Tear Jerker / Todd in the Shadows

Pop Song Reviews

• His drunken breakdown at the start of the Best of 2013 vid. He starts playing "The Monster" on his piano, but it degenerates until he starts smashing random keys and eventually headdesks on his keyboard. When Kyle and Paw try and cheer him up, he takes out a huge bottle and starts drinking.
• In his "I Took A Pill In Ibiza" review, Todd scoffs at the idea that Mike Posner could make him feel sorry for him. Then he hears the opening lines^note "I took a pill in Ibiza/To show Avicii I was cool", then immediately takes that back. The aftermath of these lines is shown as a montage of Todd falling into depression, complete with sad piano music. Later on in the review, Todd realizes that he's always felt sorry for Mike.
  • The review is even sadder in hindsight when one remembers that Avicii took his own life nearly two years after Todd posted said review.
• His feelings of being off trends in regards to most of 2016's hits during the "7 Years" review, especially given how much he liked 2015.
• While it's a good dissection of Tekashi 6ix9ine's rise and continued success, Todd's review of "Trollz" is pretty joyless. He's clearly frustrated by "cancel culture's" inability to actually cancel predators and criminals like 6ix9ine and Chris Brown, and he ends the video by asking if 2020 can get any worse before walking off. Hell, Todd didn't even bother to learn how to play the song on the piano for this one.
• In his "Top 10 Worst Songs of 2020" list, Todd admits that the Justin Bieber song "Lonely" did succeed in making him feel some sympathy for Bieber, since Bieber clearly did struggle with the pressures of being a child star. However, Todd also sees the song as a different kind of sad: the kind where it's hard to take the song seriously due to Bieber's performance, but at the same time you feel bad for laughing at it.
• "Top 10 Best Songs of 2020" is a mostly wistful, sentimental list as it entails all the songs that Todd felt helped him get through the absolute disaster of a year that was 2020, but he still has to make a comment on just how horrible it was when he gets to Lil Baby's "The Bigger Picture", a Protest Song for the Black Lives Matter Movement that Todd empathized with the most as, in his words, "Lil Baby isn't coming from anger, he's coming from pain," with Todd briefly spilling out all his frustrations of the crap the world has had to deal with over not just 2020, but the last few years in general.
  Todd: ...This song is also how I felt watching the Muslim Ban, Puerto Rico, Charlottesville, every fucking thing that happened in these last few years, including this last week where I was supposed to be trying to make this goddamn video, but I kept getting distracted by more horrible fucking news! This shit fucking sucks and it's gotta fucking stop!
  Lil Baby: We all gotta start somewhere / might as well gon' 'head, start here / we done had a hell of a year
  Todd: (resigned) ...Yeah, we sure did.
  • Morgan Wallen did a song that made it to Todd’s #1 list for the year. And he even said things were looking up for Wallen. Then comes his reprehensible behavior with him screaming the N-word at black people, Todd immediately disowned him.
• His review for Aaron Lewis' "Am I The Only One" ends up feeling a bit sad, because Todd has him pegged right out of the gate; Lewis sang a lot about bullying and parental neglect when he was in Staind, and Todd suspects he internalized a lot of it, because Lewis is currently trying to do tough guy, pro-American posturing now that he's a country singer. He feels Lewis doesn't come off as righteous in the song, but rather a bitter guy just screaming at his TV exactly as he describes in the lyrics, and possibly directing some of his animosity towards his own children for not sharing his political views. Todd even notes the lack of warmth in his singing, saying Lewis doesn't bother to sing about what he likes about America.
• Todd speculates that the reason for the video for "Sweetest Pie" by Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa, a sex jam, being about the destruction of men is because Megan Thee Stallion is working through her rough 2020 (getting a gun injury that whiny internet bros blamed her for, released an extremely explicit song and having male conservatives attack her personally), given how 2021 had her running over men with a truck and rapping about how much she hates Adam Levine, and she's just not in a place to be sexy and coy.
• Todd's #3 pick in his "Best Songs of 2022" list is "As It Was" by Harry Styles. While he praises the song's musical composition, he also acknowledges that it sounds very melancholy, most likely because it was written during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  Todd: And it's really saying something that for a guy who sold himself all year as your sexy, beautiful glamour boy, he kicked off this era with a song about being a depressed shut-in.
