing and wishing. There's a reason sad songs exist and they're probably the biggest connection I have to music that isn't just me being vaguely enthralled by the magic of it. Sadness is utterly beguiling to me still despite having endured fucking years and years of the stuff and when you hear a song that even remotely clicks with what you're feeling it's unlike anything else on Earth. Unreal. Unrelated to the thread but I just want to say when Leonard Cohen wrote "the baffled kind composing Hallelujah", that is perfect to me. You can be absolutely on top of your life but your heart will click into something on a way you weren't expecting and you are dumbfounded, baffled, by it. Existential nightmare and one of the greatest traits of the human race.

grassbath

Christ you can't win on here, last thing I would have expected out of this thread was CaBbers telling me I should have been already liking a Stereophonics song.

famethrowa

I won't, it is a shit song, mainly just due to the car/far rhyme

Jockice

Whole Again by Atomic Kitten. Watching it on the Christmas Top Of The Pops with my mum who less than a week previously had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I think you can safely close the thread now.

kngen

I'd say easily the biggest factor in liking music is the emotional engagement you have with it. Obviously, there are technical aspects to music (such as composition, production values etc) that (predominantly) musicians can argue the toss about, but for the most part arguments about the objective merits of music are really arguments about how people process their emotions - which is why such arguments are fraught, irreconcilable and ultimately pointless (and I say this as a former music critic).

I'd probably enjoy that song more if it wasn't by the Stereophonics because I think they are dicks, but then again, I like David Allen Coe, and that man is a complete cunt. There's not even any internal logic of my own emotional attachment to music, so fuck it - be confident enough in your own tastes that, if you like something, it clearly has merit.

Also: what Nagsworth said. I only need to hear the opening four or five notes of God Only Know by the Beach Boys, and I know I have to find a dark corner somewhere to greet my wee eyes out.

Gulftastic

Quote from: kngen on November 17, 2019, 04:22:10 PM


Also: what Nagsworth said. I only need to hear the opening four or five notes of God Only Know by the Beach Boys, and I know I have to find a dark corner somewhere to greet my wee eyes out.

'Shit' song?

Anyway. 'Goodbye' by The Spice Girls takes me back to when I left a job after ten years, coinciding with the start of my many illnesses and realising that I'd never find true love. Twas a glorious Xmas that year.

grassbath

Yeah, just to clarify, thanks for the concern but there's no internal strife going on over whether this is an indictment of my taste in music, and I quite agree that emotional attachment is the most important factor in music and 90% of the reason I listen to anything. I just thought it was interesting/amusing that in seconds I went from having zero interest in an overplayed song by a second-rate 00s rock band to absolutely hammering it, probably because of the context I heard it in and my emotional state at that time, and was interested to hear of similar experiences.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

#15
" Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera.

Even the most hard- bittened CaBber has a soft spot for this song  amirite?

kngen

Quote from: Gulftastic on November 17, 2019, 04:33:35 PM
'Shit' song?


Oh, god - no, no, no! But just one that is so potent, I don't even need to hear a word sung before I'm welling up.

Jockice

Quote from: Lisa Jesusandmarychain on November 17, 2019, 05:20:49 PM
" Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera.

Even the most hard- bittened CaBber has a soft spot for this song  amirite?

Nah. The only song of hers I have any affection for is Candyman. And that's mainly because of the video.

popcorn

Republica's first album was the first album was the first I ever bought. (Why does everyone else seem to have some brilliant first record they ever bought, Pulp or Bowie or NWA or something?) I liked the Ready to Go single as a kid but it wasn't exactly an album I ever fell in love with. Hadn't given Republica a moment's thought for most of the years since, and had filed them under "definitely shit".

Anyway, Ready to Go turned up in some fan-made video on YouTube, and I found myself quite energised by the chorus. There's something sort of... minty about it, breezy, refreshing, empowering. On the one hand it's obviously dreadfully dated and the rockin' guitar is quite embarrassingly toothless, but I didn't appreciate at the time the blending of 90s club/electronic elements with rock, and... yeah the chorus hook and multitrack vocals I now find very addictive.

Anyway, there's another song on the album, Holly, and this one is really baking my noodle. Again it's the chorus. I find that lift on "who really cares anyway" with the chord change affectingly sad. I think over the last couple of days I've listened to this song several dozen times, at first just enjoying the time warp but now, I have to admit to myself, being authentically moved by it.

