Most Hated Songs #4: "What I Am" by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians

Continuing with the songs that make me what to say Kill Me Right Now, we reach #4, "What I Am" by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians. I hate this song so much it turns me into a twitching, stuttering, apoplectic mess. An inexplicable hit in the late eighties, it was so bad that Brickell and her stupid hippie band never saw the charts again. She later hooked up with Paul Simon and then disappeared into thankful obscurity.

Meanwhile, we're left with the musical equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Her voice is annoying from the get-go; the nonsense lyrics are both stupid and irritating, and the music is that craptastic hippie folk-rock garbage that, in a perfect world, would get white people wearing dreadlocks arrested and deported to a country where bathing and shaving are unknown customs.

I really don't have the proper words to describe just how much I hate this song. It makes me want to plug my ears with cement. It causes me to lose the will to live. It makes me want to find a farmer's market and start punching hippies at random.

In college, I revealed the depth of my hate for this song to my friends during dinner at the dorms one night. I had a short temper back then and would explode in fits of rage that involved red-faced screaming and waving my arms in the air because I obviously cared. My friends, of course, found this tremendously entertaining and would poke me incessantly to get me to blow my top. (Spoiler: it wasn't that much of a challenge.)

In sympathy and commiseration for my hatred for this song, Bill "Ditto" Williams and "Super" Dave Rainwater called my phone, which upon answering, featured them playing this song for me and laughing hysterically. They did this until I took my phone off the hook. I'm planning my revenge upon them in the same way that Khan planned his vengeance on Captain Kirk.

I'd rather: clean all the porta-potties at one of those Grateful Dead tribute concert festivals—you know the ones where none of the goddamn bands can play a single frickin' instrument—for a hundred thousand years than ever listen to that ghastly long again.

Dante's Inferno Level Eight: Jerry Garcia's geisha

Listen instead to: Folk-rock done right by Michael McDermott in his debut single, "A Wall I Must Climb" (audio only). I fell in love with his first album, "620 W. Surf" in 1991 and got to see him play live at The Blue Note in Columbia, MO. I thought he was going to be the next Bob Dylan...what happened? Check out this article if you're curious...it's a good read!