  Harry Styles: ♫ Why are you sitting at home on the floor, what kind of pills are you on... ♫
  Todd: I feel like that's yet more shadow from the pandemic. And possibly the darkest one yet if even Harry Styles is being affected by it. If even he, at 28, is writing songs to make him sound like a 45-year-old divorced man.
• His "review" of "Last Night" by Morgan Wallen is less a review of the song itself and more about Todd trying to figure out how to feel about Wallen's comeback and musing on the various complicated angles one can and should or should not approach celebrity controversies from.
  • During the review Todd rattles off some N-Word related controversies from various white celebrities that were worse than what Wallen got in trouble for and before he even finishes he becomes absolutely ashamed at the amount of beloved white celebrities who've dropped the N-Word in undeniably racist ways.
• Todd's saga with Morgan Wallen reached a bittersweet point come early 2024 where Todd ended up placing Wallen's "Man Made a Bar" on his "Best of 2023" list. Todd appears very conflicted about his own opinion, genuinely liking the song and understanding that the fraught context surrounding Wallen's controversies — for better and for worse — aren't definitive, but still very guilty and bitter about saying anything positive about "the N-word guy".
  Todd: Morgan, if you fucking embarrass me again, I swear to God...
• While he overall liked Cowboy Carter, Todd is still very confused as to why Beyonce not only covered an extremely famous country song like “Jolene”, but also changed the lyrics and included a reference to Becky with the Good Hair from Lemonade, bringing up her and Jay-Z’s marital strife from almost a decade prior. Why dig up that drama again?
  Todd: I’ve always kind of struggled with Beyonce’s emotional imperviousness. Beyonce’s Lemonade was such a powerful album because it showed cracks in the armor for the first time. That album is about a lot of things, but as a concept, the hook was, "What happens when you’re the baddest bitch in the universe and you get betrayed just like any other woman? What happens when you’re literally Beyonce and this still happens to you? What happens when there’s a trifling man who can’t just be crushed like a bug? What happens when Queen Bee isn’t offended but genuinely hurt?" It was a fascinating position because she had never been there before.

One Hit Wonderland

• Any time the One Hit Wonderland story of an artist ends in their premature deaths, such as Pauly Fuemana of OMC, Chrissy Amphlett of the Divinyls, Zac Foley of EMF, Falco, Scatman John, Van McCoy and Patty Donahue of The Waitresses. Also lampshaded when finding out about the death of Shawty Lo of D4L when he wanted to cover a simple and quick artist for research into a One Hit Wonderland episode, which resulted in him doing a bit more research into the group and talk a bit more respectfully of the deceased in the process of that episode.
  • The Scatman John video hits particularly hard. His career turned out to be a very inspirational story about a vocalist who'd battled a disability with singing/scatting (John Larkin had a significant stutter his whole life), and sang songs about making the world a better, more tolerant place. But after Todd talks about how he was Big in Japan, it turned out that John Larkin died of lung cancer at the end of 1999. Comments on the video are often something to the effect of "I didn't expect to cry at the end of this!" However, Todd turns it into a Heartwarming Moment at the end by saying that Scatman John absolutely deserved better, and admitting that the Scatman's story is one of the most inspirational things that he's ever covered on One Hit Wonderland.
• His reflection on how "Eve of Destruction" isn't nearly as dated as it appears at first glance, as the Middle East is still a powder keg, racism is still just as ugly, and Superman is even killing people. And yes, he actually does manage to make that last one just as somber as the rest, as an illustration of the kind of world that could create such a story.
• His discussing the very bleak topic of Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning"; namely, the Australian military's incredibly poor treatment of Aboriginals.
• The review of Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers' Dance" takes a dark turn when it's revealed that her mainstream success was derailed neither by a song nor an album, but because she took a personal hiatus upon the death of her fiancé in a boating accident. Todd concludes the video with a Tear Dryer by affirming his opinion that she deserved better.
