All the radio stations seem to have Stone Sour’s "Through Glass" on overdrive rotation lately, and it’s really beginning to piss me off.  The last time a song on the radio annoyed me this much was Hoobastank’s "The Reason". (See "The Atrophy of Rock & Roll")

Whereas "The Reason" was a completely emasculating ditty about removing your own soul and replacing it with one more to your girlfriend’s liking, "Through Glass" is a monotonously repetitive and completely meaningless collection of randomly-selected words and phrases.  I haven’t done an in-depth statistical analysis yet, but it seems to me that by the time you’ve heard the first 10 seconds of the song, you’ve heard 90% of the rest of it.  This song was on the radio while I was installing crown moulding in the kitchen a couple weeks ago, and I swear I made it halfway around the kitchen before this crap was finally over.  It just droned on and on and on ad nauseum.  Please don’t correct me if I have a syllable or two wrong here, I really don’t care to seek out the song to double-check it, but I think after that first exposure to the song I had the chorus fairly-well committed to memory.

Excuse me?  Can anyone help me extract a coherent thought from this?  What glass?  The glass in the door a girlfriend has locked between her and you because you’re a blithering idiot?  Perhaps it’s the glass in the door of the rubber room where this crap was written.  Hey, they’re nice words and all, and I’m sure in the hands of a skilled writer they could be coaxed into something more closely resembling human communication.  I could forgive the words if they showed up once or twice over the course of the song.  It’d be a little abstract train of thought thing.  But after the 500th time it gets repeated, the train of thought begins to resemble the Lionel around the Christmas tree, you know?  It’s going nowhere, and it’s going there slowly.  And then there’s what can only be described as the sub-chorus, a kind of recursive variant on the standard Rock & Roll verse/chorus/verse structure involving further levels of indenting.

Once again… WTF?  It’s almost like he’s trying to say something… almost.  Is there something in your head that you’re trying to get out here, because I’m not getting it, man.  The stars are lying to me?  Wait here while I go get my tinfoil hat, okay?

I won’t reprint all the lyrics here, but feel free to go look them up, and get back to me if you can find the slightest shred of meaning in there.  Hey, I’m all for meaningless songs, I mean the Cocteau Twins’ lyrics are as close to meaningless as you can get.  Half the time they’re not even words, but that’s because Elizabeth Fraser tends to use her voice as an instrument, not as a communications mechanism.  Even when she is singing words, she’s polishing their syllables, and glossing them over such that they don’t even resemble themselves anymore.  They’ve become soft-focussed silhouettes of words by the time she’s done with them, and they sound just beautiful even if they don’t mean a thing.

There is, however, a subtle difference between scatting and babbling, and this dude’s babbling.