Review Summary: Shut up shut up shut up!
At one point in time (admit it), you liked Simple Plan. You sang along to ‘Welcome to My Life’, feeling it tug at your heartstrings knowing that nobody would ever
get you. Then when you walked in on your best friend kissing your girlfriend, you ran away sobbing, slammed the bedroom door, and blasted ‘Thank You’, a cathartic and well thought out anthem of betrayal. Then, when the pain became too much to handle, you played ‘Untitled’, touched by the band’s modesty in refusing to name a title and you slowly hoped you would just fade away, like Pierre sings about in the song. It was truly music after your own heart. Right?
Fast-forward approximately one month to ten years, and it is like going to bed with a smoking hottie, only to wake up next to an atrocity. Of course you regret it now, you must have been drunk off your ass to listen to music this bad. But to be fair, you weren’t old enough to drink when you listened to this so you were probably just a complete moron. But that’s okay, because so was I when I was thirteen. In fact, I still appreciated this band when I was twenty, which is pathetic and also why this is still rated so highly for me. So in an attempt to justify my own poor taste, I am going to give you the reason(s) that this album actually
doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets from just about everyone and their mother. I mean there must be a reason it appeals to people, even if those people are of a certain age and level of naivety.
Simple Plan is among the most hated “pop-punk” bands to come out in the past decade, that’s for sure. And for good reason - their singer has a prepubescent squeal for a voice, nobody in the band is any good at playing their respective instruments, and the lyrics wouldn’t have an emotional impact on a gullible fifth grader. Really, this is a band that for all intents and purposes doesn’t do anything right – well, except for one thing. They can craft one hell of a hook. And to anyone who remembers their impressionable early teen years, sometimes one catchy moment and a cheesy one-liner was all it took to elevate a band above its contemporaries. How do you think bands like Cartel got their feet off the ground? It’s exactly the sticking point of
Still Not Getting Any, as songs like ‘Welcome to My Life’, ‘Perfect World’, and ‘Untitled’ marked some of the catchiest songs of my teenage years. And that’s where the beauty (yeah, that’s right) of this album comes into play: if you can ignore this album’s annoyingly incessant flaws and just listen to the music, it is pretty damn great.
Every song features hook after hook. All eleven songs are insanely infectious, and it is difficult not to find yourself humming the melody to at least a few of them upon completion of the record. Don’t act so surprised, either – even the harshest critics of this album can’t deny its sheer catchiness, even if none of it was brought about by ingenuity. But then again, if you are listening to this album for experimentation, then you probably need to reconsider where you go looking for quality music. Because this simply
isn’t quality music, it’s
fun music. And fun music has a much smaller set of expectations by which it is critiqued. Basically it’s a combination of catchiness, lyrics, and diversity. The songs are certainly memorable, and there is enough of a difference between each one to mentally distinguish the tracks, so go ahead and check off two of those three requirements. It may be a carbon copy of another song, or just a catchy but stupid-as-fuc
k song, but either way, if it remains lodged in your brain for more than a few hours, it has done its job. Therein lies Simple Plan’s greatest and perhaps only strength, and
Still Not Getting Any is their pride and joy.
Let’s face it, there’s no way that this is a “great” record from any kind of artistic or professional standard – but that goes for most pop music nowadays, along with most of the things we lump together under the collective “pop-rock” umbrella. But when an album is a pleasure to listen to based solely on how fun/listenable it is, is that not a skill in itself? Bands like Fall Out Boy, Green Day, The All-American Rejects – they all have no real discernable talent outside of their sheer ability to be catchy as fuc
k, and Simple Plan falls into that category as well.
Still Not Getting Any is the record we love to look back and hate, and we have every right to. However, we shouldn’t forget the role it played on our musical journey – helping us to realize what we like in a song, what we dislike, and how to relate to lyrics. Even though everything about the album is very cheesy, it did the trick for us at one point in time, meaning that it appeals to a specific target…be it girls, young people, or just the musically inexperienced in general. It may not be the best thing anymore, but it played (and perhaps is still playing) its role in the music scene, and doing so quite effectively. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
