Scene: a man sits on a tall stool, a week's growth barely disguising his hurt.
His face is twisted with it, as though he has more to say than the language of
mere words can express.  Finally he tells his story the only way he knows how:
through the language of music.  His discomfort dissipates with every note, and
soon he and the audience are forever bound in a pure understanding of emotion,
his love for a woman the only real thing in their now-shared universe.  For
three minutes and fifty-two seconds he is not alone.

This romantic ideal of the power of art and the musician as magical realist is
not new, nor is the staging of a white man alone with his guitar.  We are
conditioned to respond to it, to find in its simplicity an earnestness that
reassures us of music's raw emotional power.  The problem is that the idioms of
the love song have nothing at all to do with music, and that it is possible for
a cunning enough mummer to maximize these appearances to the point that nobody
will even pay attention to the song itself.  It is a perfect simulacrum of
emotion, and in turn became the anthem of a generation.  It is my hope to
convince the reader not only that Hey There Delilah is a monumentally bad
song, but that enjoying it on any level is a pernicious mistake.

The most important thing the perpetrators of Hey There Delilah convey to
listeners is that it is about New York.  This is because New York is a locus
point, a wellspring of authenticity and hard life from which privileged artists
draw their power.  No other city, except perhaps for Paris, commands this
degree of popular misapprehension.  For this caper to be a success the listener
must see a love story in his or her mind, and since the song lacks any real
event in which to ground itself it instead takes root in the memories of other
events.

Anyone who doubts the song's insincerity can look up on his or her own the
author's relationship with any real-world Delilah, but for the purposes of this
essay it suffices to point out that there are only two things we can divine
about the song's ostensible subject from its lyrics: firstly that she is going
to school in New York City, and secondly that she is being harangued by a man
from her hometown.  Any of her hopes, dreams, interests, thoughts, or feelings
are ignored by the song.  It is a narcissistic litany of the songwriter's own
ambitions for fame, money, and ownership of the object of his desire.  His
insecurities are obvious: she is far away, in a much more interesting place
meeting far more interesting people, and any power he held over her emotion is
swiftly waning.  His insistent keening, as he himself admits, is a disguise.

The song's structure does it no favors, either.  Every verse is filler,
extending the song to a minimum "acceptable" length with all the desperate
repetition of a third-rate freestyler.  The rhyming proceeds with little
variation or even interest, opening with do / you / true and closing with do /
you / to / you / you.  Along the way we are treated to the most laborious
sentential contortion I have ever witnessed in song: the execrable "Even more
in love with me you'll fall", which manages to twist and strech a consummately
shameful sentence into something so jarring, so gossamer, that it's hard to
believe it's only in the service of rhyming with "all".

Folk-rock itself, as a genre, is not categorically offensive.  Over the years
it has accumulated a folklore of its own, building a mythology of musical
personality and cultural appropriation that's difficult to ignore.  With Hey
There Delilah the Plain White T's have successfully wrought of this legacy of
affectation a new kind of lie.  For a decade now it has plagued sense and
sensibility alike, appearing still on the radio against all reason.  The song
is bad, its place in culture rotten, and its effect on youth is a tranquilizing
fog that violates any space that had been left clear for art to exist.  An FCC
regulation forbidding this ham-fisted musical wince from masquerading as art
may be the only chance for healing our society has.