Song of the Day: Beck - Loser (1994, sort of)

Even though I was only 12 when it happened, I remember in the immediate post-Cobain reality of spring/summer '94 watching the media try and come up with an easy label and analogy for what the nation's youth was experiencing and how our generation would be defined. Maybe that effort was part of what propelled Beck's "Loser" into being such a big hit, or maybe the song was just that good and would have made a major impact even if Cobain hadn't died and the need for an anthropological dissection of alternative music culture didn't feel so immediate. But he did, and it was, and "Loser" immediately became labeled as the defining song of a generation. 

At the time, Beck felt like a probable one-hit wonder, arriving at the perfect moment to capitalize on the media's desire to summarize a nation's youth. Twenty years later, Beck is still going strong, undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of the '90s and '00s, with two Masterpiece albums to his name ('96's Odelay and '02's Sea Change) and several other very good ones. For these reasons (and others), it's interesting to go back and look at "Loser" as both an artifact of a time, and as the first gasp of a major artist. 

It's a little bit of a cheat to include "Loser" here, because the song actually came out a full year earlier, in the spring of '93. But that release was on a tiny label, with only 500 copies initially pressed. It was, however, what brought Beck to the attention of major labels, and after signing with Geffen, the song was re-released in the spring of '94, and that's when its major cultural impact began. 

Beck started out in NYC's "anti-folk" scene of the early-'90s, realizing that audiences were more likely to pay attention to his folk songs if they were backed by hip-hop beats and had absurd, non-sensical lyrics. Eventually that evolved into full-on rapping his lyrics over folk music, and the chorus of this song is actually (or artificially, depending on what you believe) Beck referring to his rapping ability. But as with so much art, sometimes the culture decides on a meaning that becomes more quote-unquote factual than the intended one. 

Since I wouldn't dare become the first person to ever write about Beck without referring to him as a musical chameleon, we'll go ahead and do that here. Sit down. (Waiting…) Beck is a musical chameleon! He's the Bowie of our era! He keeps changing styles! But seriously, part of Beck's genius is his ability to follow his muse across all genres and sounds without ever sounding like a tourist. His next album, Odelay, basically removed the folk part of his blueprint, made everything danceable, and flirted with electronica. Then Midnight Vultures removed the hip-hop influences and evolved into old skool funk. Then Sea Change totally shifted gears and is the best acoustic-based album anyone has released since Springsteen's Nebraska, as well as the second-greatest divorce album of all-time. And on and on and on. 

Could we see any of that in "Loser?" Yes and no. A major reason the song survives isn't merely due to importance, but quality. It's really good! It combines three seemingly disparate genres--folk, blues, and hip hop--in interesting ways that we hadn't seen before. In a sense, the lyrics of "Loser" are both the best and worst thing that could have happened to the song. Without a doubt, the lyrics are a huge reason it became a hit, and a huge reason that we remember the song as being so culturally significant. But the lyrics also obscure everything else. Because of that chorus and what it came to mean, we think of "Loser" as a distinctly time-and-place/you-had-to-be-there song, and that's not really fair. It's a song that seemingly only gets dissected in a lyrical context, and that undermines how good and interesting the music is. Sometimes that's just how it goes. 

But listen again to those opening twenty seconds, before the words start. Have you ever heard anything else like that? It sounds like it's being played on a broken guitar, merged with a beat that only could have been done on a Pro-Tools app. It's laptop music created before people used laptops to make music. And then it brings in some fucking sitar, because… sitar!! The words feel intrinsically linked to an exact time and place, but the music doesn't at all. No matter when you listen to it, those sounds come across as equally archaic and futuristic, which is the exact opposite sensation of carbon-dating than the lyrics evoke. I'm not sure how many people really recognized Beck's genius in 1994 (I was too young to be reading the good analyses), but looking back, it's inescapable. Regardless of what he said, Beck was a chimpanzee in the time of monkeys. 

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Song of the Day: Nine Inch Nails - Hurt (1994)

One of the most fascinating anomalies to look at in the pop charts is when a true piece of art rock experiences huge crossover success to audiences that aren't looking for art. In the mid-'90s, Nine Inch Nails experienced that kind of success with their/his third album, The Downward Spiral, selling nearly four million copies during its heyday. 

Even understanding the times--1994 was clearly an era where great "alternative" albums were selling in vast quantities--the huge success of The Downward Spiral is still a bit strange. Yes, it's a great album, maybe one of the ten best albums of the decade, and certainly hugely influential. But that statement applies to dozens of albums that didn't sell for shit. The Velvet Underground didn't turn into mega-stars in '67 when they released one of the best albums of an era that had a huge appetite for new and edgy rock bands. 

The Downward Spiral was marketed really well. The album's cover art straddled a fine line between looking important and dangerous, which appealed to people across several demos, the key single, "Closer," had a chorus with the lyrics "I want to fuck you like an animal," which was basically mana from the gods to all teenage boys, and the video was one of the most artistic/innovative/memorable/disturbing/cool music videos anyone had ever seen. Trent Reznor was also good looking, ripped, badass, incredibly talented, and swore a lot, so he had a lot going for him. 

