5.21

I've been thinking lately about chopped-down trees. If a photographer or cartographer has captured their exact state at some exact past, do they still exist? If a carpenter or hooper has made some useful object from their wood, do they still exist? If I still love them, do they still exist? I have whole forests of long-dead friends.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.12

Lost Stars
Adam Levine (alternate group name: Maroon 1). Forty is an overwhelming number. Twenty songs in, I am technically "over the hump" and the songs all supposedly get better, but forty is just flat overwhelming. There is no 40-point listicle on Buzzfeed. I suppose longer lists do exist, but you should relate to my suffering, goldarn it.

Apparently, four people wrote this song. I can tell. It's the worst of design by committee and it suffers from something like the bike shed effect: no one felt competent to touch the heart of the song, so they just kept adding bangles to the edges. I mean, let's just list the metaphors I see, shall we?

• caught in a dream
• reaching out for someone/take my hand
• Cupid (apparently made a bad decision)
• drunk on tears
• a speck of dust
• lion snogging deer
• turn the page
• youth
• hunting season
• stars/darkness

Now let's examine the metaphors of John Lennon's Imagine, a mild opus of songwriting.

• imagination/dreaming
• heaven vs. hell/country vs. country/religion vs. religion
• togetherness/charity/brotherhood

I wonder what metaphors there are in Sounds of Silence?

• Darkness as friend/silence and night as solace/dreams
• Silent crowds of the unquestioning
• Humanity's self-destruction
• Neon God
• Signs of the end among the lower classes

Now, I'm not running a masterclass in lyrical consistency here, but tying any of the metaphors to each other would have improved the song. Let's focus for a minute on two that might tie: Cupid and hunting season. Expand that connection. Place the references adjacent and let me imagine the tiny god waiting patiently for exactly the right shot only to realize he's shot the wrong target. What about the speck of dust and the lost stars? Push it a bit farther: dust is worthless and tiny. We have too much of it: I feel overwhelmed. Stars are also tiny and worthless and abundant, but though I am floating dust, I cannot obscure your star.

Have you looked at coleslaw recently? It's chopped and mixed and smothered until it bears no resemblance to "cabbage." This song is coleslaw. It's the ideas of four people chopped up and thrown together in a roughly rhythmic mess and played against music. It bears no resemblance to "meaning." Adam Levine! What happened to you, man? You used to write songs that had heart-wrenching stories, and now you write about sleeping in. Gripping.

No.

Nope.

The video didn't save it, either. At one point, the cameraman seizes and the editor just . . . kept it in. The aesthetic seems to be "cardboard and toothpaste." It's the fanciest the set dressing could be without actually spending any money.

Look, the song sounds good, and Levine sings well. But there's nothing about this song that makes it worthy of this list. I guess if there has to be one that I would torpedo entirely from each list (Here's looking at you, Hold On, We're Going Home), this would be it. I even hated Iggy less. Maybe because I wanted blood and passion and received something insipid and safe.

I would not buy this. If this were the first Adam Levine song I had ever heard, I would not listen to any more. I would miss Sunday Morning, but I can live without that.

Wait: (curious now)

• pathetic fallacy
• weather as bedding
• weather as memory
• weather as fighting
• slow life/fast life/life as a road
• body as painting

Whew.

Bonus: This most driest of articles written for Huffington Post Comedy (a contradiction in terms) that badly sums up a MAD article about Design by Committee.