Published at 8:10 AM on March 27, 2009

By Steve LaBate

Seven Songs Playing in the Lobby of My Own Personal Hell

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[Above: Bucky Dent. Us Red Sox fans have another name for him.]

Sitting in the bleak, strobing-florescent-light-lit lobby of my own personal hell, waiting around on backbreaking IKEA furniture for eternal damnation to begin, I glance around. Posters of Paris Hilton, Richard Nixon and New York Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent line the unfinished concrete walls. There are a few TVs, too, which are looping Dancing with the Stars, Nancy Grace, the standup comedy of Kathy Griffin, all the Rob Schneider scenes from Judge Dredd, and the last 30 seconds of Game 6 of the 1986 Mets/Red Sox World Series.

And to make matters worse, the most obnoxious songs I can think of are blasting from the speakers mounted overhead. That raging sulfur-reeking inferno on the other side of the door is suddenly starting to seem a little more appealing. Hope the wait's not much longer...

Song 1: "Crocodile Rock" - Elton John
Sure, the verse isn't so bad, you say, and let's not forget that Elton penned some great tunes circa Madman Across the Water and Tumbleweed Connection. Agreed. But no piece of music ever written could herald the ultimate triumph of darkness over light more maddeningly and convincingly than the chorus of "Crocodile Rock." That shit is pure, unadulterated evil.

Song 2: "I'm Your Captain" - Grand Funk Railroad
The end of this awful song—from the same '70s rockers who brought you such vacuous nonsense as "We're An American Band"—makes me want to get all Mike Tyson on myself. That's right... if my teeth could somehow reach around to the side of my head, I would chew my own ears off rather than listen to this song's outro, which—like a scratched record—repeats the same meaningless phrase ("I'm getting closer to my home") over the same middle-of-the-road music over and over and over again for what seems like an eternity. A hellish eternity where you have to hang out with Hitler and Bernie Madoff every day, and where there is no Thai food, Replacements records or Anthony Bourdain. 

Song 3: "Blowing in the Wind" - Joan Baez
For the love of God, woman, could you please lose that mind-numbing vibrato! Back in the '60s, the U.S. military was researching the use of Baez's vocal style as a torture instrument, one far worse than waterboarding... so bad, in fact, that the project had to be shelved because so many of our best scientists were effectively lobotomized from the vocal trills. Really, what did anyone ever see in this woman as an artist? She could neither sing nor play nor write her own songs nor arrange. Her entire career in music was a vanity project on the level of that last Scarlett Johansson record. I blame marijuana for making everything from "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" to Tiny Tim to Styx sound as revelatory as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Song 4: "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" - Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack
As if this song weren't bad enough on its own, consider the following association I've got with it: By the time I was through middle school, I'd pretty much figured out that this was totally my parents' song for doing it. That's right, y'all... when Mom & Pop LaBate wanted to celebrate by making sweet love, this was their jam. Enough times with the bedroom door locked and this shit blasting from the boombox on their nightstand and you don't have to be a detective to figure out what's up. And they were old, man. I mean, good for them, I guess... but I could go pretty much indefinitely without ever hearing that tune again. I mean, who wants to think of their parents getting it on to gated drums and soprano sax?

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