But still. I've been listening to this album a lot over the last few days, and two things really strike me: 1) Goddamn, it's still really good, and 2) Goddamn, It is amazing that so many people bought and loved this album, which is tremendously inaccessible for the 95% of it that does not feature the word "fuck." It might be the most widely heard piece of completely non-commercial music ever, which is difficult to process. 

In 1994, the album closer, "Hurt," really stood out for several reasons. It was sonically unlike the rest of the album, a very somber affair with almost no loud noises. It was somehow even bleaker than the rest of the album, which made it sound like the most dangerous song even though it was also the quietest--a reality that ought to have been mutually exclusive but somehow wasn't in this case. And the lyrics all felt poignant, even to millions of teenagers that had never tried heroin. 

Today, "Hurt" is still memorable for these reasons, and others. More than anything else on the first three NIN albums, this song pointed towards the sustained relevance Reznor would continue to have. The musical direction of the song foretold the softer sounds he'd explore on subsequent releases, the Johnny Cash cover introduced Reznor to new audiences and brought him back to the attention of old ones, and the more subtle atmospheric work of the track was the first real evidence of the type of work Reznor would eventually do in film composing, such as the Oscar-winning (and marvelous) score for The Social Network. 

It's also a song with a power that transcends its subject matter. While the song is about willful and powerless drug addiction, Cash's version--as well as time--have made it feel more universally about any type of pain we willingly subject ourselves to because we just can't help it. 

Of any song from 1994, this one might eventually prove to have the longest lifespan. 

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Song of the Day: Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun (1994)

When I think of the music of 1994, this will probably always be the first song that comes to my mind. While I unfortunately don't have a chart documenting exactly how many minutes I spent watching every music video on MTV rotation that year, I'd be shocked if this wasn't in first place by almost double whatever came in second. I honestly might have seen this video an average of three times a day in summer '94. It. Was. Everywhere. Everywhen. All the time. And that's cool, because it's a great song. 

I'd never heard of Soundgarden before this video, but I distinctly remember finding out they were also from Seattle was the first time I realized that the Seattle Scene was a quote-unquote thing. They became the de facto Band of the Summer that year for my friends and I, and the only reason Superunknown wasn't the first CD I bought is because my cousin had already given me a copy. In the same way "Smoke on the Water" was the first guitar riff everyone learned in 1974, "Spoonman" filled that role for everyone I knew that started playing guitar in the mid-'90s. 

Superunknown is the prototypical alternative album of the era: it's at least 20 minutes too long, has five totally transcendent songs, five completely forgettable songs that you skipped so often you literally forget what they sound like, and you almost always turned it off when it still had three or four songs left to go. It also has the standard-for-the-time over-produced booklet with lyrics that are difficult to read because they're obscured by the dark/cool graphics that we spent way too much time staring at, like the upside-down-pink-baby-silhouette. 

Superunknown is nearly 70 minutes long, but almost no one actually spends that much time with the album. Eight of the fifteen songs pass the five-minute mark, which is ridiculous considering they're almost all standard verse-chorus-verse affairs. Here's the Superunknown that should have existed: Axe the last five songs entirely, because they mostly suck. Then cut about a minute out of all the others, and switch the first two tracks. Now you have a ten-song/40-minute album that starts with "My Wave" and ends with "The Day I Tried To Live," which is a perfect album closer. That album would be remembered as one of the undisputed best of the '90s. Instead, everyone remembers Superunknown as an album they really loved twenty years ago, and they're not sure why they never listen to anymore. 

As it is, "Black Hole Sun" is really the only song on the album that earns its run time. It grows climactic instead of repetitive. It's Soundgarden at their most Zeppelin-esque, with the distorted riff echoing "No Quarter," and Matt Cameron's thundering drum re-entrance after the song's false ending is one of the better John Bonham impressions ever recorded. The whole thing is sort of like an alternate version of "Stairway" filtered through the more dystopian songwriting style of the Physical Graffiti era. 

The video still makes no sense, and considering people my age saw it enough times to memorize every frame, trust me when I say that we would have made sense of it if there were sense to make. But one thing that's great about music videos is that it's the perfect medium to experiment with non-narrative filmmaking. Music videos don't need to make sense, they only need to evoke feeling and emotion. The individual shots of "Black Hole Sun" don't really add up to any story, but they do create the sensation of impending doom to an otherwise normal setting, and really, creating a sensation is all a music video should generally be trying for. 

If every band has a defining image, that image for Soundgarden is undoubtedly the band playing on that yellow hill, hypnotically staring up to the sky, with those ominous clouds racing around behind them. 

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Song of the Day: Weezer - In the Garage (1994)

It's hard for teenagers--and even some adults--to realize this, but eventually you have to accept that rock stars don't necessarily have to look like Rock Stars. For a lot of people in my generation, that idea was first implanted with this photo of molten hot uncoolness: 

When you're young, what music you like doesn't matter quite as much as what music you think you're supposed to like. In 1994, white teenage males were supposed to like alternative music, and one thing the great alternative bands of that era had in common was they all looked like complete badasses. Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, Anthony Keidis, Scott Weiland, Trent Reznor… those guys all had a seemingly effortless coolness that just couldn't be contained. And then there was Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, wearing fucking khakis on the cover of their first album. 

