RAMBLE ON: "Follow You" by Imagine Dragons

Apologies, I only just realized that I hadn't put up a Ramble On for June. This is last month's Patreon reward, this month's will (hopefully) still be on time. 

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I had a surprising revelation last year that I was actually rooting for Imagine Dragons. I’m hardly alone in this – backlashes often get backlashes of their own, so at some point Dan Reynolds’s beleaguered band began garnering apologists for their bombastic millennial arena rock. I’m not one of them, I still dislike most of their songs (especially their biggest ones). But I dislike that I dislike them; I’d love for them to prove me wrong and shut me up, even though I’ve been a hater for a very long time now (one of the few things I was ahead of the curve on). It sucks for me because I was also an early booster; as far back as their third single I began to realize that this band might be Bad Actually, an impression that only got worse over the years. “Thunder” has become the popular shorthand for their shittiness, but for me the real killer was the Of Monsters and Men-ish indie single “I Bet My Life.” People who aren’t me tend to be fond of that one, but Reynolds’s passionate screaming of such a banal, empty chorus permanently ended any warm feelings I might have had from those early songs.

Their bad reputation is kind of glanced at in the self-deprecating video for their newest single, “Follow You.” Kaitlin Olson presents her husband Rob McElhenney with a birthday present of a private concert, despite the fact that she and not he is the Imagine Dragons fan. She swoons over the band and pictures the entire band flexing and preening and making bedroom eyes at her; it’s intentionally ridiculous, an attempt to make the band seem less pompous. Your mileage may vary on whether it succeeds.

But why do they even have to do that? Did they ever deserve the shit they got? It just plain feels bad to hate on Imagine Dragons, a lot more than it does to hate other overplayed mainstream bands like Nickelback or Maroon 5. Unlike Adam Levine, you could never claim that Reynolds and co. are indifferent to the craft; they’re trying, they’re trying very hard, they’re clearly still passionate about their art. Also, Dan Reynolds seems like a well-meaning guy who’s supportive of all the right causes, vs. Chad Kroeger who it’s hard not to suspect is a giant asshole. Reynolds wears his heart on his sleeve and he’s openly hurt by his band’s uncoolness, despite the fact that he is, from a purely numerical standpoint, one of the most popular singers alive. “Believer” and “Thunder” both have nearly two billion streams on Spotify, but their silent-majority constituency doesn’t seem to alleviate the pain of their lack of cred. Somehow, this multi-platinum band has become the underdog.

It’s hard to feel bad for a band for being popular, but money doesn’t always buy you respect. Even many haters still say their first album Night Visions was pretty good; a friend of mine called it the Hysteria of the streaming era, a perfectly polished packed-with-hits encapsulation of a moment in time, destined to be popular with the masses but sneered at by the critics. I don’t love that album (I don’t love Hysteria either), but it’s a dead-on comparison. The rise of poptimism has done very little for the appreciation of mainstream rock; perhaps Imagine Dragons were always doomed to be underestimated. So, yes, naturally, there’s a wave of sympathy and apologism for them. Sure, the chipmunk voices in “Thunder” are annoying. And okay, maybe the empty grandiosity of “Believer” grates after the 100th listen. Are these terrible crimes? They’ve never hurt anyone, done or said anything offensive except to the aesthetic standards of a bunch of snobs. They’re only victims of their own success, and they also have a number of deeper cuts that hold up pretty well. Why would you want to make a man as earnest as Dan Reynolds feel bad about himself? Last year, prior to their recent return to the charts, I decided that I was going to be a lot kinder to Imagine Dragons.

“Follow You,” the newest Imagine Dragons hit, is so fucking bad I’m just awestruck by it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the worst song they’ve ever released, worse than “Thunder” and “Believer,” which are awful, but which I at least understood what they were going for. Nothing about “Follow You” works in the slightest; it’s a hideous malformed mess, and yet somehow not in any way that makes it interesting. Most of my Twitter follows insisted that the bad one was “Cutthroat,” released with “Follow You” simultaneously. “Cutthroat” is also probably not a good song; it’s the band at their most overwrought, and they were not exactly a restrained act on a good day. But at least Reynolds’s over-the-top screaming is backed with an actual topic that justifies it; it’s a direct challenge to the critics, a statement that in the battle between the band and its haters it will be Imagine Dragons who will come out victorious. “My money’s good and I came to win,” he sings, a ludicrous flex from a band who has no business doing any such thing. It’s not good, but it is a raw, naked, bleeding performance; Reynolds has revealed far too much of his insecurities on it, and it’s hard for me to not be fascinated.

“Follow You” is just a love song, written by Reynolds for his wife. It goes, “I will follow you way down, wherever you may go”. These are lyrics for a B-minus-tier VH1 band from the early ‘00s, like Lifehouse or The Calling, not A-listers like Imagine Dragons; I can’t say I’m interested much. But top 40 bands have been writing dippy, uninspired love songs for ages; the worst it should be is boring. But boring it is not; it’s far too strikingly inept for that. The mechanics of the romantic ballad have completely and totally defeated the band here, they don’t understand love songs, have no idea how to approach them, completely and utterly fail to adapt their sound to it. They wail and stomp all over it, not once figuring out how their aesthetic of booming grandiose movie-trailer music could apply to romantic devotion. The entire band stops so that several layers of Dan Reynoldses can scream “I KNOW THAT IT’S NOT RIGHT!!!!” How is his wife supposed to feel listening to that except terrified?

For a band driven by atmospheric synths, Imagine Dragons is terrifyingly loud. I’ve heard them called Coldplay ripoffs but Coldplay were a space-y, inward-looking band, very much unlike ID. Naturally, “Follow You” sounds only like a horrorshow. It’s a song of devotion presented with not a single drop of warmth. What the fuck is this?

The worst part comes near the end, where Reynolds starts going “doo-ba-doo-ba-doo-ba-doo-ba” or something like that for no adequately discernible reason. It sounds like doo-wop syllables but jammed into a song light years removed from doo-wop’s smoothness and cool. It’s the dumbest fucking sound in history, or at least the worst music moment of the year so far. I honestly do not understand the artist who thinks that any of this is a good idea, or enjoys making it.

“Follow You” is not doing amazingly right now, at least compared to other Imagine Dragons singles, but it’s holding in there. It may yet become a genuine hit, as per the band’s terrible ability to make the most obnoxious music hits – they have a way of finding hooks and making swerves in their song that make them stick in the brain, no matter how obnoxious; they’re the Black-Eyed Peas of pompous alt-rock. I still do feel like an insufferable snob dunking on them, but I am pretty out of patience here. At some point harmlessness is no longer an excuse, and just in general I’m sick of being kind to things out of contrarianism. Twilight still sucks, Justin Bieber still sucks, James Cameron’s Avatar still sucks, Imagine Dragons fucking sucks, I’m out.

…“Walking the Wire” is pretty good though.