by Daniel "Tanz" Lattanzio, staff writer

Maybe this is too much information, but while I was changing the cat boxes a few nights back, I decided to attempt something different. Like a blind man, I attempted to “turn off” one of my senses and focus upon and strengthen a different sense – in this case I was trading my sense of smell for a stronger sense of hearing. I began listening to VH1 and Blender magazine’s “50 Worst Songs of All Time” and a thought popped into my head: “String? My cat ate that eight months ago! I’m still paying the vet bill on that!”

Quickly after that, I had a second, more relevant thought. I finished my duties and watched the rest of the show. Most were, indeed, very bad songs. I disagreed with a few on the list; for example: Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is a great song. And how can someone put ANY Meatloaf song on such a list? It’s MEATLOAF, for crying out loud, what were you expecting? And, isn’t it a little too easy to pick on Huey Lewis?

But back to my thought: the more I watched, the more I realized something. Most of these supposedly “bad songs” were chart-topping hit songs! They were all over the radio, sold tons of singles and made lots of money!

Now, I can personally say that none of my hard earned cash ever funded New Kids on the Block, but I have compilations with a large amount of the other songs. Hell, I even owned Starship’s “Kneedeep in the Hoopla” – the album that birthed the list’s number one bad song: “We Built this City.” The point is: no matter how bad these songs are, people bought them up like hotcakes. We have only ourselves to blame.

And there were far worse songs. Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” wasn’t on the list. Where was Gloria Estefan’s “Falling in Love” (it was a Top 40 hit)? How about any song off the “Rob and Fab” album, the one where Milli Vanilli actually sang? Oh, that’s right, only about 8 people ever heard anything off that album.

This leads me to my new dream: to write and record a bad song. Maybe not truly bad, but deceptively bad. I’d have to give it a good hook, so it’ll get stuck in your head, and trick you into buying the single. I’ll throw in a pleasant melody, double track my singing and hire a woman to sing really high and somewhat incoherently throughout the chorus. I’ll make it something everyone can relate to, but with a spin from my unique point of view. I’ll talk about breaking up with a woman, but then regretting my poor decision. I’ll even make some of the lyrics bizarre and indecipherable…you know, to keep people wondering.

In true pop/rock fashion, I took a napkin and scribbled the following in about two minutes:

Only you can save me from me/ I’m not what I’m s’posed to be

Looking up rosy waves of tiger lilly/ [something mumbled, drowned out by the chick’s wailing]

I still have a strand of your hair/ I should have let you up for air

Okay, that was…well, awful. But, I’m not giving up so easily. I think with some tweaking, I may be on to something here. (Come on, as I stated in another article, even William Hung has an album! I’m sure there are people dumb enough to buy mine!)

In the end, we can laugh at the artists and their products, but the joke is on every one of us that has ever traded green slips of paper for an album we’d never admit to owning. As for “Kneedeep in the Hoopla” – well, I’m just holding that for friend…