I heard that hideous song "What if God Were One of Us? at the gym today. It was so ridiculously loud that even when I turned up my walkman quite loudly, I couldn't get Joan Osbourne's crooning out of my head. And then I started thinking about the songwriter- Eric Bazilian, formerly of the Hooters.
I used to love the Hooters. "Nervous Night" was a great album in the life of the 1985 Daniel. That album included the song "All You Zombies" which I never particularly liked at the age of 12. I wanted to rock to jams like "And We Danced", "Day by Day" and "Nervous Night."
Did Bazilian actually think either of these songs were good? Are the lyrics of these songs sent from God to Bazilian so he could torture all of us? The lyrics in both songs are so ultra serious and 9th grade poetry bad. In "All You Zombies" he condemns all the non-believers who didn't listen to Noah, Moses, and the word of God. He writes-
All you zombies show your faces, I know you're out there
All you people in the street, let's see you
All you sittin' in high places
It's all gonna fall on you
In the Joan Osbourne song, his writing gets even worse. The lyrics are so dumb and simplistic that there doesn't really seem to be much of a point other than "Duh, God might be a slob. Heh! Heh!" What the hell is this song about? Even today when I was being forced to listen to this nonsense, I assumed the song was anti-religion. I'm not quite sure why I thought that other than the way Osbourne sneers "Yeah, yeah, God is good." But it turns out that Bazilian isn't anti-religion after all. Or is he? The lyrics are so damn dumb that is is hard to tell. What an abysmal song.
Bazilian writes-
What if god was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
Just trying to make his way home
Like a holy rolling stone
Back up to heaven all alone
Just trying to make his way home
Nobody calling on the phone
Except for the pope maybe in rome
I'd never really listened to the song before and I'm not sure I should have looked up the lyrics after all. All I know is that once the song seeps into your psyche for the day, you are in trouble.
Oh yeah, Bazilian also wrote the Cyndi Lauper song "Time after Time."
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5 comments:
I remember when I was 14 thinking that song All You Zombies was really "deep".
i thought joan osbourne was out of the public eye, but i was watching a prime time news show the other day and there she was, singing with the living members of the grateful dead. ugh, can she please go away?
that last comment was from hong.
yeah, she seems to have become a shill for any group of musicians doing a tribute act or reunion tour. did anyone see standing in the shadows of motown. horrible, overhyped film with the worst reenactments i've ever seen. god, please save us.
Actually, I love All You Zombies and What If God Was One of Us?. I think people dislike the latter because they keep hearing Tom Cruise in the movie Vanilla Sky singing his purposely dreadful rendition. A great song is not always great as a poem, but it is the way the words advance the music, or vice versa, that can make a song great even if the lyrics themselves are somewhat silly. The Rolling Stones have a number of huge hits whose lyrics are absurd if they can be understood at all, and the same could be said for R.E.M. and any number of other bands/artists. I think both songs you mentioned are actually quite moving.
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