A blog about the best, most interesting, and most offensive works in film, music, & entertainment culture, both current and classic. All comments and discussions are welcome.
Yesterday's song of the day was a somewhat cheesy 80's song, so here's another, and another one of my favorite covers of all-time.
"Hazy Shade of Winter" was written and recorded by Simon & Garfunkel in 1967, and it was a cool, up-tempo acoustic song (check it out here). The Bangles really only altered two things; they played the riff electrically, and they sang it with four female harmonies instead of two male harmonies. But good god, their version kicks the original's ass. Yes, the '80s production (and hair) is a bit (a lot) dated, but this riff played with total abandon on electric guitar and with a foxy chick knocking the shit out of the drums is the platonic ideal of this song. And lest we forget, The Bangles were great singers, with front-woman Susannah Hoffs having one of the more memorable voices of the era. There's a good reason Prince was writing hit songs for them.
Fun fact: This song was recorded as the theme song of a bad movie called Less Than Zero, which you can see clips of in the video. The film was based on the Brett Easton Ellis novel of the same name, and it stars a very young Robert Downey Jr. as a completely uncontrollable L.A. drug addict. So here's my question-- A) Was Downey cast for the role of an uncontrollable L.A. drug addict because he already was one, B) Was he relatively clean before the movie but playing an uncontrollable L.A. drug addict actually helped turn him into one, or C) Is the fact that he later turned into an uncontrollable L.A. drug addict a complete and utter coincidence?
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 3, 2014
In honor of Election Day, I wanted to write about an artist that has been overtly political and supporting of getting young people to vote (and vote democrat!), and because I'm saving Pearl Jam for a specific occasion, R.E.M. is today's lucky winner.
I don't know precisely when I bought R.E.M.'s 1994 album, Monster, but it was almost certainly sometime in early '95, when the videos from it would have still been all over MTV. I had a vague understanding that R.E.M. had been around a lot longer than all of the other bands I was listening to, and I already knew their hits from earlier in the '90s like "Losing My Religion," "Everybody Hurts," and "Man on the Moon," but I was still a year or so away from being exposed to their seminal '80s work. Monster was hugely successful with alternative music fans, which is why it became one of the most ubiquitous CDs to find in used bins later in the decade. Everyone thought it was good enough to buy, but comparatively few people thought it was good enough to keep, especially when R.E.M.'s star dramatically faded in the years to come.
These days it's popular to hate on Monster, which I don't quite understand. There's no question that it's not nearly as good as its predecessor, Automatic For the People, which is a masterpiece, but it's also a lot better than their first two Warners albums, Green and Out of Time, which are both uneven and try too hard to invade the pop mainstream. It could be argued that Monster tried just as hard to enter the alternative mainstream, but I don't quite look at it like that. Yes, this was obviously a departure for their typical sound, and it's a departure that was heavily influenced by the alternative music explosion of the previous three years, but I don't see it as an attempt to remain popular (which I don't really think R.E.M. cared about all that much) as much as it's an attempt to stay relevant. They wanted to believe their fastball was still a force to be reckoned with, and I admire when artists of an older generation experience that fit of defiance towards fading away (which is why Some Girls is still one of my favorite 'Stones albums). As Springsteen once said, "that's the life of a gunslinger, you're always lookin' over your shoulder for the next kid that's faster than you are."
Monster has its ups and downs overall, and I happen to think the ups are far more frequent than the downs, but less debatable is the fact that the leadoff track and first single, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", is absolutely fantastic. The riff and the energy are both dialed up to 11, a number R.E.M. had been previously hesitant to access, but you wouldn't know it from this. Here, they sound like 11 is their home court. Not only is the song influenced by the alternative mainstream movement happening at the time, but it's also influenced by the artistic developments U2 had been traveling over the previous several years going from the black & white somber seriousness of The Joshua Tree to the neon colored explosions of Euro-electronica on Achtung Baby and Zooropa. In a lot of ways, the entirety of Monster can be seen as an alternate version of Achtung Baby, one that could have been recorded in Seattle instead of Berlin. No, it's not nearly as good as Achtung Baby, but that same restless spirit of innovation is all over it.
