5

Soft Rock For Supermarkets

Well done, superstars. You've proved that combining a classic rock god and a modern country star produces a soulless piece of music that lacks even the decency to be hilariously bad. I like bad music that I can laugh at, then it's good music, or music so weird you can't judge it anymore. This song isn't even brave enough to break itself or violate an AABA structure, and it's just bad enough to make me hate it, but not bad enough to make me smile. Boo urns, superstars.

The piece is soft rock designed for supermarkets; a song about lost love and unspoken stuff blah blah blah. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the subject matter is too broad: what letter? what loss? whose door? why did you think you could make a soft rock album? I know that's the point - that open ended lyrics mean mass applicability - but I don't want to hear that, and neither does anybody else that's listened to real music before. Again, it's alright for supermarkets, but nowhere else ... well, maybe a radio station that sells groceries or something.

My point is that this music is about selling something, and if you pay money for it and listen to it, and think for one second that it's explicating something genuine that applies to you, then you are so wrong it's pitiable. How do I know it's trying to sell something? Because it doesn't have the balls to specify anything, even so much as a feeling. I'd pay good money to hear Krauss sing about how, when she read the letter, she was shocked at how bad her ex-lover's grammar was. Yes. Then she'd be getting into something genuine. And I'd pay good money to hear Plant sing about how he's making this record because he's scared he's gotten too old to make music with any relevance to people's lives. Or maybe a song about how he had a good run in the music business, and making more music is pointless *badass drum solo* and then maybe a tambourine and the sound of him counting his money.

Anyway, this song stinks, and not just because it's soft rock. Bryan Adams makes soft rock and I don't hate his guts (usually), and so does Bruce Cockburn (sometimes). This song stinks because it's made by a company with a lot of money, and it expresses the same hungry-for mass-appeal sentiment that drives capitalism itself. Please read this review and know better than to buy this album.