• After reviewing "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" and spending a review where he marveled at Rick Derringer singing his favorite 70s rock song, working with "Weird Al" Yankovic in the 80s, and writing and singing Hulk Hogan's WWF theme song "Real American", Todd was dismayed to find out Rick Derringer got involved in a lot of right-wing causes and even re-wrote "Real American" for the Alex Jones show. The disappointment is so painful.
  Todd: I'm sorry, the wind just went out of my sails.
• The S Club 7 episode of One Hit Wonderland gets a bit harrowing towards the end when Todd talked about how Simon Fuller over-worked the band and tried to launch a kids' version of the group with S Club 8. It just makes it extra sad that their one hit in America (especially since the whole point of their TV show was becoming big in America) was a boring, mid-tempo ballad that wasn't indicative of their overall sound.
  Todd: All of this just served to remind me how mercenary this all was. S Club 7 were not a band. They were a franchise.
  • It gets even sadder when Todd talks about the numerous problems the band had after they broke up (drugs, health problems, money problems, arguments online, etc).
    Todd: So, did they deserve better? Yes. The same way every child star deserves better than to be ground up and spit out by the pop machine.
• During his review of "Face Down" by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus on One Hit Wonderland when discussing the topic of abuse he speaks about how he knows people who are or have been in abusive relationships and just how hard for various reasons it can be for them to get out of it.
• Todd explains how Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" can rub people the wrong way by telling a personal story about how he heard it randomly in April 2020, when COVID lockdowns were at their worst and he hadn't seen another person in weeks. The happy tone of the song versus his unhappy reality created a dissonance so bad it made him feel like he was losing his mind.
• A recurring theme in the review of "Your Woman" by White Town is that sole White Town member Jyoti Prakash Mishra was something of a Reclusive Artist for a long time, making it difficult for Todd to find performance footage or photos of him from when he had a hit single on the charts, let alone before the hit. It probably didn't help any that one of the pieces of media coverage he found from when "Your Woman" was still on the charts was a British tabloid paper cruelly and gratuitously body-shaming Jyoti over an unflattering paparazzi photo ^note Todd opted not to show the photo itself, instead focusing on the text of the article and calling out the publication as jerkasses for printing it.

Trainwreckords

Entire episodes of "Trainwreckords" often take this tone, since the main criteria is that the album was so badly received that the artist or band never recovered, either critically or commercially, especially since it isn't uncommon for the failure to be partly the result of things not going well in their personal lives either.

• What is arguably the definitive episode to illustrate this was the episode on "The Funky Headhunter" by MC Hammer. While Hammer was once one of the biggest and most popular acts from 1988 to 1992, he soon became nothing more than a punchline and was quickly running out of money. So he tried a last-ditch effort to reinvent himself by trying to go gangster... which no one bought into. Hammer soon went into massive bankruptcy afterwards, remembered only as an outdated relic of his time.
  Todd: The whole MC Hammer story reads like Shakespearean tragedy now. His biggest crime was that he wanted to be loved.
  • Todd notes that Gangster Rap, who's rise had been largely responsible for the decline of his image and popularity due to the massive transformation of the culture surrounding rap music, would decline as the dominant rap genre, with the deaths of The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur leading to everyone deciding things had escalated too much in the scene. Had Hammer simply stuck to his guns and what made him so popular to begin with, he may have weathered the storm and rose back into popularity. Especially since, as Todd mentions, his actual technical skills improved on Headhunter compared to his older music. Given that his music is often fondly remembered these days, one has to wonder What Could Have Been had he not been so desperate to conform to everyone's expectations.
• Oasis' Be Here Now is not the most dramatic or unusual career-derailing album in the series, but it's still notable for being one of the most straightforward. It wasn't a misguided attempt to try something new, or a desperate attempt to keep up with the times; for better or worse, it sounds like and is an Oasis album. The problems were more direct: during the production of the album, the band was totally dysfunctional and at each other's throats (especially the Gallaghers themselves), only doing it to keep making money and coked out of their damn minds the whole time. The result is a droning, painful, overlong album that Noel Gallagher himself has absolutely no time for. Worse still, while the public were not fond of it, the critics praised it lavishly and excessively, as they had completely failed to predict the success of Oasis' earlier albums Definitely, Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? and just assumed this one would be just as successful, only for it to fall flat and greatly damage Oasis' image as one of the decade-defining rock bands of the 90's.
