Earmageddon: Train, "Does Led Zeppelin II"

The Super Bowl is the one night a year when even people who don't care about football will allow themselves to be drawn into the discourse surrounding the game. Whatever your reasons for remaining immune to the lizard-brain appeal of the sport, the Super Bowl sets itself apart by changing football's typical three-hour orgy of tightly orchestrated violence into an even longer, even more over-the-top orgy of violence plus rampant consumerism. You don't like the game? No problem! Focus on the parade of wildly expensive ads instead. And if you're a bad American who doesn't want to watch commercials, well, there's always the halftime show.

For a really long time, halftime at the Super Bowl wasn't a terribly big deal — until the early '90s, it mostly featured marching bands and Up with People — but over the last 25 years or so, the NFL has realized that courting controversy can be great for ratings, so they've leaned into booking acts whose record sales are complemented by their ability and/or willingness to foment outrage among the league's core demographic. It might seem somewhat counterintuitive, but it's really pretty brilliant; bitch and moan as they might, even the most rabidly right-wing football fan isn't going to abandon the game just because they saw Janet Jackson's nipple, or Eminem took a knee, or Jennifer Lopez had kids singing in cages. Meanwhile, millions of sports agnostics tune in to watch the show, and the discourse gives the game free publicity. Rinse and repeat.

This trend continued with the most recent Super Bowl, which sent pearl-clutching into overdrive with the selection of Bad Bunny as the game's halftime performer. If you believed what a certain type of pundit had to say, this was a terrible pick because Bad Bunny's a sex-crazed, drug-addled pervert whose songs are loaded with filthy lyrics, but the obvious root of the issue was always that he's a Puerto Rican performer who has the audacity to sing in Spanish and is publicly outspoken against the current administration. Never ones to pass up an opportunity to grift off of ignorant rage, the shameless weirdos at Turning Point USA put together an alternate, "All American" halftime show, featuring Kid Rock and a smattering of country artists you've probably never heard of.

The whole sorry debacle is interesting from a sociological perspective for any number of reasons, but for our purposes here today, the thing I most want to focus on is the selection of Kid Rock as a wholesome, family-friendly alternative to the sexual scourge of Bad Bunny. If you care at all about any of this, you're already well aware of the hilarious hypocrisy underpinning the whole thing, but either way, that isn't really the point — at least not for our purposes here today. What really interests me about the 'Murica crowd rallying behind Kid Rock is the way it represents how little time it can take for the cultural Overton window to shift.

In other words, it wasn't that long ago that Kid Rock was seen as a performer parents wouldn't want their kids listening to, but these days, he clings to his last few shreds of cultural/commercial relevance by currying favor with the god 'n' guns crowd — and to a certain extent, it's worked. He hasn't charted a single anywhere in the world in nearly a decade, but he's been around long enough that the profanities of his past have mostly been forgotten. With enough time, whatever might seem scandalous or offensive today often has a way of becoming widely accepted.

I thought about this while listening to Train Does Led Zeppelin II.

To an extent, these thoughts were probably inspired by my desperate yearning to think about anything other than the fact that I was listening to Train, particularly in such an acutely inessential context. If you aren't aware of this album — and I wasn't, at least not until discount latrine catalog Dave Lifton desecrated my inbox with it — it delivers exactly what the title threatens, which is Train covering Led Zeppelin's second album. If you're even obliquely familiar with the resounding lack of imagination that defines Train's quote-unquote original material, it will not surprise you to know that frontman Pat Monahan approached the project from the dullest possible angle, i.e. recording a note-for-note remake.

"I’ve been covering songs for all these years, and that’s the way I do it," Monahan told Howard Stern. "When I see someone going for the original, I really have a lot of respect for that. I went to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame one year and sang 'Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress' with the Hollies and they were like, ‘Man, thank you, thank you for learning it the way we wrote it.’ So that’s why."

