The Big Lebowski is my favorite movie of all time. I’m not saying it’s the best movie of all time, it’s just my favorite movie.
I hadn’t thought about how shitty The Eagles are until I saw that scene, where The Dude is riding in the cab and he’s having a bad day, and he says “I just hate the fucking Eagles man.”
I was about 16, and I hadn’t thought about it, but I then declared that I indeed hated the fucking Eagles.
It was a salient point.
If you have any doubt that The Eagles are indeed a bullshit coke head, yacht rock, greasy pony tail while wearing a blazer, hippy sell-out, fucking vegetarian cheaters, look no further than the fact that the name of their band is The Eagles. How fucking lame is that? The Eagles? Are they Eagles?
The Beatles are called The Beatles. Not The Beetles. They infused some modicum of cleverness into their name. The Eagles are the type of dudes who are like “Bro, Eagles are cool, right? We should name our band The Eagles.”
And there are women out their who will suck those guy’s dicks. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a certain level of vitriol.
Hotel California is an interesting song. I don’t know what it’s about. Doing drugs, I guess. I know that when I hear the first note of Hotel California that I become viscerally angry. I wonder why I have heard the song so many fucking times. Then, I remind myself of the answer, and I get even more pissed.
The reason I have heard Hotel California roughly 8,000 times on the radio, in the lobby of the Hard Rock Casino, in every FUCKING elevator, is because The Eagles benefited from the payola scandal.
What happened is, music executives and radio DJs started doing a bunch of cocaine together, and they came up with an amazing scam: I will pay you cash if you play my band’s music, which in turn will benefit me because they will sell albums and tickets to live shows.
This was a long time ago when people bought albums and DJs chose music, and the whole thing is pretty whimsical in retrospect.
However, this type of corruption can actually have negative implications for society, such as a serious degradation of our culture.
We cannot pinpoint how many frat guys participated in a gang rape because The Eagles were on the fucking radio instead of Neil Young or the Talking Heads.
But, there are victims.
It is impossible to know certain things. It is impossible to be implicitly objective. It’s impossible to know if you met your son or daughter on the street whether or not you would think they were cool. It’s impossible to even judge how smart you are. You could be a fucking idiot who poses for photographs with a stethoscope. You could have only got into medical school because your dad made a sizable donation to the school. You don’t know. You have no idea about any of this. You’re looking at your hair in the window reflection, is what you’re doing.
It’s impossible to know, if today was the first time you’d ever heard Hotel California, if you’d be like, hey this is kind of a catchy tune, or if you’d just immediately skip the song and listen to something respectable.
There’s also a five percent chance you would sit there talking about how dumb the song was to some woman who was clearly fucking annoyed at you and then digress into correlating how shitty the song was to the demise of the American dream and the disappearance of the middle class as she began pondering why she broke up with that lawyer who represented Kraft Foods.
But, the fact is, the song sucks.
Take it Easy sucks. Take it to the Limit sucks. Tequila Sunrise sucks. Witchy Woman fucking sucks.
I don’t want to get into a meta-analysis of Eagles lyrics, but you can tell simply based on the titles of these songs that something is amiss. It’s as if an alien came down to earth and attempted to impersonate American culture, smoked a bunch of weed while not inhaling, got herpes, and proceeded to become a songwriter.
The entire catalog is fucking embarrassing.
Now, here’s my hot take: If you like The Eagles, you’re an asshole and nobody likes you.
You might think people like you, but they don’t.
The Eagles probably don’t even know about the payola scandal which forced me to listen to their garbage ass music.
They probably just think people naturally gravitated to Witchy Woman.
Fuck The Eagles.