Monday, March 31, 2008

GLORY DAYS.

Per Adam Rubin:

BREAKING NEWS: Sweet Caroline, a Red Sox sing-along tradition stolen by the Mets, may be history. Fans can vote for a new eighth-inning sing-along song through April 4 at mets.com.

The choices:
Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison
Build Me Up Buttercup, The Foundations
I Love Rock ‘N Roll, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
I’m a Believer, The Monkees
Land of 1000 Dances, Wilson Pickett
Livin’ on a Prayer, Bon Jovi
Movin’ Out, Billy Joel
Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond
I’ll Be There For You, The Rembrandts
Waitin’ On A Sunny Day, Bruce Springsteen

My comments, after the jump.

Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison: just because the word “stadium” is in the lyrics doesn’t make it relevant. Brown Eyed Girl? This song was censored in the 70s for not being family friendly, one of the dumbest censorship attempts since Jagger had to sing “let’s spend some TIME together” on Ed Sullivan, but still. I have no idea what this is doing here.

Build Me Up Buttercup, The Foundations: While you can never go wrong with Motown, we’re not IN Motown, and the song’s pace is going to be a little plodding to be played every 8th inning for the rest of the year. Good chorus.

I Love Rock ‘N Roll, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: I like this choice because she’s a baseball fan (Orioles, natch), and it’s loud and obnoxious. However, I’m going to have the same problem with it that I do with most everything else on the list, that rock and roll is not a relevant musical form to most of the people playing on the Mets and a helluva lot of people coming to the ballpark these days.

I’m a Believer, The Monkees: Does someone on the Mets staff have stock in Neil Diamond’s publishing company? No, seriously. While this is probably the most lyrically relevant to Mets history, and is a great song, it’s just kind of funny that out of all the artists IN THE WORLD Neil Diamond gets two compositions on this list.

Land of 1000 Dances, Wilson Pickett: This is my pick. It’s classic, it gets everyone moving, and if you don’t like it you’re not breathing.

Livin’ on a Prayer, Bon Jovi: While I realize that Bon Jovi somehow got the ‘official singer of MLB’ tag the way Dane Cook had the official spokesperson tag last season, could we please just NOT? No, seriously.

Movin’ Out, Billy Joel: The worst song in the Billy Joel catalog with an annoying, embarrassing chorus. Please. HE’S A YANKEES FAN, AND SHOULDN’T BE REPRESENTED IN THIS LIST. OMG.

Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond: I’ll just link to the previous article from this space on this topic.

I’ll Be There For You, The Rembrandts: Where is this coming from? Does anyone care about this song besides the parents of the two members of this band? Whose cousin is working in the MLB offices?

Waitin’ On A Sunny Day, Bruce Springsteen: EARTH TO METS AUDIO PEOPLE: Let me introduce you to Bruce Springsteen. He wrote a song called “Glory Days,” which is one of the best rock and roll songs about baseball ever written. The Mets are even referenced in the video of the song. Everyone loves this song. People bring signs for it at his concerts. It’s got a great sing-a-long chorus. I’ll even overlook the fact that Bruce is a bandwagon Yankees fan. “Sunny Day” is a plague on the Springsteen catalog that needs to please disappear, could we not encourage him further? It’s bad enough that people get on planes and fly from Europe to see Bruce toting artificial sunflowers to wave around to get the song played - we need this at a Mets game like a hole in the head. And, it’s INEXCUSABLE that if you’re going to pick a Springsteen song out of his ENTIRE CATALOG you pick this one. You’re embarrassing yourselves right now.

I guess I should be glad “Center Field” by Fogerty isn’t on this list, because they’re all terrible. Bland, predictable, unoriginal, banal. I agree with Cerrone who is urging MetsBlog readers to write in for “Meet The Mets”. I would urge all seven MetsGrrl.com readers to write in “Glory Days” or anything by the Ramones. I realize that there are conflicts there as well, and while I’d like to write in Yo La Tengo or Ian Hunter, I am also a pragmatist and realize the impracticality of this request. I guarantee you there are two 16 year old kids from Long Island out there with iPods who could dj the 8th inning XM Radio Singalong (or whatever it is going to be called this year) better than the highly paid staff whose job it is to come up with these moronic things.