Look at those losers. Nothing baggy, no flannel, no long hair or facial scruff, no shirts emblazoned with the logos of underground bands we'd never heard of, and named after an asthmatic condition. Even as a 13-year old that played Magic: The Gathering between inhaler puffs at the time, I felt like you had to try to be that uncool.

It's hard to say how we eventually came to accept Weezer. It definitely didn't happen quickly or easily. Their first two hits, "Undone - The Sweater Song" and "Buddy Holly," both felt like joke songs. Destroying sweaters and music videos set in Happy Days--this was just not "real" rock music. By the time "Say It Ain't So" became their third major hit, we'd all pretty much succumbed to buying the album, but we were still suspicious. While we were sure bands like Filter and Seven Mary Three were the next superstars, Weezer seemed like a band that would never be heard from again and future generations would mock us for listening to. Yeah, we were idiots. 

Looking back, Weezer's debut might have been the best American rock album of '94. Even if you'd go with The Downward Spiral, or Vitalogy, or Superunknown, or any other possibility, it's hard to deny that Weezer is firmly in the conversation, and maybe even in pole position. Its ten songs are mostly perfect, all catchy, all distinctive, well produced by former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, and the epic closer "Only In Dreams" was the kind of song other bands just weren't writing anymore. Unlike most other alternative albums of the era, Weezer doesn't feel bloated with a maximized CD length, three or four filler songs demanding to be skipped, and a momentum that all but ceased to exist by track 6. But no song quite told us who they were like "In the Garage."

In the first verse, Rivers tells us he relishes playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading X-Men comics, and not even the cool, contemporary Jim Lee-drawn X-Men. No, the '80s X-Men of Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler, who by '94 were on a British super-team that even American comics readers barely cared about. I mean, after that album cover, we didn't need any further evidence that these guys weren't cool, but they just kept on giving it to us. Eventually, of course, you learn that really being cool is being who you are, unapologetically and without ulterior motive. In that, these guys were ahead of the curve, and that's what this song is all about. 

"In the garage, I feel safe. No one cares about my ways. In the garage, where I belong." That's the chorus, and it speaks to anyone who feels like their treacherous uncoolness could be exposed at any moment, which is basically every teenager on the planet. But even at the age where being uncool feels like the riskiest thing anyone could do, we still have a safe place for it, and eventually that safety net of our real selves expands out to the public world once we relax and let it. Weezer had already reached that relaxed state, which is why they could announce so emphatically and obviously on their album cover that they wouldn't be playing the same image game everyone else was. 

(Two years later, Rivers took the not-your-daddy's-rock-star thing even further by opening an album with a song about how depressing it was to have sex with groupies--a subject that Mick Jagger and Gene Simmons apparently forgot to ever weigh in on.) 

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Song of the Day: Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (1994)

Even though they were both NYC rappers, Biggie could not have been further apart from Nas in 1994. Nas was all about the realism of life on the streets, with the minimalist, non-conformist soundscapes to match. Biggie had a much more produced sound that relied far more heavily on samples transforming his raps into pop-ready sounds, with choruses that were often sung instead of rapped. In terms of subject matter, Biggie was rapping about a life that had already transcended the streets and resulted in stardom. He may have been ready to die, but until that happened--sooner rather than later, as it would turn out--he was getting "up close and personal with Robin Leach." 

"Juicy" is my favorite song from Ready To Die, and it might be the quintessential Biggie song. Like Biggie himself, literally and metaphorically, the song is larger than life. I used to think of it as a rap origin story, but that's not really true. It's not about how Biggie became who he was, but rather how he reacted to who he became. It's the second act of the story, the middle third of Scarface, when power has been consolidated, but not quite yet abused. This is when he's still prepared to say "damn right I like the life I live, 'cause I went from negative to positive." That wouldn't remain the case for long. 

Sonically, Biggie's best tracks were far more adorned than the Nas stuff we looked at yesterday, but that ornateness didn't feel out of place, because everything about Biggie at the time was meant to be decadent. Where Biggie really transcends the opulence of the songs is with his legendary voice, which is one of the best vocal weapons in rap history. Only a voice that powerful and dominating could rhyme "worst days" with "thirsty" and not have the listener wonder whether it works or not. Instead of hearing that line and thinking something like "Oh, I'm not so sure about that," our minds immediately go to "daaammnnnn." It's the rare level of command over craft that turns questionable decisions into deliriously transcendent ones. 

While Nas was about capturing existing reality, Biggie was about creating a new reality through sheer force of conviction, talent, and personality. I'm much more interested and engaged by the achievements of Nas, but there's an undeniable power to watching someone succeed at such massive and unwieldy ambitions. 

