A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

A FEW OF MY LEAST-FAVORITE THINGS: I've never been shy about identifying and cataloguing the worst kinds of music I've heard. I've ripped on Eastern Bloc heavy metal, 80s synth-pop, evangelical college a capella groups. I am constantly amazed by the fact that people will listen to songs in foreign languages that would horrify and shame them if sung in English (ever listen to an Israeli folk singer?), and I have a working theory that this is somehow related to the inexplicable Europop phenomenon (numa numa hey…).

Until recently, I had pegged Richard Marx as the low point in domestic modern music. His work is to good music as industrial-park buildings are to good architecture: cheaply built, designed for maximum profit, determinedly inoffensive, and utterly indifferent to invention or artfulness. It's the soundtrack of double-ledger accounting and actuarial tabulation.

But over the course of the last year, I've had to come to grips with the fact that Marx is not, after all, as bad as it gets. There is a saxophonist who often plays in the evenings above the Embarcadero BART station (I think I've mentioned him before), and I cannot even imagine a worse musician. You may think it's unfair to give the title to an "amateur" (scare quotes apply here because the root meaning of amateur -- one who does something for the love of it -- could not possibly apply to one who commits such violent acts against music) over a pro like Marx, but even if you grade them on a curve against their peers, Sax Guy has to win. He knows two songs: "Over the Rainbow" and "My Favorite Things." The latter is a song that, if played on a saxophone for mass appeal, really can only be played in 5:46:8, a la Coltrane. Sax Guy plays it in something closest to 3:4, with no syncopation at all, except that the beats don't quite fit together, sometimes hesitating as if there's a particular note to which he can never quite remember the fingering. "Over the Rainbow" is equally fitful, but because of the wider tonal leaps, it takes on an extra honk-squeak dimension. Both are played at appalling volume, which as you draw nearer creates a surreal malice to WHISKERS ON KITTENS and ONCE IN A LULLABY. I have never played a woodwind, but I am quite confident that given a year of practice a couple of days a week -- exactly the amount of time I have been listening to Sax Guy -- I would do a better job.

I'm sure this guy has fallen on hard times, and maybe he has a mental illness, and I hope he gets whatever he needs, but people: you are driving me crazy. Do not give money to terrible street musicians. NO RAINBOW.