• The episode about Creedence Clearwater Revival and the album Mardi Gras is rather tough to watch, especially considering this was the last album the band made before bitterly breaking up. With how the John Fogerty and his bandmates legitmately despise each other nowadays, its hard to see one the most iconic classic rock bands of the 20th century fall apart in an instant.
• The episode covering Lauryn Hill was especially painful, with the MTV Unplugged 2.0 concert just highlighting a person on a downward spiral. Even worse, for those familiar with Lauryn Hill, they know all too well that it's not going to get better for her. While Todd didn't let her off the hook for her pretensions and lack of professionalism (performing half-finished songs with a blown out voice, that only gets worse as the show nears its end), he also calls out her record label and MTV for releasing a record that damaged her reputation so badly it all but ensured another album would never happen. Driving all this home is the famous moment in the middle of the show where Lauryn has an emotional breakdown, and starts uncontrollably weeping in the middle of a song. By this point, Todd is horrified, and feels like he shouldn't be watching this. Rarely has a musician's self-destruction been put on public display like this, and it's easily one of the most depressing reviews Todd's ever done.
• The episode about Madonna's American Life, which clearly shows Madonna feeling Lonely at the Top and feeling bitter about her failed attempts at a Hollywood career, which Todd has covered at length. That'd be sad enough, except it was supposed to be a record protesting the Iraq War, so she just came off as an unsympathetic narcissist.
  Todd: How do you keep making songs when you view your entire back catalog as vapid and corrupt?
• The episode about Robin Thicke's Paula is perhaps his most serious yet, managing to have some sympathy for the man, even admitting he has talent, while also finding him pathetic, manipulative, and off-putting. This was a man who, in 2013, had one of the best-selling singles of all time in "Blurred Lines," and then one year later, wound up a pariah whose sales were practically zero, and he had no one to blame but himself. He compared it to Ben Affleck's performance in Gone Girl; a man thrust into the public eye with plenty of skeletons in his closet and everyone just waiting for him slip up and fail. It's extra harrowing seeing the awkward live performances while Thicke promoted the album, with the audience either dead silent or laughing at his brazen attempts to put his now ex-wife on the spot, which were All for Nothing as she very much did not come back to him and the album was a humungous flop.
  Todd: He just... seemed like a douchebag...
• The Clash's Cut the Crap is rightfully forgotten by the band and their fans, consisting of awfully produced songs that boil down to Joe Strummer and a drum machine. What footage of the time Todd manages to find though, it's clear Strummer's statements are just a put-on and he's just going through the motions. Indeed, halfway through recording Cut The Crap, he realized what a huge mistake he'd made letting their manager fire Mick Jones. He and Mick eventually reconciled after the band broke up, but The Clash would never play again, and thanks to Joe's premature death, they never will. Such an ignoble end to arguably the greatest punk band ever.
• Gregg Allman and Cher's one album together while they were married, Two the Hard Way, ends up being rather sad; few members of the public believed they were a good couple to begin with and the album didn't dissuade that notion. The planned tour was cancelled after one week after their respective audiences got into fights, which caused Gregg (who struggled with drugs and alcohol most of his life) to start drinking again, which was the final straw for Cher. This Trainwreckord may not have destroyed the careers of the singers, but it did torpedo their marriage.
  Todd: This album feels a lot like having a baby to save the marriage; it's bad for the both of you and it fucks up the baby.
  • That quote especially becomes Harsher in Hindsight when Cher and Gregg did do that. Their son Elijah grew up to become the frontman of the Industrial Rock band Deadsy, however extra harsh is that Elijah became a heroin addict at age 11 and wouldn't become clean and sober until 2008, mostly due to his abandonment issues from said parents.
• Todd's analysis on the failure of Metallica's St. Anger centralizes a lot about the serious interpersonal breakdowns of the band and why even as the album was trying to serve as their sort of redemption from it, the uncomfortable personal revelations still underscore everything and make the listen that much more awkward. For his point on James Hetfield especially, Todd has very pointed words about his fall from his former titan status.