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Song of the Day: Nas - Represent (1994)

To anyone that knows me, it's probably not a huge surprise that I wasn't yet listening to rap music as a 12-year old in 1994. As a small town Jewish comic nerd attending a tiny laboratory school with virtually no black kids, rap music could not possibly have made less sense to me. But when you truly love an art form, you eventually start exploring every corner of it, even the ones that might first not appeal to you. I first started buying the major canonical rap albums towards the end of college, but really appreciating some of them came slowly. Getting into Jay-Z and Kanye was easy, because their music was partially targeted to white suburbanites. Accessible pop hooks were nearly smothering it. 

But there was a next level of rap, what now feels to me more like "real" rap, which was much more unadorned and minimalist, like A Tribe Called Quest and Nas, that was more difficult to love at first. It wasn't until 2008 that I really started understanding why '94's Illmatic was such a masterpiece, and it's now in a toss-up with a few others as my favorite rap album ever. 

Illmatic is wildly unlike most other hip-hop albums of the era. It's comparatively short, under 40 minutes, while the major albums of artists like Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, and so many others were sprawling affairs that nearly maxed out CD length, and included numerous skits and segue tracks that diverted from the key material. Illmatic also doesn't feature any major guest stars, pop hooks, or tracks aimed at crossover success. It's just a brisk, bleak, minimal, ten-song affair about the streets, with each song mostly surviving on a single repeated  sample that allows the beat and vocal to do all of the heavy lifting. If stars like 2Pac and Biggie were the popular network juggernauts like CSI, Nas was The Wire -- the prestigious, low-budget alternative that thrived on grit, realism, and empathy for the fully formed figures it portrayed. 

"Represent" is my favorite song on the album, maybe in part because it has the most obvious hook of any of the tracks, but also because of the rawness of opening with the words "straight up shit is real, and any day could be your last in the jungle." It's not like this was the first rap song I'd heard discuss the mortality problem of growing up in the streets, but while most of the others romanticized that life, Nas makes it sound more like a CNN piece, and the somber keyboard melody that keeps methodically repeating ends up feeling funerary in this context. 

A lot of the rap music I still love is in the Jay-Z "Empire State of Mind" style, which are essentially pop songs with rapped vocals. But stuff like what Nas was doing in '94 continues to grow in my appreciation, because it truly is its own thing. While listening to a lot of rap can feel a little too uncomfortably like contrived tourism for white rock fans, Illmatic never does. That's probably why it took me so long to appreciate it. Until you can stop being an actual tourist, there'll never be anything for you in Illmatic. But when you're finally ready to move in, the real genius of the place will stand revealed. 

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Song of the Day: Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye (1994)

Yesterday I wrote about how difficult it is for someone like Liz Phair to try and follow-up on a debut as acclaimed as Exile in Guyville was. So today, I thought it'd be interesting to look at someone who never fully experienced that problem, for better and worse. 

There weren't too many "Best of '94" lists you would have found Jeff Buckley's lone album, Grace, placing highly on at the time. It was listed #1 in Mojo, and made Top Ten in both Entertainment Weekly and Melody Maker, but it wasn't exactly a consensus "Great" album in its moment. Then Buckley died in 1997, drowning during a late night swim while he was still laboring over Grace's follow-up, and now we remember everything differently. 

A lot of artistic works become more heralded over time, and it's always fascinating to try and understand why, both in terms of why we like something better in retrospect, and why we might have liked it less at the time. 

Grace seems to exist completely devoid of context, which in itself is amazing. It doesn't feel a part of any scene, style, or era. Whenever you hit play on the album, it always feels wistfully old and wise, yet distinctly contemporary to whatever year it's being heard in. In that sense, it's an album that the world was almost destined to under-appreciate at first and (perhaps) over-appreciate in retrospect, specifically because it feels so alien to any given moment and so universal to being looked back upon. It's probably an album that would eventually be an agreed-upon masterpiece even if Buckley had lived and released nothing but shit for the rest of his life. That Sliding Doors timeline did not occur, but perhaps it only exacerbated a critical ascension that was already inevitable. 

Something I've always loved about the NBA is that it's the sport where I believe elite athleticism most frequently and spectacularly becomes a visual thing. Seeing someone slash through the lane, get into the air, and then change directions/poses/hands/strategies during hang-time is just breathtaking to watch. When I listen to Jeff Buckley, I get that same sort of hang-time with his voice. It's like he had this super-power to begin a note without having any idea where it was going, and just sort of whimsically glide it around to however he was emoting at the time. 

We often associate The Pixies--and then Nirvana--with the archetypal "loud, quiet, loud" dynamic, and that's valid. With those bands, that sound style was more about song craft and chord structuring than anything else. But the seemingly uncontrolled emotional out-pouring of Buckley's music and vocal athleticism turns the "loud, quiet, loud" blueprint into more of a "gentle, hostile, gentle" thing. It's hard to imagine too many artists that would work for, but Buckley made it his own, even if just for a short while. 

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Song of the Day: Liz Phair - Supernova

A lot of times when an artist follows up a "masterpiece" with an album that isn't, we begin to remember that second album as an unmitigated failure even though that's often not the case. Many of these failed follow-up albums are ripe for rediscovery, because they hold up surprisingly well once they're removed from the context of their expectations. 

