Whitney Houston "I Will Always Love You"

Though I didn’t mention it in the previous post, I suppose a large part of my distaste for requests has everything to do with my 6 years of hosting Request Radio.

Night after night I was asked to play songs that I simply didn’t like.  Pop tunes in the era of N’Sync and Britney Spears and “Mmmm Bop” and “Wannabe” over and over again.

Worse, was that there was always a dedication that went with it.  And often they were just inappropriate.

Now, the bulk of the audience was high school age, so there was just something wrong about being asked to say and play:

“From Matt to Andrea, this song is for you,” and then play Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love To You.”

Or have a 6th grader ask another kid out by requesting “Nightmare On My Street.”

The one that really drove me nuts was when someone---sometimes a kid and sometimes an adult---would request Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and send out a dedication to their boyfriend or girlfriend saying “I love you so much!”

It was annoying, because “I Will Always Love You” is perhaps one of the greatest break-up songs of all time.  It’s about leaving someone, giving them up and letting them go.

And people kept using it to “say how they really feel” about someone. 

Irony!!!

Worse, if I’d try to explain this to the requester (“You know this is a break-up song, right?”) I’d just come off like I was some kind of prick.  So I gave up offering my helpful, and correct, advice, and just resigned myself to this truth: 

Requests are stupid.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Hanson "Mmm Bop"

I spent 6 years in radio---my first 6 years in radio---at a station that played Top 40.

And yes, a lot of what hits the Top 40 is inane drivel. Pap. Garbage.

Silly Pop songs that don't have the gravitas of a Fluffernutter sandwich.

But not "Mmm Bop."

Sure, when I first heard this song, I was ready to dismiss it. The chorus is ridiculously catchy, yet requires no knowledge of a spoken language. I saw that it was performed by young boys so precocious they practically qualified as Muppets. And the Request Line phone calls from hyperventilating teenage girls . . . Oy!

But then I heard an interview with one of the Muppets who explained that an "Mmm Bop" was a split-second. That in the larger picture, our time on Earth is nothing but a blip, and then it's gone. Gone in an Mmm Bop.

That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen, "Mmm Bop" is about death.

"Mmm Bop" is about the temporal nature of our corporal being. It asks the existential question of "Who will still care?" when you look up one day and you have become old and irrelevant.

So next time you hear this song and you start to mock it as a sugary trifle, know that the song, and the universe, are paying your disdain no mind, as you will be gone and forgotten in an Mmm Bop.

Hanson, introduced by Kelsey Grammer. How 1998!