Why? Why??? Whyyyy??
Yeah, this is going to be one of those posts. I am going to be fighting through every single word of this one. Expect no contractions, a high amount of repetition, plenty of unnecessary conventions, and a fair number of unneeded paragraphs just like this one.
Oh lord, 200 words to go.
So for some reason, my father believed that it would be a great idea for me to listen to some Van Morrision this Dad-Rock Tuesday. I do not understand…maybe he got his hands on a little hippy crack at Lollapalooza or something. Whatever the case may be, I did it. All 39 minutes of it. I was miserable the entire time.
You know Brown Eyed Girl, that overrated, overplayed, over-obnoxious song about, guess what, a brown eyed girl? Yeah, that is not even on this record. It is by Van Morrison, though. So if you expect anything different going into Mooncrap, you are both optimistic and moronic, like me.
I picked Glad Tidings as the sample track for this post for one reason—it sounds exactly like Brown Eyed Girl. Most other songs are pretty close as well, though. Pick your poison.
It is hard for me to identify exactly what it is that I cannot stand about Van Morrison and his music. It has got to be more than the awful lyrics and identical guitars and horns used in every song…there is something more extreme going on in my subconscious.
But, at this point, I am at 250 words. We’ll leave the subconscious probing for another day.
Swole Ear 
Let’s review. In the biography section in allmusic.com on Van Morrison, here is what Jason Ankeny has to say:
Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music’s true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon. Subject only to the whims of his own muse, his recordings cover extraordinary stylistic ground yet retain a consistency and purity virtually unmatched among his contemporaries, connected by the mythic power of his singular musical vision and his incendiary vocal delivery: spiraling repetitions of wails and whispers that bypass the confines of language to articulate emotional truths far beyond the scope of literal meaning
I think Jason gets carried away and, frankly, there are a bunch of Van the Man discs that I can easily live without. Plus the guy is a jerk. But so are most of my favorite artists. In other words, I am about halfway between you and Jason. I think this album is pretty good. You are entitled to hate it. I am glad, though, that you realize that there is simply something about the music that just rubs you the wrong way and probably clouds your overall judgment.
Better luck next Tuesday.
When it comes to subconscious probing, Sigmund Freud would say you hate it because you have a buried romantic love for your mother that causes you to hate (read: want to kill) your father, but you liked Dixie Chicken last Dad-Rock Tuesday, not to mention Guns n Roses, so I guess Sigmund Freud was full of it. I don’t know your dad. Never met the man, but it could be that he’s throwing albums at you to broaden your horizons and to see what you like. Maybe when you hate a Dad-Rock Tuesday album, he’s just as happy as when you like one. After all, it’s just music and, as your hero Kanye Dumbass West says, “Dat da da dat dat don’t kill me, only make me stronger.”
Brown eyed girl was originally brown skinned girl but it was too risqué for the radio at the time. From what I remember. But I’m too lazy to find a source to verify.
Van the Man himself saays that you have it right:
Originally titled “Brown-Skinned Girl”, Morrison changed it to “Brown Eyed Girl” when he recorded it. Morrison remarked on the original title: “That was just a mistake. It was a kind of Jamaican song. Calypso. It just slipped my mind. I changed the title.”[13] “After we’d recorded it, I looked at the tape box and didn’t even notice that I’d changed the title. I looked at the box where I’d lain it down with my guitar and it said ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ on the tape box. It’s just one of those things that happen.”[14]
The whole brown skinned to brown eyed is kind of disappointing. There used to be a couple in Boston. He played the guitar on the street and it appears the only song he knew was “Brown Eyed Girl”. She would come up to him and ask him to play “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” and he would say “I don’t know that. How about “Brown Eyed Girl”” and would commence playing and she would act non-plussed. The first time I saw this I thought it was spontaneous anf funny. Then I began seeing it happen again and again.
One of the great voices of the past 40 years. The thing about Morrison to me, however, is he is one of those guys that only puts a couple of really good songs on an album, and the bulk can be dismissed fairly easily (kind of like Billy Joel), but when you look at all the tremendous music he has put out from Them to now, you have to give him his due. And Brown Eyed Girl? Always love the joy.