Liz Phair burst on the scene in 1993 with Exile in Guyville, which didn't sell a lot, but lit critics' mental loins aflame like almost no female-rocker ever had. When it came time to follow that up the next year, the media positioned her as the next big thing, which included the above Rolling Stone cover, proclaiming that "A rock & roll star is born." 

The ensuing album, Whip-Smart, did not turn Phair into a major rock star, and it's now considered to be just the first of Phair's many failures at ever mattering again as much as she did with Exile in Guyville. Until I found it cheap in a used bin earlier this year, I'd never even heard Whip-Smart. I didn't think I needed to; the conventional wisdom on Phair had become that you only need her first album, and everything else sucks. I bought Whip-Smart mostly as an archaeological curiosity, like I wanted to research how quickly and all-encompassingly she started sucking. But that really wasn't what the research yielded. 

There's nothing profound about saying that Whip-Smart isn't as good as Exile in Guyville, that's pretty much agreeable fact. But for revisionist history to suggest that Whip-Smart is therefore of no value is simply unfair. 

"Supernova" was the big single from the album. The lyrics certainly aren't as interesting as people might have been expecting from Phair at the time, with lines like "Your eyelashes sparkle like gilded grass, and your lips are sweet and slippery like a cherub's bare wet ass." So yeah, nothing revelatory there. But even if this became the moment that Phair stopped making interesting art, that doesn't equate to meaning it's also the moment she stopped making decent rock and roll. Those two things are best when they go together, but they don't have to. "Supernova" might be a bit simplistic, and maybe even dumb, but it has a good hook and it's an infectious rock song. If Phair weren't under the hostile burden of expectations, maybe that would have been good enough, but instead we remember that it wasn't. Sometimes that's just how it goes. 

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Song of the Day: Johnny Cash - The Man Who Couldn't Cry (1994)

Aside from everything important that was going on in the musical mainstreams of 1994, one of the more interesting things happening slightly off the beaten paths of MTV was the beginning of the working relationship between Johnny Cash and producer Rick Rubin. At the time, Rubin was still in the nascent phases of branching out from hip hop & metal producing--he started working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in '91, Mick Jagger and Tom Petty in '93, and then Cash in '94. Over time, this collaboration would become one of the most important in both careers, but it all started with the 1994 album American Recordings. 

Like a lot of people, I really didn't become aware of this latter phase of Cash's career until he died, and his cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" became a pseudo-hit. So I bought American Vol. IV in 2003, and then worked my way back from there, eventually getting to this one. 

This first one is actually my least favorite of Cash's American Recordings albums, partially because the songs are just so spare that they don't fully engage me. But I also admire that approach, and that's something Rubin has been really good at when he begins producing an already-established artist--figuring out what the core elements of that artist's sound and talent are, and focusing solely on those, stripping away almost everything else. In several cases, like with Petty's Wildflowers, Jay-Z's Black Album, and these Cash albums, the results have helped redefine entire careers. 

My favorite song on this first American Recordings album is the last one, "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," which is also the only one not recorded in a studio. The simple inclusion of the crowd noises on this song (the album version was recorded at L.A.'s Viper Room) really helps sell the jokes of the lyrics. It's almost like hearing others laugh at the song gives you permission to laugh yourself. There's also something about hearing Cash perform live, late in his life, with no musical accompaniment. It's a reminder of just how talented and magnetic his voice and delivery was. 

The original version of this song is by Loudon Wainwright III (dad of Rufus), and it's performed roughly the same way. But Wainwright's voice was so much higher and more delicate that the song sounded like it had an entirely different meaning. Even though the lyrics are the same, Loudon's original doesn't really sound funny. It sounds more like he's relaying a true story, and an incredibly depressing one. With Cash, the unflinching deepness of his voice feels like such a non-sequiter to the sad subject matter that it could only be a joke. Cash takes away all sensitivity from the song and replaces it with a matter-of-fact, dry morbidness that seems to fit the song even better. That's how you know someone has a classic voice: When its mere presence can alter the entire emotional spectrum of the material. 

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Song of the Day: Blur - This Is a Low

It's strange looking back at what happened with British music in America in the mid-'90s. Oasis made it big, but none of their other Britpop contemporaries really crossed the pond. The Verve had a huge hit with "Bittersweet Symphony," but that was arguably only because of its role in Cruel Intentions, and Blur also got to MTV in that same year with "Song 2." But otherwise Blur and The Verve never became well-known bands in the states, and the other two great Britpop bands, Suede and Pulp, never made it here at all. In a sense, Britpop was just that--pop music for Brits, largely about British tradition and daily British life. Americans didn't understand what any of the lyrics spoke about, and Americans definitely don't like things they don't understand. Oasis made it here because they were almost too big not too, and their brand of rock and roll felt too powerful and undeniable for anyone that liked rock stars to look, sound, and act like rock stars. "Bittersweet Symphony" made it in America because it sounded like a classic the first time you heard it, and only felt more timeless in proportion to its becoming more ubiquitous. 

