Blender on the worst Lyricists and Songs EVER!

According to Blender as described by Jim Fusilli in the WSJ...

Blender magazine, which treats men like boys, women like chattel and rock music like a soundtrack for cretins, recently published its list of "The 50 Worst Songs Ever!" In its current issue, it follows with "The 40 Worst Lyricists Ever!" Surely the culture is better off for its musical anthropology....

"The 40 Worse Lyricists Ever!" is actually more modest in scope than its hysterical headline would suggest. It's about one or two bad verses by some rather talented songwriters, including Paul McCartney, Bernie Taupin, Alanis Morissette, Smashing Pumpkins's Billy Corgan and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard. This last is accused of being "the type who's sensitive, wears glasses, likes long conversations." So much for finely honed music criticism.

At the top of Blender's list is Sting. While he can be skin-crawlingly pretentious in his writing, he's also crafted some gorgeous lyrics....

"The 50 Worst Songs Ever!" feature indicts "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by the Beatles; some achingly sincere tunes like Five for Fighting's "Superman" (which helped soothe first responders after the 9/11 attacks), Bette Midler's version of "From a Distance." It also includes a bunch of harmless party songs like "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" by Wang Chung and Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart," which was once sung to me by a cab driver in Budapest as a demonstration of his mastery of English. Their all-time worst song is Starship's "We Built This City." (OK, they may have a point there.)...

What the people who appear on the "worse" lists have in common is they aren't particularly popular with Blender's focus demographic, which is affluent males under 30. Which is fine: Many of them were one-hit wonders or did their best work decades ago. It's always a good time to welcome creative new music and musicians, and I could fill a Blender-sized magazine with features on wonderful new artists who'd rather not promote their work by celebrating their drug use, toting criminal background, playing model or being identified by who they're dating.

The problem is, and I can't tell you how badly I hope I'm wrong here, some readers may think Blender is a music magazine and that what they do is actual music criticism; that putting down 30-year-old pop tunes and selectively panning gifted songwriters is a merely a dumbed-down form of qualitative analysis. It's not. Even Blender's CD reviews, some written by critics who know better, take a flip tone that suggests the subject is disposable and thoroughly banal.

Blender and its peers wait for others -- the recording industry, TV and Hollywood, the police blotter -- to declare what's hip. In its current issue, it places "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey among "the greatest songs ever." Why? In part because of its association with the finale of "The Sopranos." Maybe it's me but I don't find "Don't Stop Believin'," a candy-coated piece of Springsteen-lite, any less calculating than "We Build This City." The lyrics work for the song but would you say they are considerably better than Sting's worst? They must be. Tony Soprano thinks so.

If you're interested, Blender also has a Top 10 Worst Duets of all time...