67. The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (February 1966)

1. Monday, Monday*

2. Straight Shooter

3. Got a Feelin'*

4. I Call Your Name

5. Do You Wanna Dance

6. Go Where You Wanna Go

7. California Dreamin'*

8. Spanish Harlem

9. Somebody Groovy

10. Hey Girl

11. You Baby

12. The 'In' Crowd

C+

Jesus Christ they need to clean that toilet.

Some albums seem designed to piss me off. This album manages to combine one of my least favourite styles of music - overproduced vocal pop - with one of my least favourite cultural movements - California hippies. The result is a superficially pretty album of bland pop which, when you dig into the lyrics, is actually a pretty smug and self-indulgent celebration of 1960s sleaze. This is an album where you'll hear the words "groovy" and "square" used unironically. "Straight Shooter" is entirely about drugs, but written in a coy way so that it comes across as a goofy love song. "The 'In' Crowd" is an unbearable song about how great it is to be hip and doing also sorts of crazy things. There are some nice shout-outs to female sexual empowerment on this album, but they're presented in a deeply unappealing way. And somehow all this shit led to the development of music such as the Carpenters and Kamahl. It's deeply irritating.

That said, there are a few good songs. "Monday, Monday" is very pretty, although far too long. "Got a Feelin'" is a beautiful folk ballad that points the way towards a lot of gentle psychedelia to come. And of course "California Dreamin'" is a beautiful song that everyone knows and that will outlast us all.

The problem with this album is that it stands somewhere between a collection of house wife's favourites and a self-consciously hip bunch of songs about sex and drugs. The result is that there's something for everyone, but as a whole, for me at least, it doesn't really hang together as an album. I suppose my big problem is that the Mamas and the Papas decided to take one of my least favourite approaches to an album - finding a unique sound, and then milking it for all it's worth. There's a bit of variety on this album, but not enough to rescue it from being overproduced schmaltz. 

So, yeah. Rolling Stone ranked this the 112th greatest album of all time in 2012. Your mileage may vary. To me, bar a couple of songs, it's pretty much everything that was wrong with music in the late 60s and early 70s - pretty but vacuous, wide-eyed but sleazy, and deeply, obnoxiously hip.

It's honestly making me a bit worried. The late 60s produced some of my very favourite music, but at the same time I forgot about all the hippies, hipsters, and the general breakdown of society that allowed so much crap to slip through. I won't go into it, but I have a lot of strong personal reasons for hating that sort of thing with a passion.

For all that, I plan to give a good review to the first Velvet Underground album. I'm complicated.