It's a bit difficult to understand why Suede didn't cross the Atlantic, because the guitar sounds on their first album would have fit in perfectly with what MTV was playing in 1992. But with Blur and Pulp, it's really not that mysterious. You can't listen to either band's best work for more than 90 seconds without feeling immersed in Britishness. I guess that's why I didn't really like Blur when I first heard them. 

1994's Parklife was the first Blur album I bought, and I remember getting it in the fall of 2003 when I was first going through a phase where I really felt like I needed to understand the slightly more marginal genres of rock that I hadn't totally supported yet. Britpop certainly applied, as did alt.country (this is when I first got into Uncle Tupelo), trip-hop, and several others. I bought Parklife without hearing anything from it first. It was considered a landmark album of '90s British rock, and that was good enough for me. The first time I put it on, those opening bass/dance-guitar lines of "Girls and Boys" could not have possibly sounded worse to me. It was an issue of expectations (I was assuming something much closer to Oasis), but I really hated them at first. I'm not even sure how many tries it took me to get all the way through the album. But one advantage I have when it comes to listening appreciation is because I'm so fascinated by the way the art forms evolve, I refuse to give up on something without understanding it first. This stubbornness has helped me eventually love a lot of bands I didn't like at first, like Blur, Steely Dan, Los Lobos, Roxy Music, and many others. On the other hand, it doesn't work every time. I listened to Captain Beefheart, Suicide, and The Fall long enough to understand and "get" them, and still know I can't stand listening to them.

Anyway, through repeated listens, I eventually started to like Blur quite a bit, though I still think The Verve, Suede, and Pulp were better. 

Parklife is a grower for many reasons. The first track doesn't really sound like the rest of the album, and a handful of the filler tracks are just bad. The title track makes absolutely no sense to Americans (myself included), nor do a large percentage of the lyrics on the others songs. The guitar sounds like punk power chords filtered through an all-ages video game. I think that's a compliment, but I'm still not totally sure. The bass is mixed so high that it almost turns every song into disco rock. Damon Albarn's vocals just sound soooo British that it's difficult to even think of it as singing until you really get used to it. Maybe you have to take the piss first. 

And yet, somehow all of these become just parts of the endearing whole that is the Blur experience. Though I never spent any time in England in 1994--the closest I got was a two-hour pit stop at Heathrow airport in the summer of 1996--Parklife just sort of feels like it captures a time and a place extremely well. It's an album that sounds like spending an exceedingly normal (and well soundtracked) day in London, for all of the good and bad and in-between that entails. 

One thing that Parklife really has going for it is how it ends, with "This Is a Low." It's what a good day in a great city coming to a close should feel like, when you over-romanticize it like any clueless foreigner would. When I listen to Blur, and particularly to this song, I'm okay with being that clueless foreigner, imagining my sexy alternate life in London. It's that Before Sunrise trope of feeling like you can't go to a great European city without something extraordinary happening, and this song is not just the sound of the end of that extraordinary something, but the sound of actually realizing it's the end, and romanticizing it in real time. 

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Song of the Day: Portishead - Mysterons (1994)

After ten straight posts of songs from 1994 that I loved (roughly) at the time, it's time to spend a while looking at songs from that year which I sadly wasn't nearly cool enough to discover until much later. And since the last post took us all the way to England, let's stay there for a bit. 

I didn't discover Portishead until a good ten years after their debut album came out and maybe even longer. I got into Massive Attack and The Chemical Brothers first, and those two bands led me to the larger world of the varied styles of electronic/techno/trip-hop music out there, explorations which I'm still making. 

Portishead is generally defined as trip-hop, which sort of means musical sounds derived from hip hop, but which aren't generally layered with rap, and rather feature vocals and tempos much closer to jazz/soul/electronica. I've read it described as music intended to listen to at 3am, when you've gotten home from the club, but aren't quite ready for the party to stop yet. 

"Mysterons" isn't one of the three singles on Portishead's first album, but it is the opening track, and I love the way it creates the mood not just for the album, but also for the band and their entire style of music. The drum beat sounds like it's perpetually leading somewhere, but the spooky synth melody makes it sound like you're only traveling back around to places you've already been, though maybe don't quite recognize. It's this inventive cocktail of deja vu, nostalgia, and pseudo-recognition that the album constantly plays with, and makes it seem both always familiar and forever unknown. It's not quite the sort of music that could ever be my favorite, but also not the sort I could ever tire of. 

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Song of the Day: Oasis - Columbia (1994)

Okay, now that we've spent several posts looking at the American music of 1994, it's time to leap across the pond for a bit. Obviously, there's no better place to start than arguably the best British album of '90s, which was also the debut of the best British band of the '90s. 

Many of my favorite bands, like Pearl Jam, U2, and The Clash, have this gift of amping up the final act of their most anthemic songs, like things are being taken to a new plane of passion/volume/energy/emotion that can barely be contained. I'm specifically thinking of the crescendoes of songs like The Clash's "Complete Control," Pearl Jam's "Rearviewmirror," and U2's "Even Better Than the Real Thing," which, not-so-coincidentally, are my favorite songs from each of those bands. Oasis is unique in that they have a gift for creating songs that don't merely reach this point, but actually seem to start there and linger for a song's entire duration. It's a bit of a Catch-22, because by definition (and being a writer, I love citing definitions) something can't logically be all-climax. That negates the entire concept of a climax. And yet, I sort of love that Oasis operates as though this truth does not exist. Nowhere is that better exemplified than the song "Columbia."