It's ironic that the album which confirmed R.E.M. as heroes to a second generation of fans was also their last real moment in the zeitgeist. It's difficult to say if that was by choice or by circumstance. Their follow-up, 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, was certainly less commercial and MTV accessible, but the band also might not have expected the music industry to change and leave them behind as fast it did. But that's the life of the gunslinger; one day, you're just not quite fast enough anymore.
Objectivity is difficult even with the most concerted efforts, and nostalgia can be a powerful enemy to any attempt towards rational thought. We all have bands and movies from our youth that we sort of know better than to still enjoy un-ironically, but the power our memories have over us just doesn't quite allow for it. (Kiss fans almost all fit into this descriptor, myself included.) It's like we have a mental block towards seeing their flaws, no matter how obvious or egregious they are. Of all the lesser bands I got into during middle school, there's only one that I still can't quite abandon or label as shit-that-I-only-could-have-liked-when-I-was-thirteen. That band is Live, whose first two albums I still proudly own and thoroughly enjoy listening to.
I don't think I bought Throwing Copper until spring of '95, about a year after it came out and had become something of a juggernaut album. But when I finally got it, I loved it and it became my favorite album of that time period. The whole album was produced by former Talking Head Jerry Harrison, and even though I had no idea who he was at the time, his former band would one day become an all-timer for me. To this day, I think every one of the thirteen tracks is at least some degree of strong, even though I can now look at them without the rosy glasses I was apparently wearing at the time. "Selling the Drama," the first single, is a great post-grunge update of early R.E.M. "I Alone" is a shameless Nirvana imitator, but at least one of the better ones (though the video is absolutely horrid). "Lightning Crashes" (the huge hit) is a fantastic song that gave everyone a serious case of the feels at the time, even if we sort of knew it was overly preachy and sappy. Somehow that preachiness hasn't even hurt the song over time, because it's still just too good, like an alternative version of "Dream On." "Shit Towne" was obviously a song that spoke to me, living in Muncie, Indiana at the time. Many of the album tracks had great hooks and the perfect balance of subtlety and rage. But my favorite was always "Iris."
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this song, except that it's sort of everything. It's consciously artier, which I might not have known I was ready for at the time, but in retrospect I definitely was. It sounds angry in a way that isn't contrived directly from Nirvana, but rather feels like it's coming from a truer place. It starts with a subtlety that wasn't the same old, as every element of the song--bass, drums, guitar, vocals--each sort of have their own moments, like every second is something's solo until the chorus comes in. And man did I love that chorus. The drums start completely driving, like the best moments of Neil Peart on 2112, and the vocal melodies and crescendos were right out of the Bono/Eddie Vedder playbook. Then it all sort of quietly stutters and hiccups, like each instrument needs to awkwardly stretch for a few beats before starting the next verse. The lyrics also register as profound, even if they're somewhat unintelligible. I have no idea what "the felix of your truth" is, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound important.
Live haven't aged well overall. It doesn't help that they never released another good album, or that their singer became much, much preachier over the years, to the extent that they seem like a generically spiritual version of Christian rock. But those things sadly seem to cater the way we remember Throwing Copper, and I don't think that's totally fair. Yes, it was post-grunge in all of the wrong ways, but there's no reason that has to automatically mean it wasn't good.
Or maybe there is. I can't tell because the nostalgia I have for this album might be blocking my rationality. And I'm good with that.
First, a disclosure: I do not think Hall & Oates deserved induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and "You Make My Dreams" is one of their only songs that I really like. If we're merely going to start inducting popular groups that made decent pop songs, then they should have started with Boston and Duran Duran. But whatever, it is what it is.
Anyway, this is a good song, but more importantly, it's distinguished in history as one of modern film's all-time greatest uses of a pop song. I'm always impressed when a filmmaker finds a new innovative way to convey specific emotions. One of the best examples is the way Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" was used in Almost Famous. It's impossible to watch that scene without truly feeling the way music has the power to unite people, and that was the whole point. Here, we get a different kind of emotion: The "Hell yeah, I did it!" moment that people experience when they accomplish a long term goal… even if that goal is as simple as fornicating with someone.
