Peter O.

Metro Station is a band that has plenty of public comments on their videos about being one of the worst bands of all-time. I never get tired of reading them and, honestly, I don’t blame them for making the hyperbole. Metro Station are a bad band. One of my favorite bands. A bad band. Awesome. Horrible. A nightmare. Pretty good.

I don’t think saying this is too contradictory. Ideas of personal taste are too rigid and misunderstood to be critiqued in that way. There’s a fair amount of research on why people like the music they like, but never anything definitive or surprising enough to create much buzz. This has been a bit frustrating for me at times. Music especially has been incredibly important to me, and there were times when I thought a shared interest in a group I felt an intimate relationship to could lead to an intimate (romantic or not) relationship with that person.

One idea is that our tastes are completely arbitrary: that there is so little predictability that a person will like something because they follow scientific criteria. It is often thought that our tastes are determined almost entirely subconsciously and anything we say to explain it from there is fabricated justification.

Some universities have tried using psychology and neuroscience to explain tastes. A study at Cambridge by researcher David Greenberg tried to make a pattern between typical brain patterns and preferred musical styles. A quick summary, that does little justice to the full study, suggested that people with empathy prioritizing brains enjoyed slower paced songs with emotional depth and that people with systematic brains concerned with rules and systems preferred structured, more intense music.

What’s interesting about the Cambridge study is that it’s not that interesting. They connected wires to peoples’ brains so they could publish that sad people like sad music and intense people like intense music. Rebellious people might like counter-cultural music (rock music for older generations, hip-hop for the next set, experimental pop for the current) and clever or fake smart people (like myself) might pursue jazz or freeform music. It’s almost too bad that this explanation makes the most sense, generally, but it’s also how we get by categorizing people on the day2day. It’s why websites where friends share ratings of books, movies, and music are so popular and it’s why people on twitter like to get smarmy about college kids who idolize Fight Club and Chuck Palahniuk novels and seemingly nothing else (faux intellectualism and (extremely) softly critiqued masculinity that’s overtly championed) or radio drones (shallow trend followers with little imagination).

I cherry pick those examples as particularly mean ones, and I want to say that they’re wrong but it’s so easy to feel the same way. People put a lot of stake on the personal tastes of others and on their own as well. I’ve felt that as much as anybody, especially in high school and college where I found little else to define myself by. I believe this is also why people who continue to have little to define themselves by in terms of career, hobbies, or family continue to define themselves through the work and appreciation of the work of others. It’s not wrong to do so, but if the link between appreciation of something and the essence of the person is so muddled and confusing then the usefulness of defining oneself in that way isn’t enough. I see this most in my peers (and myself) when they are working a job that doesn’t provide meaningfulness in their lives: refuge in identifying with something greater through appreciation of art they can identify with and bolster their sense of meaning.

This is also a common explanation for one’s personal taste that resonates the most with me: tastes are formed mostly because of how one feels or would like to feel about themselves. However, because the internet and social media has trained almost everybody to be increasingly meta or self-conscious in the way they analyze themselves and others, determination of personal taste has become even more confusing and layered to a point where creating musical algorithms and predicting what somebody might enjoy based on prior listening habits music be hell. It also means founding a relationship based on shared interests is more dicey than ever.

So why do I like Metro Station? A short explanation… I like that it’s shameless. I like that they’ll sell out an emotional message in the lyrics to shout a non-sequitur like “everybody get down!”. I like that they can be cheered for like a local sports team that never wins, that they’ll always put something out hoping to regain a former glory while seeming hopelessly out of touch with what will bring success in the modern era (maybe they should fire somebody). I think there’s a little rebellious edge to exalting a band near universally deemed awful in serious music circles too. I like following the social media accounts digging for depth and insight and discovering time after time that there really is nothing there. I can’t fully become a 2000s Scene music connoisseur, but I like having at least one horse in the race.

Does that say much about me? I think it does, but it doesn’t seem useful to seek out any random Metro Station fan looking for a connection unless they feel the same way about the artist as I do, and getting to that understanding between myself and another person would probably take enough hangouts that we’d be friends by then already.

Anyway. For ALL THE FANS OUT THERE, here’s the OFFICIAL all Metro Station songs ranked list. I’ve separated them into 5 different quality tiers. I’m an SEO genius!

Top Tier

1. She Likes Girls (Gold EP)
2. Shake It (Metro Station)
3. Control (Metro Station)
4. Ain’t So High (Non-Album Single)
5. Now That We’re Done (Metro Station)

High Tier

6. Wish We Were Older (Metro Station)
7. Seventeen Forever (Metro Station)
8. Forever Young (featuring The Ready Set)(Gold EP)
9. Kelsey (Metro Station)
10. Getting Over You (Featuring Ronnie Radke) (Savior)
11. California (Metro Station)
12. I Still Love You (Middle of the Night EP)
13. Japanese Girl (Kelsey EP 2009)
14. Tell Me What to Do (Metro Station)
15. Love & War (Gold EP)
16. Play It Cool (Gold EP)
17. Closer and Closer (Non-Album Single)
18. Disco (Metro Station)
19. Every Time I Touch You (Middle of the Night EP)
20. Married In Vegas (Savior)
21. Better Than Me (Savior)

Mid Tier

22. Runaway (Savior)
23. Young Again (Bury Me My Love)
24. Gold (Gold EP)
25. Barcelona (Middle of the Night EP)
26. Where’s My Angel (Almost Alice Soundtrack)
27. I Hate Society (New Single)
28. Time To Play (Kelsey EP 2009)
29. Pop Princess (Savior)
30. Wake Up (Savior)
31. Best of Me (Bury Me My Love)
32. The Love That Left You to Die (Bury Me My Love)
33. Savior (Savior)
34. Ocean Waves (Bury Me My Love)
35. Pretty Little Liar (Savior)
36. Burn With You (Savior)
37. Moving Along (Unreleased Early Track)

Low Tier

38. True to Me (Metro Station)
39. Give Me Your Love (Savior)
40. I Don’t Know You (Middle of the Night EP)
41. In My Dreams (Bury Me My Love)
42. Take You Home (Middle of the Night EP)
43. Goodnight and Goodbye (The Questions We Ask at Night EP)
44. Runaway Train (Non-Album Single 2012)
45. After The Fall (Metro Station: Deluxe)
46. Bury Me My Love (Bury Me My Love)
47. Breaking Up (Bury Me My Love)
48. Don’t Waste My Time (Non-Album Single 2011)
49. Comin’ Around (Metro Station: Deluxe)
50. Deadly on the Dance Floor (Savior)
51. Liquid Courage (Savior)
52. Ride or Die (Savior)
53. Used By You (Savior)
54. Still Party (Savior)
55. Dear Hannah (Unreleased Early Track)

Shit Tier

56. Get It On (Savior)
57. Devil In Disguise (Savior)
58. One Night (Savior)