  Todd: Y'know, I think we've all have that moment when we realize our parents aren't gods — like, you saw one of them cry or something like that and you realize they're just people, and it's just a very unsettling and destabilizing feeling. On St. Anger, I have never been more acutely aware of James Hetfield as a human being, and I hate it.
• "At what cost a hit?" Crash by The Human League is a rare case where the band didn't sell out in a desire for fame and money, but out of exhaustion. They had no other ideas and all the other band members had quit, so they turned to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who wrote R&B funk hits that were completely unfitting for a white British synthpop band to sing. Bandleader Phil Oakey was interviewed by Melody Maker after the album's release (by an interviewer who actively hated the album), and Todd outright winces at Oakey's response to the Armor-Piercing Question thrown at him.
  Interviewer: Is this even a Human League record?
  Phil Oakey: Well, it's got our name on it, doesn't it?
  Interviewer: Do you even like this record?
  Phil Oakey: I think so. I have to. Haven't got anything else.
  • Even the album's cover, a blurry low-res picture of the band, shows how done they truly were with everything. And the reason the album had such a bad picture? Because the photographer was a Jerkass who tried to get the female members to do inappropriate things during the shoot.
• Carpenters never did get much critical respect until well after Karen Carpenter's death from anorexia. In spite of having a string of radio hits in the seventies, they had been bothered by this lack of respect. After facing slumping sales of a couple albums owing to overexposure, they tried something new with Passage, which ultimately got met with a confused indifference. They never had a gold record ever again at that point, with a silver lining being that their cover of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" became a hit in Europe, and Todd found himself loving it.
• Todd was hesitant to make an episode on Katy Perry's Witness, despite the album immediately and undeniably fitting the criteria for Trainwreckords (and as he points out, Todd's fans knew it almost as soon as Trainwreckords established itself) because he's now sincerely hoping Katy can make a comeback, in contrast to his early antagonism towards her. In fact, it's a bit harrowing to see footage from this album cycle all in one sitting, seeing the videos, live performances, and interviews all tank miserably. While Todd purposefully doesn't try to guess Katy's frame of mind at this time, the themes of self-loathing and misery on Witness are hard to ignore. Since Katy traded on a lot of The Hunger Games imagery for this record, Todd compares her to Effie Trinket, a flamboyant spokesperson of the Capitol that finally joined the resistance, and looks absolutely miserable without her wealth and status to bolster her up. Once Taylor Swift put out her single "Look What You Made Me Do" on the very same day Katy dropped the "Swish Swish" video — more or less kicking Katy when she's down, and decisively winning a years-long feud — it was the final nail in the coffin. It's hard not to feel some level of sadness for Katy, watching her relevance, public image and self-image crumble to dust in the span of a half-hour video.
  • Todd specifically calls attention to the last video released, "Hey Hey Hey", and argues that it clearly spells out Katy's self-image problems: the video has Katy playing a Marie Antoinette-like princess who dreams of becoming Joan of Arc, but Todd points out that Perry's attempt to do so in real life failed, and everyone watching knew that — and so did Katy herself.
  • As Todd notes, the new direction itself was more or less doomed to failure. Perry had made her success in pop trading on deliberate artifice and bubbly innuendo, and even before Witness, the more serious tone of Prism had made it a "delayed flop" bolstered only by previous goodwill and name recognition; when she tried to change direction without changing her sound, and performed big loud "purposeful" pop anthems about how big loud pop anthems are a distraction from the world's problems ("Chained to the Rhythm"), it came off as crying wolf, insincere in its self-criticism, and even hypocritical and insulting at worst. Worse, the reaction to the 'purposeful pop' was essentially 'Yeah, that's nice, when are you going to release the stuff we actually like?' Like Hammer's turn into gangsta rap — originally a poor gangbanger from Oakland, trying to reinvent himself but keeping his synchronized dance routines — it was an impossible change to sell, no matter how sincerely or seriously the artist felt about it.
    Todd: Katy Perry is the spectacle, not the spectator.