"Columbia" is basically six straight minutes of all late-song climax. It's a song that doesn't even totally have a beginning. It's like the band was in the studio, fiddling around with possibilities of how to start the song and get it to the part they were actually interested, and Noel finally just said "Fuck it, mates! Why can't we just bloody start it from the good bits?" And so they did. Yet even with a song that's ostensibly all-climax, they still find ways to amp up the intensity. The guitar solo followed by Liam joining back in with the distant-and-echo-heavy repetition of "Yeah yeah yeah"'s is glorious. 

At their best, Oasis always sounded larger than life, monolithic, like a musical Stonehenge that was somehow ancient even as it amazed you with its stature. It wasn't necessarily a volume thing, but rather the way the production interacted with the volume, like the style of the music's creation actually transcended how loudly it was being listened to. 

Like most Americans, the first time I heard Oasis was in '95, when "Wonderwall" became a massive hit. But I loved their second album so much that I quickly went back and found the first, and Definitely Maybe has been unquestionably one of my favorite albums of the '90s ever since. 

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Song of the Day: Seal - Kiss From a Rose (1994)

Few pop songs have ever united people that mostly hated pop music like Seal's massive hit "Kiss From a Rose" united my friends and I in 1995. It's difficult to say why this is. It could be that the song is just that good, which I honestly do believe. It also could be that once you put Batman in a music video, you've won the 13-year old demo regardless of what the song sounds like. 

Seal's second album (which, like the first, was simply titled Seal) came out in 1994 and included this song, but "Kiss From a Rose" didn't really take off until the summer of '95, when it was featured on the Batman Forever soundtrack, and a tie-in music video turned it into a massive hit. And we all loved it, even though it bore absolutely no resemblance or connection to anything else we loved at the time, other than comic books. 

It's especially ironic that a pop song's connection to Batman Forever might have been what provoked my friends and I to like it in 1995, because in hindsight, Batman Forever is a comically (no pun intended) awful movie, while "Kiss From a Rose" remains the outstanding pop song that it's always been. It uses the Freddie Mercury/"Bohemian Rhapsody" trick of layering many Seal vocals over one another to create a sound of epic harmony that's still just one person. It's also one of those rare songs where every line sort of sounds like it must be the chorus, so the song has this effect of feeling like it's all existing at a peak moment that just continues to linger. And the video was great. Even though my friends and I knew nothing about love in 1995, we all probably romanticized the idea that it must somehow involve dark rooftops, spotlights, bald black singers, Nicole Kidman, and leather Batman suits with fetishized nipples. To this day, I remain disappointed that my love life has never quite involved any of those things. 

Seal is an interesting figure, because it seems the two things people most know him for--his appearance and his marriage to Heidi Klum--have absolutely nothing to do with his music. As a latter day pop/soul crooner, he's quite good, and many of his best songs, like "Crazy" and "Amazing," remain some of the better songs of their genre and era. 

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Song of the Day: INXS - The Strangest Party (These Are the Times) (1994)

After a week's worth of posts on the alternative music of 1994, I thought it'd be fun to spend the next week checking in on some other types of music from that year, starting with the pop mainstream. 

INXS was one of the earliest bands I remember liking, probably a full year or two before I first started buying music. My cousin got me into them because he loved their 1992 album Welcome to Wherever You Are, and this led me to purchase their 1994 Greatest Hits album pretty early on in my CD buying years. Though I no longer have it--I replaced it with the more comprehensive 42-track anthology, Shine Like It Does--I listened to it a hell of a lot in those first few years of my music fandom, and I don't think I ever quite understood at the time that they were a different sort of band. I just assumed that they were like R.E.M. or U2--they'd been around longer, but otherwise were part of the same alternative scene that I was listening to. The fact that I had never seen one of their videos on MTV apparently didn't phase me from that belief. 

As was typical for the time, their Greatest Hits included two new songs to coax their fans into paying for music they mostly already had, and one of those new songs, "The Strangest Party (These Are the Times)" became arguably my favorite INXS song. 

INXS are one of the hardest bands to peg into any sort of style. They're general vibe is dance pop, but they sure as hell don't sound like any other dance pop bands. They're mostly guitar driven, which is unique enough, and the chorus's usually reach a level of epic sing-along. If you could somehow have a New Wave band completely devoid of any punk influence (which I realize is a mutually exclusive concept), then I guess that gets you close, but still somehow not quite. Maybe the reason I assumed they were part of the alternative music scene at the time was because they didn't fit anywhere else either. And they were at least rock and roll, even if a heavily danceable, pop version. 

