​In the world of random audio hallucination, there's the shit and then there's, well, shit. While I own some terrible stoner tunes, mere good taste, as everyone knows, goes for little in a world of thin walls, car audio, American Idol, and an ongoing '90s revival. Drunk or sober, bent or straight, light or loaded, you will encounter lousy music like that listed below, and the benignly sensitizing influence of marijuana makes the experience about 40 times worse. Why the stuff should divert attention from every pain but the purely aesthetic is a karmic conundrum fit for a 420 mystic's extended navel-gaze. For the rest of us, the following is a reasonable guide on what's too overbearing while under the influence.

13. Anything by Billy Joel

Over a long and cheerless catalog, Mr. New York State of Meh is at once too pompous to bear and too bland to laugh at. BJ's glee ("Big Shot") is as sad as his melancholia ("I Love You Just the Way You Are") is sidesplitting, and those richly applauded populist gestures ("Allentown," "Goodnight Saigon") are Face the Nation-phony enough to drive the most stalwart 99-percent-er straight to the skeletal arms of the John Birch Society. Given all that's happened since 1989, the piano man's Big Statement "We Didn't Start the Fire" is a breathtaking piece of sociopolitical buck-passing unsurpassed until Obama didn't close Gitmo.

12. The Marshall Mathers LP, by Eminem.
This is Dark Side of the Moon for mall boys.

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Listen to this while high: Back on Time by Plug.

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Behind the buzz: These are treats from "long-lost" tracks that didn't make genre-spanning pop wizard Luke Vibert's (recording under his drum 'n bass monicker Pluf) celebrated 1996 cult item Drum 'N Bass for Papa and were instead left to ripen a decade and a half for delectation well into different era altogether. Still meaty and beaty or merely another random shovel load in the ongoing Nineties Reclamation Project? The purpose of this column is to ascend a suitable indica altitude and find out.

Today's weed: Blackberry Kush.

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Listen To This While High: No One Loves You Like I Do by The Life And Times

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Behind the buzz: Ornaments of the once-fashionable Kansas City indie scene, The Life and Times is a trio of confirmed aural psychonauts helmed by Allen Epley, formerly of '90s math-rock wizards Shiner and a living link to that era's politics of anti-grunge. The space rockers' previous EP and full-length releases aren't so much conventional rock albums as bright, meticulously planned derangements of expectation, so to hear they've decided to junk songwriting altogether and toss off a composition a day for their new album sounds less like a weird stunt and more like the gaudy outer wrapping of sonic obliteration. This drops on Jan. 17 and the band plays Café Du Nord on Jan. 21.

Today's dope: A merry little sativa called Sour Lemon Haze reputed to have serious giggle-inducing propensities, which is about what you'd expect out of dope monickered like a Travis McGee novel.

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Listen to this while high: Album Raises New and Troubling Questions by They Might Be Giants

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Behind the buzz: Here is a collection of notable sweepings, left-offs and rejiggerings of classic old stuff thrown out for Yuletide trade. On this followup to last summer's Join Us studio album and subsequent tour, the twin titans of '80s and '90s college radio show little sign of approaching infirmity or humorlessness as Johns Flansburgh and Linell once again turn up the quirk. Fans will revel in the scads of videos and other goodies thrown on for added value.

Today's weed: A dense, Lavender-like indica strain named White Rascal.

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Listen to this while high: The Cult of Dom Keller's EP3

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Behind the buzz: This is yet another case of a publicist lobbing the right series of adjectives over my email transom. Words like "acid-dripping" and "lysergic" promise much for this third-in-a-series EP, as does the band having played on bills with The Warlocks and Asteroid No. 4, but deployment of "tenebrous" suggests a certain strain. Worse, reviews of live performances by this Nottingham, UK outfit tend to include accounts of gross fissures in the space-time continuum I choose to regard as fanciful. As with most EPs released these fast-receding December days, these seven tracks are opening salvos for a full-length with a 2012 release date.

Today's weed: Private Reserve, an indica amateurs should use with care, lest its sheer gravity cause one's brain to drip into one's shoes.

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Listen to this while high: Tape Club by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.
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Behind the buzz: Outta Springfield, Mo., this perennial Internet buzz band whose three full-lengths rate highly with the sort of indie blogoscenti most likely to faint if the P.A. were to suddenly offload a stack of Nazareth or Tom T. Hall joints. Well, the delicate and veiny ears of such exquisites are in for quite the massaging with this 24-track gallimaufry of B-sides, demos, left-offs, and suchlike, with the whole magilla forming, as is usual with such collections, a type of secret history of the band. They headline at the Hotel Utah tomorrow night.

Today's weed: Platinum Bubba.

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Listen to this while high: John Cale's Extra Playful EP

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Behind the buzz: Seeing John Cale's first new release in over a half decade casually racked at Amoeba Music last weekend was a pleasant shock, and the title itself imparts a nice little thrill of suspense at what the fabulously playful artist might be up to this time. This reputed foretaste of next year's rumored full-length finds the ex-Velvet Underground genius in as close as he gets to full-on Spike Jones mode, deconstructing a handful of pop tunes perhaps as therapy for having to do Paris 1919 live for much of the past two years.

Today's weed: Sativa aptly named Dolce Vita, its native nimbleness only a little hobbled by some hash residue.

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Listen to this while high: Caveman's Coco Beware.

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Today's dope: Sour O.G., a sativa with 18 percent THC content, making it the MJ equivalent of potato vodka.

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Listen to this while high: Future of the Left's Polymers are Forever EP.

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Behind the buzz: Hyperliterate Welsh provocateurs Future of the Left scored heavily with 2009's Travels with Myself and Another, so it won't do to dismiss the Polymers are Forever EP (out as of yesterday on Xtra Mile and streaming courtesy of Spin magazine here) as a stopgap between albums. Six songs that clock collectively in at a mere 20 minutes might not seem like ideal stoner rock, but excited squawks from the UK blogosphere indicate this fucker will blow the casual listener though the wall.

Today's weed: Private Reserve, an indica advertised down at the local dispensary as containing a frightful percentage of raw THC calculated helpfully to two decimal spaces.

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Listen to this while high: Ty Segall's "Spiders" 7-inch.

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Behind the buzz: S.F.'s Ty Segall attracts strong interest both on his own and as guitarist and/or drummer in a number of acts, including O.C. punks The Epsilons. His development from lo-fi D.I.Y. to this year's raucously heavy Goodbye Bread is being monitored like a rare and mutant orchid in the indie blogosphere, and the artist let slip his next record would be something even heavier: "I want to do a total glam Stooges-meets-Hawkwind or Sabbath, something like that. I think that would be super fun. I want to throw people off. I want to make a really heavy record: evil, evil space rock. Put a little Satan in space and you got the sound." So it is with great anticipation that I submerge my THC-sharpened ears into the promising muck of the shaggy wunderkind's new "Spiders" 7-inch. Ty Segall plays a free (with RSVP) show tonight at Brick and Mortar.

Today's weed: Presidential, a high-yield indica that will repeal term limits in your brain.

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