Late Thursday Jukebox: Dean Ween Vents Spleen

Ween is a world unto itself, a band whose fierce independence has forever earned my appreciation, even if its music often left me behind. Unfortunately, the band dissolved last year in precisely the sort of way one might have expected, with one of the band’s two founding members casually announcing that Ween was no more, news that hadn’t, as it turned out, reached the other founding member.

That independent streak though? It produced the following three songs:

And this…

And this…

To my mind, those all sound quite different from one another, and yet, there they are, each of them recorded by the same band, one that’s unfortunately done. But those two founding members? They’re still around, and one of them – Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo – just gave an interview to about his hatred of the 4 Non Blondes’ ubiqitous “What’s Up?” I seriously doubt that I can do his outrage sufficient justice, so I’ll simply quote my favorite parts instead:

I don’t remember where I was, or what I was doing, but I remember hearing it and thinking, “This is the most obnoxious fucking hollering I’ve ever heard in my life.” I could envision the horrible, horrible female that was singing it, and I knew that it was gonna be a hit, just by how bad I hated it. I knew that it was going to be played for years by every fucking bad girl band that came through my local bar, and sung on every karaoke night for the rest of time. I was just instantly overcome with a sense of dread, and of course it’s all come to pass. Then I saw the video for it, and the people that I imagined would be so loathsome as to make such a piece of shit of a song looked identical to what I imagined them to be in my mind.

That’s only the beginning of the utter meltdown because there’s also this:

f it was on in a bar or a restaurant, I would go out of my way to make them turn it off. There’s all kinds of bad music out there, but everything about the song makes my ears bleed. The over-singing, the awful lyrics, and the guitar. There’s a guitar solo in it that’s like what you learn the first week you get a guitar and take a lesson. They show you a blues scale, and that’s what is being played on the song. Everything about the song is so awful that if I sat down and tried to write the worst song ever, I couldn’t even make it 10 percent of the reality of how awful that song is.

…and this:

I’d like to fight the whole band. That’s how much I hate the song. I’d like to fight them.

…and this exchange with the interviewer:

AVC: When I was 11, in 1993, my Mom and I bought the 4 Non Blondes tape, and we would blast “What’s Up?” on the way to soccer practice. I have a begrudging, sentimental love for this song.

DW: Well, you’re a dick!

Which brings us to this: what song do you find the most loathsome? Other than “What’s Up?” I mean.