"I hate this song," I heard someone say the other day. "And it's always on the radio."
They were referring to Girls Like You by Maroon 5. They might have a point, but I gave the opinion very little notice, as I had heard it many times before. They may as well have been talking in a bygone year, referring to songs such as Sugar, This Love, She Will Be Loved, or Payphone. The Maroon boys have become a part of the cultural furniture, knocking out the periodic hits over the last twenty years. Like a planet with a long, elliptical orbit, they pass out of memory, only to return once more into our consciousness. It might be an old hit on the radio, or perhaps a new one on television. Perhaps a recommendation on Spotify, or when someone mentions Mick Jagger. It might be a soulless version of cover of Three Little Birds on an even more soulless Hyundai World Cup advertisement. It matters not, you'll hear them; Maroon 5 have an inescapable gravity. They have thrived and survived for years, despite the adversity the pop music market and being a shit band from an era of shit music.
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| Adam and the boys. |
I am referring specifically to the very nadir of music, approximately from 1998 to 2004. Try think of a good tune from then. It's hard, isn't it? Songs that come to mind from that period: Elevation by U2, The Scientist by Coldplay, All Star by Smash Mouth, and Hero by Enrique Iglasius. That time also bore witness to Nelly, Ronan Keating's solo career, Matchbox Twenty, Evanescence, The Darkness, and Nickelback. Can you take any more? How about Five for Fighting, Train, and the solo careers of Robbie Williams and Geri Halliwell? Let's go one more round, through the very depths of this valley of woe and tears: Because I Got High by Afroman, Sk8r Boi by Avril Lavigne, Fix You by Coldplay, Out of Reach by Gabrielle, the Cheeky Girls and Las Ketchup. Most people will say that music was better when they were young, but if you are my age, you would need to be dangerously intoxicated on nostalgia to make such a claim.
This is the pestilential cauldron that Maroon 5 emerged from. They knew their product would only ever be of a mediocre standard, but the saw an opportunity to ply their trade in such a lacklustre market. They are a merry band of stevedores, and like the dockers of yesteryear, they keep turning up again and again, never disheartened. Regardless of whether the opportunities are plentiful or scarce, they apply their mercenary work ethic to their music. Some times they must walk away disappointed, hands in pockets; other times, they hit gold with another radio-friendly hit. Their members are near-anonymous, except the lead singer, who cannot sing well, and looks like scuzzy, sleazy loser. His surname is Levine, a name that sounds like a mix of 'letch' and 'slime', and he comes across as the most basic of fuck boys who has rendered many of his groupies infertile with STIs. One must assume that their fans are very ordinary women. You might query that last sentence, for some Maroon 5 fans could be men. I considered that possibility, but found it impossible to imagine a man choosing to listen to a Maroon 5 song, much in the way that a woman would never enter the realm of MGTOW and Incels, and listen to a Linkin Park song.
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| The Maroon boys earning their bread. |
At a guess, Maroon 5 fill the need of people who need music to play in a shopping mall or a department store. Adam Levine's synthesised voice can be heard in Starbuck's or MacDonald's, or at a party where the DJ doesn't know what kind of music the birthday girl likes. Or perhaps they find fandom among teenage girls who have yet to make debut into the world of actual music. And there are all those poor souls who don't actually like listening to music, but need something to fill the void at a house party or the car (or at their wedding). In these situations the musical soldiers of fortune come to the rescue. As long as we have unremarkable, unthinking consumers, who want only for music of no distinction — something to accompany the Pepsi advertisement at the Super Bowl — we will have Maroon 5. They will undoubtedly continue, walking into eternity; like the Rolling Stones and their decades-long career, they will truly move like Jagger.
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| Did someone beat me to the punch? |
