Looking Back at Eric Clapton's Anti-Mask, Anti-Vaccine Anthem "This Has Gotta Stop", the Worst Song Ever Written
The older I get, the less invested I am in my own opinions. This is particularly true where hate is concerned. Life is just too goddamn short and too goddamn precious to waste it furiously despising musicians, actors and filmmakers, particularly artists everyone else seems to hate.
This laissez-faire attitude is partially attributable to age and partially attributable to a solid decade of evangelizing on behalf of Phish and Insane Clown Posse, two of the most hated acts in the history of pop music.
But re-watching The Doors for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 reminded me that there are nevertheless musicians, actors and filmmakers I genuinely hate with an intense, distinctly personal passion, chief among them Jim fucking Morrison.
Hatred is not too strong of a word to describe my feelings towards Morrison. I hate damn near everything about him: the pretension, the ego, the insufferable self-indulgence and mindless hedonism.
My father told me you should save your hate for things and people that really deserve it, like Adolf Hitler. That was a seriously bad dude. He was so bad he was LITERALLY Hitler. Jim Morrison falls into this category as well.
I’ve mellowed with age but deplorable motherfuckers like Eric Clapton nevertheless bring out the hater in me. I’ve always disliked Clapton as a musician, icon and human being and not just because I once worked for a summer at a Goodwill in 1996 perpetually tuned into the Easy Listening station, where the musical sleeping pill that is “Change the World” was in heavy rotation.
My lifelong dislike of Clapton metastasized into seething hatred with the deeply unsurprising revelation that a man notorious for a 1976 racist rant against immigrants and people of color had hopped onboard the anti-mask, anti-vaccine bandwagon, after having a bad reaction to being vaccinated.
Clapton personally experienced side effects so obviously the vaccine must be an evil instrument of Fascist oppression.
Clapton feels so strongly that asking people to show basic consideration for the sake of curbing the spread of a deadly pandemic is pretty much The Holocaust 2.0 that he regrettably made a single about it that I can say without hyperbole is the single worst song in the history of the universe.
“This Has Gotta Stop” sleepwalks haphazardly out of the gate with a sleepy melody that feels like they re-arranged some of the chords on “Change the World” and passed it off as a new composition.
Clapton’s middling manifesto opens with what feels unmistakably like placeholder lyrics that the awful exemplar of boomer arrogance figured he might as well keep because there’s no point trying at this stage of his career.
A song Clapton delusionally imagines will change minds and inspire social change begins with the lines, “This has gotta stop/Enough is enough/I can't take this BS any longer.”
“I can’t take this BS any longer!” That somehow wasn’t just good enough to make it into what Clapton thinks is an important song, an anthem even: it made it into the goddamn chorus.
Clapton is so proud of the lyric “I can’t take this BS any longer” that he repeats them no less than five times.
I have subsequently learned that Clapton’s original lyrics for the chorus, “What the heck? This junk seems pretty messed up” and “Stuff is kinda crappy, with all the things that are going on”, were somehow even less eloquent.
That would seem to leave the song nowhere to go but up but Clapton somehow keeps keeps finding new bottoms.
“This Has Gotta Stop” follows in the footsteps of countless memes from baby boomers in depicting a selfish refusal to wear a mask into Wal-Mart or get vaccinated for the sake of society and those around you as well as yourself as the heroism of the last free souls left.
Clapton just barely tries to sound tough when he taunts, “If you wanna claim my soul/You’ll have to come and break down this door” with a dearth of energy that suggests that if you were to break down Clapton’s door you’d find an old man sleeping in a fetal position in the corner, possibly while sucking his thumb.
At this point, really, Clapton’s soul isn’t worth claiming. Clapton invokes the kids, the precious children, when he whines, “Thinkin' of my kids, What’s left for them/And then what's coming down the road/The light in the tunnel/Could be the southbound train/Lord, please help them with their load.”
You know what might help them with their load? Getting vaccinated. That way they won’t die of COVID at one of Clapton’s shows.
“This Has Gotta Stop” might just be the least urgent message song ever written. Clapton sounds exhausted, alright, but it’s not the righteous exhaustion of someone who can’t put up with injustice one moment longer.
Instead it’s the exhaustion of someone with nothing left to say and no reason left to live, who is ready for the sweet release of the grave and a nap that will last for all of eternity.
Seldom has a song that falls listlessly under the heading of “Easy Listening” been so difficult to actually listen to.
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