Bad songs that have a profound emotional effect on you.

scanning the radio on a drive home from philadelphia tonight i came across the song "stay together for the kids". i think it was playing on 104.5. i could criticize this song for a million reasons. it's mawkish and one-dimensional. there is something really cynical about peddling this hallmark-ready, stereotypical narrative about a broken family to the youth, like the band members were sitting around thinking up things their 14 year old listeners would find profound. which, i mean, this is clearly what happened: this is the band that released adam's song, the shallowest song about teen suicide of all time. clearly, blink had no business writing songs about experiences more profound than egging the principal's house. yet tonight, in the car, listening to "stay together for the kids," i cried. i'd like to say it was just the loud-quiet guitars, but it was more than that.

what are the songs that move you which you would never defend on aesthetic grounds?

"i've never been to me"

as i have also never been to me

when i was living in vancouver in 2010? i was living with xinran, and we'd lived together before in saskatchewan and i'd gotten a scholarship to go to ubc and it was kind of a dream situation. we were living right by the water in an apartment that was too expensive and i ended up losing the scholarship. for a period, we had no money. we ate potatoes and spent, like, a hundred bucks a month on food. i have a memory of onetime going to a buddhist temple in steveston, fishing coins out of the fountain and getting enough to get kfc toonie tuesday meals. she gave me half the chicken from her meal. a few days after, we had sex in the afternoon and she started crying after and for whatever reason i asked her if she was pregnant. she said no, i love you but i'm going to leave. we took the skytrain to the airport and she bought a ticket and left the next day. i stopped going to school and got a job at shoppers drugmart, stocking shelves. they played a softrock station in the store. i didn't really know any of the songs or have any connection to any of them. but it was excruciating restocking fish oil capsules or hair bands or pantyhose and having nothing to think about but fucking up my entire life, losing a scholarship to the school i put on a stupid list of the schools i dreamed about going to and losing the first girl that loved me as much as i loved her, and hearing softrock love songs, 8 hours a shift. one of the few times i've publicly cried, tears down cheek, audible sobs was while listening to e.l.o.'s 'telephone line' while working in shoppers drugmart.

i know adam's song is like an ilm joke or whatever the other fucking blink 182 song is? miss you? but it gets me, too, even if whatever.

Mostly anything that I listened to before I was 20 but really, this is usually just called nostalgia.

dylannn, your post ;_;

I don't have any bad songs that do this to me-- there are some bad songs that make me drop everything and leave, like, a deep physical response, the two songs that I know trigger this response are La Roux "Bulletproof" and Flaming Lips "Oh Yoshimi you gotta believe me" or whatever it's called. Those songs make me despair on a fundamental level, but I think it's more "this song is too bad for me to finish my grocery shopping" and the cart is abandoned and I run for the door. (I shop with earbuds now).

my local grocery shop plays La Roux a lot, good shopping music imo

Seeing as La Roux has caused me to stop shopping and order pizza on the way home, it's not particularly good shopping music imo

Some Green Day song

cat's in the cradle by harry chapin is very cheap and obvious and the melody is annoying but it will get me every time.

Magic Power by Triumph. It's overwrought, riddled with cliches and flat-out goofy. But I love it to death.

the wannadies You and Me Song

it reminds me of a very specific set of friends, one specific and brief time, chaotic and obliterated before i even realized wtf was happening

Oh God, I remember being in a CVS late at night about a week or two after my mom died and Randy VanWarmer's "Just When I Needed You Most" came on and I just started bawling my eyes out, and I have a feeling I'd do the same thing if I ever heard it again.

I went through a phase after a bad breakup where Total Eclipse of the Heart had me like this. I could count on it being played once a shift at the IHOP where I worked.

i remember this being a booming thread