If you’ve ever listened to the radio, you’ve probably heard a song that you thought was absolutely awful and changed the station. Then, you might have heard that song the next time you turned it on. Then, you could walk into any retail store and heard the same song. This cycle usually repeats itself any number of times until the opening chords to the song envoke a fight-or-flight response.
I’ve experienced this many times. This summer, multiple Benson Boone songs tortured me to the point I’ve legitimately woken up in a cold sweat with his “moonbeam ice cream” song playing in my head. One of the first songs I remember this happening with was Panic! At The Disco’s song “High Hopes,” which was played so much between 2018 and 2019 that it could have violated the Geneva Convention.
Because of those negative experiences, most people don’t even give these songs a fair try. Since being deeply traumatized by that song, I’ve grown to like pretty much every other Panic! Album, except for the one that features High Hopes, Pray for The Wicked.
In order to change my potential discrimination against Pray For The Wicked, I decided to listen to it once a day for the entire month of April. Surely, if I bite the bullet, it could be possible to self-induce stockholm syndrome.
How long could I hate the album for while listening to it every day? Five days?
Once I began listening to the album, it became clear this would be an extreme struggle.
The first song on the album is called “(Fuck A) Silver Lining,” and it is the worst possible way to start any album ever. When listening to Pray for the Wicked, hearing “(Fuck A) Silver Lining” immediately after pressing play feels similar to hearing a bomb go off in your house from the other room while you were sleeping. It is way too energetic and is very off-putting. It’s followed by “Say Amen (Saturday Night),” which isn’t so much a song as it is Brendon Urie reminding you what his album is called repeatedly in the chorus.
Unfortunately, it only gets worse from there.
“Hey Look Ma, I Made It” is extremely repetitive. That’s especially bad when the parts you’re repeating are absolutely awful. Whoever was responsible for writing this song needs to be fired, because the only meaningful lyric they could think of was the title, which is repeated fifteen times in a song that lasts a little bit less than three minutes.
High Hopes has a lot of issues. In the grand scheme of the album, though, it’s not bad at all. It’s easily one of the best, but only because it’s not totally boring. It’s one of my personal favorites because at one point, Brendon Urie sings “Mama said, “Fulfill the prophecy.” In an album full of lines that mean nothing, this is a shining star amongst other, dimmer stars. What on earth is the prophecy? Why is Mama telling him to fulfill it? Why is there a prophecy about Brendon Urie? Did he fulfill it?
All of these questions are very funny, especially considering none of them are ever answered or even addressed. It’s nice to be able to laugh at something when you feel like you’ve just been punched in the stomach four times in a row.
Luckily, “High Hopes” is followed by my favorite song on the album, “Roaring 20’s”. “Roaring 20’s” is a decent song, and sometimes almost crosses the line into being a song that’s actually slightly good. Similarly to “High Hopes”, it’s inadvertently super funny. One of the lyrics in it is “Roll me like a blunt ‘cause I wanna go home.” This, once again, invites some questions.
What does he mean by “roll”? Why is rolling him connected to him going home? Why like a blunt? These will be the questions that archaeologists will ask if they find these lyrics, but for now we are, once again, forced to let them go unanswered.
“Dancing’s Not A Crime” comes after those two. This song is incredibly witty, the chorus saying “Dancing’s not a crime” before pausing for a second and saying “Unless you do it without me.” Misdirecting the audience this way before clarifying that it is a crime if you do it without him, and that he’d like to be included, is absolutely genius! Once again, Brendon Urie has shown his absolute songwriting mastery. Paul McCartney and John Lennon bow to him.
None of the songs after this can even really be called songs. “One Of The Drunks” is confusing due to the fact that Urie, once again, never elaborates on anything, but it’s the most notable song among the last five. The songs at this part of the album are mainly boring, and feel like the record label let the people making it know that they couldn’t press it into highly profitable vinyl records unless they added fifteen more minutes of filler songs. Then again, it’s an entire album of filler songs, so they aren’t exactly special for that.
My initial hatred for the album only grew as time went on.
Thirty times is too many times to listen to most albums, much less one you dislike. I listened to it on walks, in the car, on a bus while on a school trip to Nashville. Sometimes, it was the last thing I heard before going to sleep and the first thing I heard upon waking up. Once, I used the album to warm up my voice while driving to a singing lesson.
At this point, it was part of me.
After three weeks, though, the smoke had cleared. By this point, I had learned every lyric to the songs and found myself singing along in the car. At this point, I realized that I was genuinely enjoying Pray For The Wicked.
For most of the songs, it was more and more easy to ignore all of the negatives. I even enjoyed “(Fuck A) Silver Lining,” which was one of the songs I thought I would never like.
The self-induced stockholm syndrome worked. I had successfully tortured myself into liking an album that was so bad it completely trashed a band’s reputation.
Despite this, I found that there was a lot more joy in my life. I was able to like more of the songs of a band I already liked, and I’ve completely ended the pavlovian response I used to get when hearing “High Hopes” in the grocery store! Even though it was awful, it somewhat improved my quality of life.
Pray For The Wicked is an awful album. Whatever Panic! At The Disco were doing in their first albums had entirely left by the time it was released, probably due to the fact that almost every band member from that time had also left. At no point in this process would I have ever considered this a good album.
Despite that, doing something you dislike over and over again with an open mind can clearly make you slowly start to enjoy it. While no one should listen to the same song thirty times in a month, risking insanity, more people could consider trying things that they don’t like instead of turning off the radio.
