Ruined for Me

Due to a headphones malfunction at work, I'm being forced to listen to the radio on my Walkman instead of CDs/online radio via my computer. So, Phil Collins comes on, whining about "Against All Odds," a song I don't remember liking very much in the first place (I'll take "Sussudio" any day) but that I rilly, rilly, rilly hate now that it has been attempted to death on American Idol. (I can't really say sung because you can't legitimately call what some contestants do singing.)

So, I'm trying to get Scott Savol out of my head, and that got me thinking about the concept of things that have been ruined for me, and I did some Googling to see what other people think. Here are some highlights:

• USA Today's Pop Candy blog has a post about songs that have been ruined because they appear in commercials. People left a lot of comments wondering why the Beatles, Led Zep, Iggy Pop, et al. "sold out to the man." For me it's more an issue of whether I like the song at all. If I do, then I don't really mind hearing it in commercials. Sometimes I'll hear a riff I like but don't recognize, and look up the rest of the song.

• Not to be outdone, the Entertainment Weekly Popwatch blog also asks what song has been ruined for you. Only here I think they are going for "What song is inexorably linked to some momentous life event, and you can't hear the song without thinking about said event?" Much like I can't hear "The Lady in Red" without thinking of Homecoming junior year, or "Every Time You Go Away" without thinking of a family vacation in 1985. Not like I enjoyed those songs much to begin with, but still: I can't shake the mental associations.

• On Tribe there's a thread devoted to Great Books They Ruined by Forcing You to Read Them. It's pretty much the usual suspects: Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Steinbeck.

• Oh, and I found some site called Wordie: Like Flickr, but without the Photos, which contains the post Nice Words That Have Been Completely Ruined For Me Due To Their Yuck Slang Meaning. Toboggan? Yikes.