Sometime in March, the 2010-11 USF mens' basketball team will lose its 23rd game of the season, and set the school record for most losses in a season.
Which is a little unfair. This year's team played more games than any of the three previous teams that lost 22, and certainly played tougher competition than Bobby Paschal's 6-22 team in 1987-88. (One of those losses was to the University of Tampa, for cryin' out loud.)
Still, a record is a record and we must acknowledge it as such. So we all decided that the final anthem of this season will be, simply, the worst queefcore song in history.
And boy, did we find it.
See what it is, and how it helps tell the story of the 2010-11 USF men's basketball season, after the jump:
The story of the worst queefcore song ever recorded, and the musical anthem of USF's 2010-11 basketball season, starts here.
The singer/songwriter, who we'll keep secret for now, tells us how the song came to be:
"I said, 'I want to write an INXS-y song.'"
This is not a bad starting point. For a pop band, INXS had some quality guitar riffs: "Devil Inside", "Need You Tonight", "Don't Change", "Suicide Blonde". Even "Never Tear Us Apart" had that four-note bit in the middle. Just like Augustus Gilchrist: a decent part in the middle of a slow number from a band that never quite peaked twenty years ago. Still, memorable songs and basketball seasons have been built on less.
But in both cases, things went wrong pretty quickly:
"So, they started playing kind of an INXS-y song, and I wrote the melodies and started to sing it. And I said, 'Man, this just doesn't sound great to me.'"
A tip to all you aspiring songwriters: if you try to write an INXS-y song and it sucks, that's the universe telling you you're no Michael Hutchence.
Just like this year's USF basketball team learned they didn't quite have the right sound when they lost to two Conference USA teams, and barely beat St. Francis, the Patron Saint of Finishing Eighth In The Northeast Conference.
But that's OK. It just needs more cowbell!
"One of the guys picked up a ukulele, and said, 'Hey, how about this?'"
Already we've gone from INXS-y song to ukelele. USF's basketball season unraveled just as quickly and just as bizarrely.
"And it made the difference. It made my words dance. It made sense."
In terms of this basketball season, this moment would be the first half of the Marquette game. For some unexplainable reason, the odd pieces fit. The team made shots. The team defended. The team rebounded. The team didn't turn the ball over.
But it wouldn't last. These twin train wrecks couldn't belie their flawed composition for long.
He had never been to Burning Man, but he had an image in his head of what it must be like. All these beautiful women dancing around the fire. Thousands and thousands of people go to it every year. People run around naked and I guess it’s a total crazy deal. That was the imagery he conjured up when he was writing the lyrics.
First of all, the people who go to Burning Man are the same people who wear costumes to Oakland Raiders home games. But let's ignore that, and take the song as an idealistic interpretation of this event. It still doesn't make a lick of sense. Just like USF's halfcourt offense most of this season: it starts with a flawed premise, moves slowly and pointlessly, and never gets there.
That's why USF's queefcore anthem for the 2010-11 Big East Tournament, and, in Voodoo Five's estimation, the worst queefcore song of all time, is... ."Hey, Soul Sister" by Train!
As we said when we introduced this theme, queefcore is about bros having big, obvious, clearly stated emotions. Most queefcore songs can at least manage that. This song is like a magnetic poetry set of big obvious bro emotions, spilled on the dining room table by a non-English speaker.
The sentimentality is muddled and juvenile. I can't tell if the song is about being in love or peeping on your big sister. And what man addresses a woman he's attracted to as "sister", anyway? Nobody, unless you're a creep, or you're both in the same cult, or you have the same parents in a state where that sort of thing is socially acceptable.
The song randomly mixes metaphors and moods. It drops 1980s references for retro hipster cred... five times in a three-minute song. There are unnecessary modifiers like "untrimmed chest" and "left side brains", which were obviously inserted to make the meter fit, but the personal physical details just make the whole thing sound like the "Water" song from Family Guy. The guitar and drums aren't without flourish; they're completely nonexistent. And it's repetitive. Lord, it's repetitive. Hey-ay. Hey-ay-ay-ayayyy. Hey-ay-ay-ayayyy. Hey soul sister, something Mr. Mister. Hey-ay. Hey-ay-ay-ayayyy. Hey-ay-ay-ayayyy. Did I say something about a cult earlier?
Anyway, this is likely the final installment of Queefcore 2011, and probably the end of my career as a music critic on a college sports blog. We hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back next year with an all-new basketball team, and a new musical style to help us cope with it.