What is the most depressing song of all time?
Jan 31st
It’s my birthday next week* and I am doing karaoke. I have been mulling over my song choices. I’m currently considering “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (I don’t care it’s out of season). I’m also keen on “Bleeding Love”, but my friends are trying to steer me away, fearing it is ambitious. I’m choosing carefully as in the past I have been known to unintentionally pick songs that kill dead the mood of the private karaoke box. Which brings me nicely onto this week’s blog post.
My iPod has gained a bit of a reputation amongst my friends as being bloody depressing. My ill-fated “house party playlist” showed me that songs I think are uplifting floor fillers are to others more sit-down-and-ponder-existential-suffering. Note: Karma Police by Radiohead does not get the party started.
So, scrolling through my iPod, I decided to create a cheerful blog post about the most depressing songs of all time. There have been many lists before that contain the usual suspects (Gary Jules “Mad World”, The Verve “The Drugs Don’t Work””, REM “Everybody Hurts”) so I’ve gone for an alternative list. I’ve even divided them into nice categories for your convenience. Please do contribute your own suggestions and thoughts in the comments below.
Just plain depressing (but good):
Sia – “Breathe Me”
You probably wont know this song but might recognize the instrumental that starts at 4:27, which is used in any emotional TV musical montage worth watching, along with the instrumental in Desree’s “Kissing You”. It was used as the finale song in the brilliant “Six Feet Under”, which is worthy of a hundred blog posts in itself. If you haven’t seen the final episode then skip on, but this song accompanies perhaps the best six minutes ever shown on TV. In these last minutes we see the future death of each character, who you have got to know over six seasons. Alan Ball is so clever he even manages to make everything six. Brilliant TV and a fitting song. I blubbed for approximately 24 hours after watching. Proper ugly blubbing, like Alexandra Burke when she won X Factor.
Arcade Fire – “Cold Wind”
Another song discovered through the “Six Feet Under” soundtrack: this one’s used to accompany the disappearance of the main character’s wife who vanishes one day. The song itself is about a man disappearing and by the time the funereal organ starts and the background singers start chanting “dead, dead, dead” (some say it’s “hey, hey, hey”, but I’m sure it’s not) it has got bloody depressing. But great.
Songs That Try To Be Depressing But Actually Are Just Funny
Eternal – “Don’t You Love Me”
Who could forget Eternal’s apocalyptic vision of the social chaos the world was descending into in 1997? Eternal went all “let’s put social messaging in our songs” with potent lyrical content like “why does granny have to walk the streets?” and “child goes to the store for a loaf of bread/bullets flying all around his head”. The child choir is the icing on the cake.
Mel C – “If That Were Me”
Mel C’s enlightened song about homelessness. It contains the lyric “I couldn’t live without my phone/But you don’t even have a home”. Possibly. The. Worst. Lyric. Ever.
Songs That No-One Else Finds Depressing But I Do:
The Foundations – “Build Me Up Buttercup”
I fully acknowledge that it is probably only me that finds this song soul achingly depressing. But I maintain that it is (in exclusively bad ways). There’s something about “Build Me Up Buttercup” that sums up every rubbish night out I had at university spent in a club I didn’t really want to be in, dancing to rubbish music with groups of people alternating between inappropriately snogging each other and crying. Those introductory bars are enough to make me shudder. Argh! This gets no video.
Sugababes – “About You Now”
An uplifting pop song (and the Sugababes’ best moment without Siobhan), this song was transformed for me by its inclusion in one of Hollyoaks’ better sequences. Now, before you laugh, Hollyoaks went through a stage a few years ago of breaking free of its trashy storylines about fit girls to produce some brilliant, innovative plots. One of the best, which should not have worked, was Max’s funeral. Steph, his widow, is a wannabe singer, but isn’t actually very good. When she stands up at Max’s funeral to sing “About You Now”, it absolutely *should* be hideous and silly. Instead, her a-cappella off key rendition is pretty touching, especially as the song sums up her regret at umm-ing and err-ing over Max before they got married.
Watch the brilliance here! It was the closest we got to making my housemate who never cries cry.
Songs That Are More Depressing Than They Seem:
David Gray – “The One I Love”
David Gray puts something into his chords that makes all his songs fill you with sad nostalgia. If any of my Internet Following is musically minded please do explain how he does this. “The One I Love”, my favourite of David’s songs, initially sounds like his most cheerful, with a chirpy jangly melody and the nice “tell the stars above/that you’re the one I love” chorus. Oh no no. Listen properly and you realize this song is actually sung by a man bleeding to death, hallucinating about his lover. Amazing.