  • Katy Perry had avoided the feminist label for a long time, but in the lead up to Witness, she had stumped for Hillary Clinton and joined the Women's March after the election. Admirable for sure, but vagueness about her politics and generally being guarded with the press made it difficult to identify with her. A major sore point is the fact that she's never commented one way or another about the rape accusations against Dr. Luke, her former producer (aside from not working with him anymore). Todd also points out that Perry is from a conservative, right-wing family, and it's entirely possible that the vagueness about her politics may have stemmed from Katy simply not wanting to make her already-strained relationship with them any worse.
• Most people assume Will Smith's rap career fell off because his film career was far, far more successful and Will just wasn't able to change his music with the times. While that's still Metaphorically True, his final album Lost & Found reveals Will to be bitter and angry at the hip-hop community for not giving him his due. This even extends to a diss track aimed at his ex-wife Sheree for her Holier Than Thou attitude since she became a born again Christian (including references to possibly murdering her). Even if you feel Will is justified in his anger, it is extremely jarring to hear the Fresh Prince publicly clap back at the mother of his oldest son. Todd compares it to Michael Jordan's infamous Hall of Fame speech, where a squeaky clean superstar finally cracks and uses their platform to air every petty grievance that's piled up over the course of their career. What's more, since Will Smith has frequently used ghostwriters for his raps, getting angry over not getting his due as a rapper makes him come off like a massive hypocrite. In spite of his success, Lost & Found paints Will Smith as an incredibly unhappy person.
  • Smith's conflicted nature extends to the album itself. Obviously, like any superstar, he wanted to keep the fans he had and make more while expanding his sound in a new direction; at the same time, he tried to copy nearly every then-current trend in a hip-hop and rap scene that he acknowledged had long since passed him by, and also seemed to think that this comeback was a good opportunity to air his secret frustrations and grievances with everyone that he saw as against him. What's left is a complete mess — the tonal contrast between his light-hearted old persona ("Party Starter", "Switch") and his embittered, confessional new side ("Mr. Niceguy", "Ms. Holy Roller") is jarring, and both drag the other down to an extent. Todd is uncomfortable every time "Pissy" Will emerges, for the wrong reasons, and in the one instance where he seems like he's going somewhere interesting — attacking racist white audiences for considering him non-threatening — he quickly drops the thread; likewise, Will censoring his own use of "fuck" in "Tell Me Why" is met with much disappointment by Todd. What could've been either a great return to form, a much-needed update, or a bold new direction for Smith instead becomes the sound of a man's two selves tearing each other apart.
• American Dream was a result of a promise that Neil Young made to David Crosby when the latter got in trouble with the law as a result of a cocaine addiction that nearly killed him. Crosby got himself clean, so the full Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reconvened to make that lineup's first studio album since the legendary Déjà Vu. However, with the group long known for their infighting, which did not improve by the 1980s, it felt like a largely half-hearted effort. Crosby, Stills & Nash remained as dysfunctional as ever, never releasing a hit album again and touring only intermittently before acrimoniously splitting off for the final time years later. One of the songs on the album was Crosby's "Compass", about how the addiction ruined his life. Todd didn't enjoy the song, but conceded that there are people defending it on the premise alone and that he was fine with that.
  • CSN&Y's big draw was always that these four solo artists could play with such melody and harmony, and make their distinct creative aesthetics mesh on the album even if they couldn't get along in private (they even called the project that to emphasize its collaborative nature). By 1988, though, they had become very different musicians, and it shows in a divided album: Crosby was scarred by years of drug abuse, institutionalization and painful rehab that had left him a changed man and stymied his output; Stills' own battles with substance abuse had worsened, and was currently going through a "mid-life crisis" style of songwriting about fast cars and girls; Nash was chasing AOR trends with cheesy, soft synth ballads; Young was off on experimental sonic directions that would soon launch him back to superstardom with Freedom, but at the time were sabotaging the album's production. Todd even speculates that Neil Young was half-assing it the whole time he worked on the album, either because Young was only doing it out of needing to be true to his word about a promise he made that he never thought he'd have to cash in, and/or that Young was saving his really good material for his solo career. Todd compares it to camping trips between old friends who have lost touch — they don't go well, and nobody wants to actually do them because they fail to bring you together, just making it clear how much you've grown apart instead.
