What Is Your Personal Garbage Music?

For John Vanderslice, the well-loved producer and songwriter who’s worked with the Mountain Goats, the National, and other thoughtful indie-rock mainstays, the answer is “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind. In the regular AV Club feature called Hatesong, Vanderslice expounds on the topic at length.

AVC: Why this Third Eye Blind song specifically? Why didn’t you pick “Jumper,” which is another pretty terrible song?

JV: Well, the thing with “Jumper” is that it’s absolutely atrocious, but “Semi-Charmed Life,” that’s the song that broke whatever social restraint Stephan Jenkins had. That tune pumped up his ego with so much helium and put the band on the map. It was their flag. It also crossed genres in a really irritating way because there’s a little bit of content in it, in that it’s supposedly about crystal meth — in quotations, “crystal meth.”

“Jumper” clearly is this fluff tune. And even though there’s a hysterical underpinning to most of his songs, “Semi-Charmed Life” had this crossover. There’s a little bit of Fred Durst in there. There’s a little bit of this frat-boy rapping dude that… just grates on me. It brings back that story and that entitlement that I felt with him and also the confidence. Flipping the chair around and, “What are we going to do about the rate?” I don’t really get shivers when I hear “Jumper.” But “Semi-Charmed Life,” it’s their flag. It’s got to be that tune.

AVC: Supposedly “Semi-Charmed Life” was the group’s updated response to Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side.”

JV: Yeah, and that’s even more galling. That’s on the Wiki page for this song. He said that in an interview, and it’s just like, “Dude, don’t go there.” Don’t do that because this is not. I mean, listen to the patience and the sexiness and the danger of “Walk On The Wild Side.” Talk about a drug song. That at least invokes a feeling of murkiness, danger, and unsolvable philosophical problems. If you read the lyrics of “Semi-Charmed Life,” talk about malarkey. This is total garbage.

I like this delineation of garbage music versus bad music more generally. I love a lot of terrible, bombastic, poorly written music (like two days ago I started listening to the Fall Out Boy cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” so I could mentally make fun of it and then ended up jamming out super, super hard), but still have a firm category of songs (“Santeria,” James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”) that give me hives. Do you? What is your personal garbage music?