Were Republica definitely shit? I keep thinking that if they were actually a Japanese band and everything was the same except the vocals were in Japanese I would almost certainly regard them as quirky, cool artefacts of 90s J-pop.

Jockice

Quote from: popcorn on November 17, 2019, 11:33:52 PM
Republica's first album was the first album was the first I ever bought. (Why does everyone else seem to have some brilliant first record they ever bought, Pulp or Bowie or NWA or something?) I liked the Ready to Go single as a kid but it wasn't exactly an album I ever fell in love with. Hadn't given Republica a moment's thought for most of the years since, and had filed them under "definitely shit".

Anyway, Ready to Go turned up in some fan-made video on YouTube, and I found myself quite energised by the chorus. There's something sort of... minty about it, breezy, refreshing, empowering. On the one hand it's obviously dreadfully dated and the rockin' guitar is quite embarrassingly toothless, but I didn't appreciate at the time the blending of 90s club/electronic elements with rock, and... yeah the chorus hook and multitrack vocals I now find very addictive.

Anyway, there's another song on the album, Holly, and this one is really baking my noodle. Again it's the chorus. I find that lift on "who really cares anyway" with the chord change affectingly sad. I think over the last couple of days I've listened to this song several dozen times, at first just enjoying the time warp but now, I have to admit to myself, being authentically moved by it.

Were Republica definitely shit? I keep thinking that if they were actually a Japanese band and everything was the same except the vocals were in Japanese I would almost certainly regard them as quirky, cool artefacts of 90s J-pop.

Ready To Go brings back extremely bad memories to me. Not in an emotional attachment way though.

popcorn

Quote from: popcorn on November 17, 2019, 11:33:52 PM
Republica's first album was the first album was the first I ever bought.

What the fuck?

spaghetamine

although it's arguably not really that shit of a song, Pure Shores by All Saints has lately been making me feel intensely melancholic, however it's easy to remedy this by following it up with the nightcore version straight after

McFlymo

Find myself singing along with 90s pop recently (mostly because of work).

[2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls, for example]

The worrying part is that I have reached that age where a part of me genuinely thinks, "They don't make pop songs like that anymore! Cheesy and shit, but at least it had a bit of character and depth to it, instead of all this bland, whatever-the-fuck-808-plus-autotune-wank kids listen to nowadays."

That's just some bitter old man, out of touch bullshit though, isn't it?

Double layers of shit: when listening to that podcast Serial some years ago (remember that?) and they started playing that late 90s song by K-Ci & Jojo ("All My Life") while talking about the murdered girl it was as if I was a child realizing its own mortality for the first time. Something about piano plus focusing on a teenager killed 20+ years ago plus the nostalgic pang of the 90s and an era lost to time.

jobotic

#24
Anything can make me well up if I'm in the wrong mood.

As for a shit song, Japanese Boy by Aneka reminds me vividly of being about to go through the Dartford Tunnel in my mum's car, on the way to my grandparents and feeling all happy. I probably wasn't but that's the memory.

Luckily you don't hear it much these days, for some reason.

Jockice

I once started crying while listening to Telegraph by OMD. I haven't the slightest idea why.

Cuellar

I'm gonna win this whole thread

Bat Out Of Hell as a heartbroken lad of about 17.

I'm cringing myself inside out typing this btw

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

It's mostly the shit songs that I get nostalgic about. The good songs aren't tied to their original time and place, because I've continued listening to them over the years. I heard Barbie Girl on the radio the other day and felt all funny (then again, I was giving blood at the time).

Gulftastic

Pretty much exactly 30 years ago at this time of year, 'Broke Away' by Wet Wet Wet came on the ITV Chart Show and it made me burst into tears. I was going through some awful family trauma at the time, and it broke the dam that had been keeping my sadness inside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbJuOs4JkoU

Quote from: popcorn on November 17, 2019, 11:33:52 PM
Republica's first album was the first album was the first I ever bought. (Why does everyone else seem to have some brilliant first record they ever bought, Pulp or Bowie or NWA or something?)

Because they are all fucking liars is why. Yeah, mate, of course, your 8 year old arse was in Woolworths buying Dark Side of the Moon and not Wombling Songs. Yeah, I fucking bet it was.