I've always been a sucker for a good epic pop song, and "The strangest Party" definitely qualifies. The guitar doesn't even register until the chorus, with mostly just the vocals and drums making an impact before then. Then the chorus explodes into a glorious party anthem that demands to be sung along to. 

It seems uncouth to like INXS these days, and I've never quite understood why. You never even see Kick on any "Best Albums of the '80s" lists, which is pretty baffling. People seem to love hearing their singles in isolated bursts, but somehow can't equate that with liking the band across the continuum. A large swath of their work stands the test of time, and a song like "Need You Tonight" still sounds like it could have come out last month. It's like their sound captured the best of what people think of as "The '80s" without ever being held prisoner by the stench of the '80s. And yet, we somehow collectively hold that stench against them, even though it's not there. Pop culture doesn't always make sense. 

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Song of the Day: Pearl Jam - Not For You (1994)

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah, which was not only the occasion that initiated my music buying, but also a natural reason to reflect back on the time between. While Bruce Springsteen is unquestionably my favorite musical artist ever, no one has quite chronicled my life like Pearl Jam has. For starters, they're probably the only artist that I've loved for all 20 years I've been buying music. I've bought every Pearl Jam album since Vitalogy on the day it came out, with the exception of Yield, which was released at a time that I stubbornly refused to listen to anything but classic rock. No matter how much my tastes have changed and grown over the years, Pearl Jam has always been one of the greatest bands I've ever heard, and I can't imagine myself ever tiring of them. 

The first two times I saw them in concert punctuated the two most dramatic changes of my life: Their concert on August 18, 2000 was the day after I moved into the dorms for my freshman year of college, and their concert on May 7, 2010 was the week I moved to Michigan. Several of their albums have been released at pivotal times in my life. Vitalogy came out just a few weeks after my Bar Mitzvah, and I purchased it with gift certificates I received from that event. Binaural came out two weeks before my high school graduation, and I listened to it in the car that day. Lightning Bolt was released last fall in the midst of the worst break-up of my life, and it provided me some isolated moments of happiness and distraction. They've even permeated my burgeoning life as a writer and film critic, as I attended the world premiere of their documentary Pearl Jam Twenty at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, which has become my home away from home (here's my review from TIFF '11). And, of course, they've been valuable mentors for my beliefs on integrity, passion, artistry, and standing up for what you believe in. 

"Not For You" is not one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs. It's probably only my fifth favorite song from Vitalogy (the top four: "Better Man," "Corduroy," "Last Exit," and "Nothingman"). However, I do think this is the single most interesting song from which to discuss the band, and who they've been throughout their career. When Vitalogy was reissued a few years ago, it came with a live disc of a show from Boston in April '94, and just before the band begins playing "Not For You" (to an audience that didn't know the song yet), Eddie Vedder says "This song is about people who don't have taste, but they like us anyway." 

I can't fathom what it must have been like to be Pearl Jam between '92-'95, when they were unquestionably the biggest band in America, and essentially anointed spokesmen for the entire nation's youth, all within a year of releasing their first album. Being labeled a spokesman is a duel-edged sword. It provides the power of influence, but also the ripe opportunity for your message to be seized and misinterpreted by people that you want nothing to do with. (This is why Twitter is such a dangerous thing.) Just about anybody to ever join a rock band has had dreams of fame, but there are degrees. Few rational people ever expect to be the next Beatles, but that's pretty nearly what Pearl Jam became. Generally speaking, the larger your audience is, the less interesting you can be, because the Venn Diagram of people & demographics you're expected to reach doesn't have enough areas of overlap. Most celebrities that encounter this problem just suck it up and consciously stop being interesting (or never were in the first place), but Pearl Jam have never fit into any definition of "most." When they saw that their fan base was largely made of people they didn't want to be associated with, they calculatedly became less popular, which virtually no band has ever done before or since. Both Vitalogy and its follow-up, 1996's No Code, were very conscious attempts to appeal to a smaller number of people, to be less accessible, to be weirder. 

And yet, within that strategy are so many interesting ideas and lessons. Vitalogy has always been one of my favorite album titles, maybe my second favorite ever after Born to Run. It's a mostly made-up word, whose only notable previous use was to mean "the study of life." But I think of the word more literally, and more like the sum of its parts: the study of being vital. That's what Pearl Jam were really doing in the mid-90's, learning how to matter in perpetuity instead of fleetingly. No piece of art can be vital to everyone; that's simply not what art does. To really be artistically vital, you have to settle on an audience. So Pearl Jam started creating music that only the important parts of their audience would like, and the rest were happy--and encouraged!--to jump ship. 

I love the lyrics to this song. "Where did they come from? Stormed my room! And you dare say, it belongs to you. This is not for you!" That's about as clear a statement of intent as any band has ever uttered. Pearl Jam spent a handful of years as arguably the most important band in the world, and then abdicated the throne. It was the rock equivalent of Michael Jordan deciding to leave the NBA after three straight titles to become a shitty baseball player. But while Jordan probably still laments the titles he might have left on the table, I really don't think Pearl Jam does. They've spent the last 20 years with the fans they wanted to have, and that was enough for them. For everyone else, well… this was not for you.

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