This is a reasonable and respectful-sounding explanation, although given the source, I tend to think that neither Monahan nor whichever assortment of hired hands happened to be calling themselves "Train" in 2016 could think of any personal touches to add to the material. This is, after all, the guy who sharted all over the Carmichael/Loesser classic "Heart and Soul" to create the loathsome "Play That Song" (link intentionally left out), and whose idea of a final draft lyric is "My dad used to tell me I was lazy / I got dance moves like Patrick Swayze / I'm the leftover turkey for the world's mayonnaisey" (see preceding parenthetical).

Such is the corrosive genius of cloaca-shaped Ben Wa ball Dave Lifton, who sent me this hollow turd not only because it was made by Train and therefore sucks, but also because by virtue of the fact that it contains zero Train songs, it is automatically superior to anything else in the group's dismayingly lengthy discography. In this way, Train Does Led Zeppelin II is a sort of Russian nesting doll of pain. You listen to it knowing that creativity was utterly beside the point for the people making it, and you're filled with horror as you contemplate the very real possibility that a non-zero number of people have heard it without realizing it's an album of covers — and yet you're also forced to concede that listening to Pat Monahan cover "Whole Lotta Love" or "Heartbreaker" is preferable to hearing "Meet Virginia" or "Drops of Jupiter" ever again.

Setting aside the cruel conundrum forced upon the listener, Train Does Led Zeppelin II is one of the dullest things you've ever heard, an exercise in musical futility whose outcome was predetermined long before anybody had the gall to book studio time. Yet this is what ends up being the most interesting thing about it: the simple fact that a group that was once seen as too dangerous for polite society has been so thoroughly subsumed into the cultural lexicon that an amplified glass of milk like Train can record a full-album tribute.

In a way, Train Does Led Zeppelin II is a perfect nutshell for this band's career, which has been spent sanding the edges off any hooks that couldn't simply be stolen. "Meet Virginia" roughly marks the spot where the quiet/loud/quiet dynamic popularized by various "alternative" acts became safe enough for hold music and the frozen foods aisle, while "Drops of Jupiter" leg-humps every orchestra-assisted slab of classic rock excess that came howling out of the '70s. As time wore on and the rock-adjacent hits started drying up, Monahan pulled a page from the Johnny Rzeznik playbook and went full adult contemporary. Like Bon Jovi, only somehow worse, they consistently gave the impression of a group whose only goal was to sell records by offering up echoes of sounds that had already been heard by the broadest possible cross-section of listeners. It could even be argued that this proudly mercenary approach is reflected in Monahan's decision to donate all the proceeds from Train Does Led Zeppelin II to charity — as Monahan told Stern, "My manager was like, ‘This is really good, maybe we shouldn’t just put it on the internet and give it to our fans, maybe we should figure out a way to get it into a lot of people’s hands.’ And then my other manager was like, ‘There’s gonna be so little that will come our way, let’s give it to the right people instead of you guys.'"

In other words: "We aren't going to make anything from this, so we might as well tell everyone we're giving it away."

I feel like it's important to stress that strictly from a performance perspective, there have undoubtedly been worse attempts to honor the Zeppelin catalog; in fact, you could put Train Does Led Zeppelin II on at low volume, let it play in the background at any random gathering, and feel very confident that no one would ever suspect they were listening to anything other than the original. The sheer competence brought to bear on these recordings is a big part of why the whole thing feels so pointless, though. It's a reasonable enough facsimile of the real thing, so why not just listen to that instead? Without a cuckoo Encomium-style curveball like, say, 4 Non Blondes attempting "Misty Mountain Hop," why bother at all?

I don't want to try and answer those questions, and I also do not want to listen to Train Does Led Zeppelin II ever again. I remain, however, naggingly intrigued by the oddly comforting notion that this album's existence represents a certain clumsy sort of progress, and entertained by the idea that one day, Bad Bunny's music will be given the tribute treatment by an act every bit as creatively timid as Train. It fills me with something like hope for the future.

Well, maybe not fills, because I still have plenty of room for fiery disdain aimed in the direction of leading horse deodorant Dave Lifton, who will only escape his looming punishment if the cold hand of death finally catches him first. Keep a fearful eye on your inbox, scumbag. Vengeance will be mine.