For anyone that's ever finally succeeded in requiting a long-unrequited crush, you know this feeling. It's like you expect the whole world to come out and high-five you and say "Way to go, champ!", like some Little League coach. It's stupid, but we all feel it under the circumstances. This scene in (500) Days of Summer conveys that emotion better than I ever thought it was possible to be conveyed, and Hall & Oates' best song is the key. Few films are able to do this: Use heavily formalized elements to get at real emotional truth. It's always great when it works, and this scene is an absolute delight.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 2, 2014
What do Sting, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, and Paul McCartney all have in common? They all had massively successful solo careers that were artistically underwhelming and often downright awful. In the history of pop music, virtually every time an artist first becomes famous with a band and then goes solo, the solo career is disappointing in comparison. I can only think of four instances where the work a famous artist did solo is better than the work he/she did with the band that spawned their fame: Michael Jackson, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Peter Gabriel. In the case of Michael, he was too young to have any artistic sway over his band, and with Neil & Van the reason their solo careers are better is simply because they had a lot more time and freedom to follow their muse. But Peter Gabriel is unique in the annals of pop in that he became infinitely more interesting and better as a solo artist. He's one of the only figures for which the decision to go solo was clearly the right one for his artistic development.
When I first heard Gabriel was being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few months ago, I was a bit on the fence. Yes, he released some great songs, but was he really important? Now that I've spent some time rediscovering his music, the decision is a no-brainer, and I can't believe it took this long. Gabriel found a unique way to take the prog-rock of his Genesis work, fuse it with the art rock sensibilities of Eno and Bowie, and turn it into music that wasn't just accessible for Western pop audiences, but really for the whole world. He was also incalculably important to the development of music videos and the incorporation of African music into anglo-pop.
Gabriel reached his peak as a pop songwriter with 1986's So, and while that is an outstanding album, I slightly prefer his third and fourth albums from earlier that decade, where he found the most interesting middle-ground between his art-rock roots and the world-pop that he was beginning to embrace. "I Don't Remember" is my favorite song from those albums, and it showcases everything that made this era of Gabriel's music so rewarding.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 1, 2014
Here's another one of my favorite Motown singles, and one of my favorite opening bass lines ever.
Someone once asked me how to tell the difference between '60s Motown soul and other '60s soul like Stax and Atlantic, and my immediate answer was "Tambourine." Motown just loved them some tambourine. If SNL ever wanted to do a sequel to their "More Cowbell" skit, it should be a Motown skit called "More Tambourine." Motown singles also tended to have more pronounced bass and piano, while Stax/Atlantic tended to emphasize guitar, horns, and organ far more than Motown. But really, tambourine is the key. If you hear it, it's probably Motown. But I don't mean that as a pejorative, as a song like this proves. Listening to this song makes me wish I owned a tambourine.
There's also a great moment in the 1991 film The Commitments where the female back-up singers of the group rock out to this song while hanging laundry, so that's worth checking out.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 31, 2014
This is the best punk song you've never heard. Jim Carroll was the NYC street punk/poet who wrote the autobiography The Basketball Diaries, which was turned into a film in 1995 with a young Leonardo DiCaprio playing Carroll. Carroll lived a life few of us can fathom, with heroin, prostitution, trouble with the law, friends dying, and everything else thrown in, all before he turned 20. It's one of the most extreme cautionary tales of modern urban life. But few people know that Carroll's redemption and overcoming his addictions culminated with his forming a punk band at the end of the 1970's, and this was their debut single. (FYI: the song doesn't start until about 20 seconds into the video)
"People Who Died" is morbid, and all the more so because it's factual. The stories Carroll tells in the song are all based on people he knew. At first it might seem inappropriate to turn so much tragedy into entertainment, but to Carroll, this was his life. This isn't entertainment to him, it's a coping mechanism.
One of the central missions of the original punk movement was to seize back reality from the ridiculous excesses of 70's mainstream rock, and few were more prepared to do that than Carroll. I encourage everyone to look up the complete lyrics to the song, but here are two verses where the starkness of the words are equal parts shocking and heartbreaking.
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof Tony thought that his rage was just some goof But Herbie sure gave Tony some, some bitchin' proof And Herbie said "Tony, can you fly?" But Tony couldn't fly... Tony died
Brian got busted on a Narco rap He beat the rap by ratting on some bikers He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Rikers." But the very next day he got offed By the very same bikers
Is this funny? I guess, kind of. But to Carroll, tragedy didn't have the same sting when it was all around you, all the time. All people find ways to laugh about their misfortune. For Carroll, misfortune was just far more extreme than what most of us are used to. But he did better than merely laugh about it, he used it to fuel meaningful art.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 30, 2014
Dredging up Prince's greatest B-Side yesterday reminded me of this song, which just might be my favorite B-Side ever.
