The Singles Jukebox

Where have all the good scores gone?

[Video][Website]
[2.82]

Will Adams: Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” now eighteen years old, had the good sense to imbue its lament with a sense of satire. “Good Guys,” on the other hand, takes itself dead seriously, and is all the more embarrassing for it.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Turning an Oscar Wilde line that Chrissie Hynde immortalized into a Hallmark maxim with acoustic strumming offended me as much as anything Ted Cruz has said in recent memory. I’ll blame myself for mishearing the hook as “Where’ve all the gay guys gone?”
[2]

Iain Mew: Mika has a more interesting idea for a song than normal (where have all the gay guys gone?) and an interesting sound to go with it (stripping down his previous approach until it sounds like a particularly morose Mark Owen record). It could be enough to change my mind on him, except that after forty seconds he loses confidence and abandons the lot in favour of bland excess. “Some of us in the gutter are looking up at the stars” competes with Gregory Porter for most extensive and ineffective application of a cliché this year.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: This might be my third favourite Mika song ever, and it’s still a [2]. One of the two I prefer to this is “Happy Ending,” and this is like a tasteful but exceptionally enfeebled cousin.
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: Remember when Mika made exciting, zingy pop like “Grace Kelly”? Because apparently he doesn’t.
[2]

Ramzi Awn: If a first line’s anything to go by, “Good Guys” wouldn’t make it past five seconds on any jukebox. The chorus is even more disturbing, blending Paul McCartney senior moments with an odd brand of Sufjan Stevens. The result is the equivalent of a sneeze on a record with some bells and whistles thrown in.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: A quite muddled song. To its credit is its sad-rousing nature, heavily echoing Mika’s finest hour “Happy Ending,” right down to the joyously shoehorned breakdown-keychange into an anthemic chorus. The rest is food for thought, but mostly on Mika’s own lack of it. Flitting between “good guys” and “gay guys” is confusing even if taken as equation, and so is the idea that either have disappeared, but the most confounding failure is in the cap-doffing namecheck section. Including Kinsey in a list effectively mislabeling multiple men is not so much ironic as suggestive of a lack of any knowledge about Alfred Kinsey. This, from a man of changing public identity, can only have been laziness. If he required inspiration, that list was done better by Holly Johnson, in 1994.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Mika is huge in Montreal, part of that queer sentimentality that seems uniquely francophone, and so this is kind of the song that ends up beloved by both Anglophones and Francophones. I have heard it coming out of hipster bars and the radio in middle-aged Somali taxi drivers. I haven’t been to the drag bar in a while, or the bear bar, but it’s about three weeks to pride, and I can imagine it will end up there. His voice is fantastic, and the chanson quality only compounds it. It’s one of the reasons why I secretly love this town I profess to hate. Extra points for sounding so much like the best of late Elton.
[8]

Brad Shoup: The number of good songs with the line “don’t be offended” remains zero. He should have just gone full Hidden Cameras and gotten the choir to sing about cowboys.
[2]

Micha Cavaseno: Ignoring the quality of his list of examples, the song is musically the equivalent of denying a struggling family a loan. Mika here is talking wistfully about ‘the good guys’, these figment constructed persons that aren’t real humans but just the ideas we get about people. It means to be a call for us to be better, but what it results in is a parade of dehumanizing standards that we cannot live up to. Plus, any good guys would strive for a better arrangement than this shit. He tried for the “Abraham, Martin & John”, but all he got was the sappy canonization. I guess he got what counts.
[1]

Alex Ostroff: Look, in theory I am all about out queer guys in pop singing about Oscar Wilde etc. but this is the bad kind of schmaltz and we deserve better.
[2]