Joy Ride, Or How to Create The Worst Song Ever

About a few weeks back, I had a lot of venom about this band from Las Vegas called The Killers who have just so happened to sell a few million records. And for reasons notwithstanding (i.e. the single "Human"), I cared nothing about listening to Day and Age, the third record from this band that went from new wave imitators to poor arena rock imitators to now even poorer dance rock creators. And they have in vocalist in Brandon Flowers who is just a much a poor lyricist. Other than composing "Human", Flowers composed perhaps the single worst song in the history of my existence on earth.

This song is track four on the Day and Age CD and it is called "Joy Ride". Now for the first thirty-eight seconds or so, the song is fine and tolerable. The lyrics are horrible, as Flowers strains to make a cliche story about a stuffy man letting his hair down in Vegas seem original and fails massively, but this doesn't affect the riff of the song. At least not yet.

Because right at second 39, there is a sudden move to change this song into a direction that makes no sense and fails horribly. The song adds a saxophone to the mix. And it's sad, because groups like TV on the Radio and any ska band in history have made succinct and successful use of the sax, but here, it is ghastly beyond belief because it's incredibly cheesy. And worse yet, it doesn't seem to hold a legitimate reason for being in the song other than Flowers thinking, "Let's just throw in a sax. We'll be edgy and experimental like that." Except nothing about this band has any hint of experimentation other than mining material that was at least intriguing and creating overwrought lyrics and dull songs out of the fold.

So the first question I'm sure you're going to ask is "How did I hear this song?" (Though, I doubt you've read that far before deciding that I'm incorrect in my assumption that this song is the worst thing in our lifetime and that you actually want to read more of this diatribe.) But anyways, to answer the question, I was listening to one of my personal favorite music podcasts, the Sound Opinions podcast. And it came to an immediate shock to me when I found out they were reviewing Day and Age on the show. And they played a snippet of the aforementioned "Joy Ride", purposefully remembering to keep the taut part with the sax line and the brilliant chorus of "When your chips are down/When your highs are low/Joy ride (JOY RIDE)". And I realized how bad the sax playing was. And then the reviewers said that they thought the sax playing was bad. And then they went on some spiel about how "Human" was based around a book from a famous author (I kind of tune out on what "inspires" Mr. Flowers' works).

But nonetheless, they were right. They were totally right about how insanely bad the saxophone line was, but it's not the only bad thing about this song. A dull bit of guitar work, crappy sax playing, worse lyrics. Wow, Brandon Flowers suddenly made "Are we human or are we dancer" seem like a brilliant observation by comparison.