Make this sucky music stop!!!

Greetings, and welcome to this week’s tympanic tickling edition of Mecca Muzak Monday on what will always be a bittersweet day for your sciurine author.  For today’s entry, let’s try a little scientific musical experiment… better get your safety goggles ready!

Remember that classic commercial for Reese’s peanut butter cups that showed how bringing two good things together can create something that’s great?  Well, what if we stood that on its ear and brought together two things that totally suck?  Would the resulting mess be even more heinous than the individual parts?

To test this out, let’s take two of music’s crappiest guinea pigs.  Let’s start with the worst band of the 1990’s…

An award they obviously won almost every year of the decade…

Despite their unfathomable popularity, you won’t find many people these days who will admit to liking Hootie and the Blowfish.  Their music was bland and uninteresting, and all of their songs sounded the exact same kind of pathetic.  When the only song of theirs I can even find listenable is a cover from my nominee for the most overrated band of the 1970’s, they have achieved epic levels of flat out suckitude.

And in the opposite corner, wearing the assless trunks, we have that most annoying of all American music genres…. country and western!

Sorry Conway, but you were my most accessable image for C&W…

So what would happen if you put this shitty band in a particle accelerator along with this even shittier form of music?  Would the resulting precipitate be something so abominable, that we’d have to quarantine off the entire continent the experiment was performed on?

Sir, you must leave at once! The chances of catching the boot scootin’ boogie are at Level Red!

Actually…… no.  What you get is the song I tried so hard to hate when it popped up on last Fall’s Mecca CD, but in the end just couldn’t.  And I’ve even come around to like it enough to have made it this week’s MMM honoree…

Darius Rucker’s 2013 version of “Wagon Wheel” is itself a cover of a song which has a bizarre history behind its creation that can be found by clicking on the Wiki article I linked to at the beginning of this sentence.  But even more mind boggling than the origin of the song is just how in the hell the black lead singer of a horrific rock band managed to become a star in the lily-white Opryland of country music…

This is every bit as mockable as Vanilla Ice.

But Darius shows us that if you put your heart and soul into something, you can overcome traditional stereotypes and become anything you want.  Now if only he had put that much effort into making Hootie and the Blowfish a halfway decent band….