is it love, hate, what's it gunna be?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

When my dad was driving me back to Aberystwyth this Saturday, Mark LaMarr played 'Time Of The Season' by The Zombies on Radio 2 or whatever my dad had on.

Youtube, if wanted

This is a song I very much like, although I don't hear it particularly often. I love the verse, the breathy noise, the sudden swing of the bridge... and I absolutely despise the actual it's the ti-i-ime of the se-e-eason fo-or lo-o-oving bit. Which got me thinking about a question I've been meaning to put to poptimists for some time and hopefully hasn't been done before.

Does anyone else experience this love/hate with songs? Do the hated bits make the rest of the song better or do they override your ability to enjoy it? Equally, can one incredibly good bit of a song make up for the rest of it being rubbish? [eg: the awesome bit in 'Striptease' by Danity Kane where Anonymous Danity sings and I just can't keep my clothes from falling down and we've only got tonight so make it count, thus propelling the song into 'amazing' when it was previously 'a bit crap.'] Do songs with these polarised bits make you frustrated or delight you with their obtuse nature?

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah if there's a bit in a song I find genuinely awful I tend to hate the song despite any other redeeming factors. Most of the exceptions are from acts with a really really strong personality, like Kanye West or Fiona Apple - both of whom have lyrics which make me cringe in horror (eg Kanye making up the word "apologin" just so he has a rhyme for "collagen" in the otherwise great 'Can't Tell Me Nothing' AAGH) but they somehow give the impression that their amazing moments are really inextricably linked to their awful moments, that it all comes from exactly the same place, that the latter are in some way dependent on the former.

Also Madge's rap in 'American Life' to thread. "I'm not a Christian and I'm not a Jew" = maybe the nadir of her career to date, but everything else is so batshit that it makes up for it.

I'm sure lots of mostly-bad songs have good moments but if one bad moment is usually enough to put me off, there isn't much hope for these to make it through the filter. Oh hang on, I have an example - I absolutely love the descending piano riff which opens 'Everything In Its Right Place' by Radiohead - obv then T Yorke opens his mouth and it all goes to shit though.

There are plenty of songs with less-good bits, or boring bits, which I love because of moments of amazingness though.