Does anyone reading The Guardian live next door to the ad executive in charge of choosing the music that Major League Baseball uses for its annual promotion of the playoffs and the World Series? If so, please do the world a service: wait until the executive leaves for work Monday morning, break into his or her house or apartment (I am almost 100% sure it is “his”), find his music collection (I imagine it will be on CD), pour gasoline all over it and set it afire.
Just kidding. Do not do this. It would be illegal and dangerous and also just not a very nice thing to do to a fellow human being. You’re better than that. We all are.
But it’s tempting, because I’m pretty sure that whoever is in charge of choosing the music that MLB uses has the worst taste in music of any human being living on the planet, and we all suffer horribly for it every year around this time. (Or at least those of us who like to watch baseball on TV do. I speak for such people.)
We’re four days into the postseason this year, and it has been a fun one so far – full of upsets already, with the visiting team winning each of the first four games. But watching them has necessitated repeated exposure to a song called Heavy Is the Head, by the Zac Brown Band and former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell. It is an astoundingly dumb song.
Are you familiar with the Zac Brown Band? They’re pretty much the same as Mouse Rat, the fictional rock band led by dimwitted bohunk Andy Dwyer (played by Chris Pratt) on the popular TV show Parks & Recreation. Mouse Rat songs borrow heavily from the trembly-voiced, excruciatingly sincere music you would have heard at a frat party in the 1990s – Pearl Jam, Candlebox and Hootie & the Blowfish come to mind. They are funny because they’re so bad on purpose.
But the Zac Brown Band is not funny – they’re not trying to be bad on purpose. And they still end up sounding like a paint-by-numbers spoof of lug-headed meat-rock. Here are the lyrics to the opening verse of Heavy Is the Head:
Night falls
Smoke on the water
Darkness closes in
Cold white hand
In the deep
Will drown you for your sins
Christ. If only.
Unfortunately, I am still alive to hear this song play again and again and again as I watch the rest of this years’s postseason games. And I will watch them. Because I love baseball. (I am rooting for the Mets. Let’s go Mets!) I will sit through the horrible ads, with their horrible music, just like I’ve done for the past eight years at this time, since Fox and TBS signed on to air them.
I don’t remember what it was like before the MLB made their deal with Fox/TBS. A lot of Bob Seger, I’m guessing. But holy cow, as ol’ Scooter Rizzuto would have said, it has been rough going since.
In 2008 and 2009 we got Bon Jovi, insulting our intelligence with the country-bumpkin jingle I Love this Town and a song called We Weren’t Born to Follow that was so perfunctory the singer couldn’t even be bothered to leave his living room to record it. (I happen to be from a town right near where Jon Bon Jovi lives in New Jersey. It has not been easy.)
It was even worse in 2010, when the putrid red-state icon Kid Rock served up a cheese-laden slice of musical apple pie so cloying that I still can still feel it in my Eustachian tube. (Be careful clicking this link. You will hear a song called Born Free.)
MLB went in a slightly different direction in 2011, licensing a song from the much-less-famous, and much-less-American, British rapper Tinie Tempah. But it’s probably the chorus, sung by a guy named Eric Turner, that you will resent me for bringing up again. “Oh!” it goes, “Written in the stars/A million miles away”.
The catchiness of these songs is often a big part of the problem. You hear them so frequently during the broadcasts that they gnaw their way into your brain like a cranial tapeworm and stay there long after the last out of the World Series has been recorded. The baseball-less winter is bad enough without an internal soundtrack of garish, melodramatic melody keening constantly in your ear.
The year 2012 was especially painful in this regard, as the song MLB chose was one from a great hero of mine (again: I am from New Jersey), Bruce Springsteen. Bruce has blessed the world with scores of wonderful music and some lovely baseball-related memories, too. Remember back in 1985, when the coda for the video for Glory Days was a reference to the great Yankees, and later Padres, third baseman Graig Nettles? It couldn’t have been any better for a rock-and-baseball obsessed 14-year-old me. Nettles was my favorite player, and the thought that he might be Bruce’s, too? There aren’t enough exclamation points. (You may not remember 1985. You may have not been alive then.)
But 2012’s The Land of Hope and Dreams is not one of Bruce’s more wonderful songs. It sounds distressingly at home in a medley with I Love This Town and Born Free. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was David Brooks’s favorite Bruce song. It is, I’m sad to say, an all-too-regular-sounding MLB postseason theme song. They used it in 2013, too. Sigh. You can’t go home again.
Last year, MLB decided to save some money, apparently (I imagine Bruce’s lawyers really soaked them), and selected a song from a lesser-known “neo soul/indie pop” band from Los Angeles called Fitz & the Tantrums. The song was called The Walker, which makes me picture that ad executive smiling to himself at the potential baseball pun. Maybe he thought the bass line would make it a hit.
Unfortunately for us, The Walker is the musical equivalent of a game that ends with a bases-loaded bases-on-balls. No one’s wholly happy about it. It’s a saggy, draggy, anticlimactic feeling. One that dampened an otherwise super-exciting postseason between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals. Man, thinking back, that World Series was really something else – seven games! I was pulling for the starless Royals team to shock the universe. But watching the Giants’ burly, bearded, longhair Madison Bumgarner pitch so masterfully was entertainment to treasure forever despite the annoying inanity of the interstitial musical fare.
And now we’ve got Zac Brown. Oh well. For baseball fans, for everybody, I suppose, even the best things in life have to suck a little bit.