Kelly Clarkson – “Because of You”
This song is obviously sad and on first listen seems like a typical power ballad sung by rejected ex. Oh no. In fact, it has some of the bleakest pop lyrics I know. Listen carefully and it’s actually about a child who’s been emotionally damaged by a parent (“I watched you die, I heard you cry/every night in your sleep/I was so young, you should have known better than to lean on me”). The song gets darker as the music builds, culminating with Kelly telling us how ashamed she is of her life because it’s so empty. Few pop songs go this bleak.
There are so many more I could have written about (Mika’s “Happy Ending”, especially when the cuddly toys start crying in the video; George Michael’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” – oh dear Lord, Peter Andre is releasing a version of this; Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares To You” – that one perfect tear in the video), but that’s enough for today. Glee is now on. To lighten the mood, I want to end with one of my favourite YouTube clips ever: Karen from Outnumbered pretending to be Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson:
* Feel free to send me birthday emails/leave birthday comments/send presents. Or suggest karaoke songs.
In-between Christmas and New Year songs: an undiscovered music genre?
Dec 29th
I’m slightly worried. I recently admitted that most of the time I’m listening to my iPod I’m pretending to be in a music video, which I thought was widespread, normal behaviour. Apparently not.
For those unfamiliar with this pastime, the best location to try this is on trains, where looking a bit sad whilst staring out the window is the perfect accompaniment to many songs. Natalie Imbruglia in “Shiver” demonstrates the wistful look I aim for perfectly:
Also good is simple walking through faceless crowds – the underground is ideal – whilst again looking a bit sad or even angry, like Richard Ashcroft:
Possibilities are endless. You can have walking on a beach à la Chris Martin in “Yellow”:
Dramatic walking on a cliff top (Take That, “Patience”):
Even standing in crowded room (as Will Young showed us):
But all this is a distraction from the main reason for the blog post. Today it dawned on me (whilst on train, pretending to be in music video), that, as there are Christmas songs (i.e. “Driving Home For Christmas”), there should also be songs to mark the strange time in-between Christmas and New Year (i.e.“Getting The Train Back After Christmas”). Post-holiday truly is an undiscovered genre.
At least that’s what I thought. Until my Literary Agent Flatmate alerted me to another blog on this topic, which lists a few songs that fit this niche. (Seriously now, this was going to be my first highly innovative blog post and someone got in there first, just 3 days ago).
But I can add one more! Sugababes, “New Year”*. I was reminded of this song when Noddy Holder declared that it was his 37th favourite Christmas Song (“Don’t You Love Me Baby” by Human League was his 3rd though, so we’re not entirely convinced by his chart). A little known song, released when the Sugababes were still great, i.e. when they included Siobhan Donaghy. (Siobahn created officially the most underrated album of all time, Ghosts, which incidentally includes a song sung part backwards. Siobhan deserves a whole blog post of her own, so more on her in the future). For now, here is the underrated “New Year” : a song who’s title promises positivity, but it’s actually mostly about reflecting on the disappointment of the year just gone. I personally think the Sugababes’ bluesy harmonies perfectly sum up this time of year.
And another! Dina Carol’s “The Perfect Year” (remember her?) is set on New Year’s eve. She even says so in the song. I guess the hideous “Millennium Prayer” by Cliff also sort of fits. I’ve found one more: Barry Manilow’s cheery “It’s Just Another New Year’s Eve”.
However, I campaign for a major, relevant artist to release a song that defines that post Christmas pre New Year feeling, please, in the way that Mariah sums up Christmas in “All I Want For Christmas”. It’s a funny time of year, full of post Christmas melancholy and wistful reflection, plus a bit of hope. It would be massive.
And on that note, Happy New Year to all my wonderful Internet Following (i.e. housemates, The Boyfriend, Paul and a few other random people who google rude things about X Factor contestants). Here’s to 2010 and much blogging.
*OK, technically the Sugababes “New Year” could be said to be a Christmas song, as it talks about a “year ago at Christmas”. And they repeat the word Christmas a lot. But it’s set at 2:30am so I’d say it was Christmas evening, and therefore Boxing Day, alright? And it’s all about the the last/New Year really.
P.S. It seems I’m not alone after all! On trains Literary Agent Flatmate believes she is Gabrielle in “Out Of Reach”. As below.
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