• As Todd points out in the Run–D.M.C. episode, D.M.C.'s lack of commitment or enthusiasm for Crown Royal were coupled with his greater unfulfilled ambitions for what the group could be. Already battling depression and substance abuse that had caused him to contract spasmodic dysphonia and had restricted his vocal range, D was thinking about the legacy of what he saw as all-time great artists like Dylan and Clapton, and, worried that Run-D.M.C. had reached their creative peak as a hip-hop group long ago, wanted to expand their sound into something rootsier. Rev. Run, by contrast, was very determined to not admit that their best days were behind them, chasing all the current trends that he could, and followed Clive Davis's directive to cram the album full of big guest stars on every track (some of whom were temporarily overruled by their own management out of fear the album would be a dud). While Jam Master Jay followed Run in this new direction, D — both unable and unwilling to summon his enthusiastic older self — sat out the entire project. The end result was an album that was dead on arrival; the fact that there was such a rift in the group meant that it was never going to end well.
  Todd: This doomed the album immediately, before it even came out. Run-D.M.C. was not two separate guys; it was a group. Most rap groups, the way it works is, one guy does his verse, then the next guy does his... but Run-D.M.C. did not operate like that. They would trade rhymes, finish each other's lines: they played off each other. You remove one of them and you don't have Run-DMC. You don't even have HALF of Run-D.M.C.! You have nothing! You can hear at the end of lines where Run should be handing the mic off to Darryl, but, instead, there's no one there!
  • Jam Master Jay's tragic murder in 2002 also meant that Crown Royal would be the last album for Run-D.M.C., ending the band's tenure on an ignominious note. To make matters worse, Run and D had begun reconciling with each other and discussion of a proper Run-D.M.C. album at the time of Jay's murder.
  • Todd has to sadly conclude, even if D.M.C. had been willing to play ball from the start or they decided to do a double album with both his and Run's different visions, between D.M.C.'s singing range being more limited, Executive Meddling and guest collaborators unwilling to work with them, while they may have been able to make a financially profitable album, they most likely wouldn't have been able to make a good one.
• Todd is a proud Nickelback hater, but even he expresses some sympathy that Nickelback is now arguably better known for being hated than for any of their music. He even admits that some jabs at them are really lazy, citing an episode of Only Murders in the Building that calls Nickelback a one-hit wonder — Todd notes that the problem with Nickelback was overexposure, not being a one-hit wonder. But he posits that, ironically, Nickelback set up their own downfall. They dominated rock radio so much that, when rock audiences fractured and got into more niche sub-genres, there wasn't a mainstream infrastructure to support them anymore. And pop radio started ignoring them simply because tastes had changed, and Nickelback couldn't adapt with the times.
  • Todd says he walked away from this having "more and less respect for Nickelback" at the same time. They turned out to be more diverse than he gave them credit for, but he also had no emotional reaction at all to any of their songs because they clearly wrote them to have hits as opposed to expressing themselves artistically. He even cites an upcoming documentary about the band's hatedom, and critics saying it tells you nothing about the band you didn't already know. Todd finishes off by saying "maybe Nickelback didn't care about being hated, because they got paid either way".
• Faith Hill was coming off an album that went eight times platinum, and had every reason to believe that the follow-up, Cry, would be a success as well. But a bunch of things beyond her control ending up conspiring against her: Country attempting to be more traditionalist in the wake of 9/11, a shift away from major female artists (Todd points out that Country stars now are aggressively male), and a shift away from the type of epic romantic balladry that Faith Hill was moving towards. That said, Faith's new direction also turned out some mediocre material that didn't seem to suit her. Todd suspects that radio stations gave the excuse that the album is "Not country enough" because they couldn't just come out and say they thought the album was bad. Either way, it seemed to have affected her greatly, because Faith Hill hasn't put out a new solo album of fresh material since 2005.

Miscellaneous

• In the "Mr. Awesome Goes to Washington" video, Todd's voice breaks slightly as he explains what the Channel Awesome site means to him, and how SOPA could severely damage it.
• The Cinemadonna episode on the Truth or Dare documentary is really not very sympathetic toward Madonna, except for when Todd gets to the titular game, and Madonna is asked who has been the love of her life:
  Madonna: My whole life? ...Sean. Sean.
  Todd: (stunned) Holy damn. That poor woman.

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