"Armagideon Time" is a cover of a reggae song by Willi Williams, and it was the flip-side to the classic single "London Calling." The Clash recorded a fair amount of reggae around this time, and at the risk of sounding like a philistine, I like most of it better than the original source material. But beyond just being a great song recorded by a great band at the peak of their powers, this song has a story behind it that makes me love it even more.
The engineer, Kosmo Vinyl, had a theory that the perfect single was 3 minutes long, so the plan was the band would just play the song live in the studio and they'd fade out the recording to hit three minutes. So at about the 2:58 mark, you can hear Kosmo Vinyl announce from the recording booth that they got to three minutes, and the band briefly stops, before frontman Joe Strummer shouts back, "Okay, okay, don't push us when we're hot!" And with those words, the band jumps right back in and jams out for another minute.
I love 1) that Joe knew how hot the band was and that they should keep it going, and 2) that they had both the playfulness and pomposity to keep that exchange on the recording. 99% of bands would have either edited it out or just recorded another take. But rules weren't for The Clash, and that's what made them legends.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 29, 2014
The first three CDs I ever bought were by Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, and Counting Crows, but by the time I bought them at the end of October, 1994, they'd all been out for several months. On November 1, 1994 (twenty years ago yesterday), I bought three new CDs that were released that day, the first time I'd ever bought an album the day it came out. The first two, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Out in L.A. and Aerosmith's Big Ones, I don't have anymore. The Chili Peppers album was terrible, just a clearing house of bad outtakes for their old record label to try and cash in on the band's new breakthrough success. Big Ones was a good compilation of Aerosmith's comeback hits for Geffen Records in the late '80s and early '90s, but I've since replaced it with a better, more complete compilation. The third album that came out that day, Nirvana Unplugged, ended up being a milestone album for my generation, and one of the greatest live albums ever released.
Few live albums, and especially few posthumous releases, ever have the ability to change the way we collectively look at an artist, but Nirvana Unplugged did just that. The track list of lesser known album tracks redefined the depth that we associated with Cobain's songwriting catalogue, the arrangements reframed what we sonically thought Nirvana represented, and the choice of covers (and the appearance of former Germs guitarist Pat Smear) more firmly placed the band as champions of the musical underground. By the time of the album's release, Nirvana had essentially ceased to exist for six months, but the way we've thought of the band in the twenty years since has been forever altered by this unplugged performance. The album begins with Kurt Cobain introducing the opening song, "About a Girl," by saying "This is off our first record. Most people don't own it."
Just in that first line, and especially in the 14 tracks that follow, Nirvana draws attention to the idea that there's so much more music out there than the hits, and that much of it is great. At the time Cobain wrote this song, he'd been listening a lot to the early '60s Beatles and contemporary R.E.M., and he wanted to write a song that fit in with the pop sensibilities of those styles. He was initially concerned about putting the song on 1989's Bleach, because it melodically stood out from the rest of the record. Here, not only does it stand out, but it sets the tone. The acoustic arrangement sounds perfect, and recasts the chords and vocals Nirvana was famous for as something far more tender and timeless. Who knows what impact this album might have made had Cobain still been alive for its release. Maybe the vulnerability it exhibited would have felt out of place in a world that wasn't looking at him as a tragic martyr for the dark underside of fame. But we didn't get that world, we only got this one. For all of the sadness associated with this recording, it's also the greatest eulogy any pop star has ever written for themselves.
It's amazing how chronological proximity can force labels upon things that simply don't fit. The Alternative Nation of the early-to-mid '90s American music scene allowed a lot of bands to become popular that otherwise wouldn't have, but it also forced the "alternative" descriptor onto a lot of music that was simply not alternative. With hindsight, we can look back and understand that Counting Crows were clearly not part of the same scene as The Smashing Pumpkins, and the mere suggestion feels ludicrous. But in 1994, it all felt the same. Good new rock bands were coming out of the woodwork seemingly every month, MTV made them all fast superstars, and the era made it all feel like part of the same thing.
Counting Crows' debut album, August and Everything After, was the third of the first three CDs I ever bought, all on the same day. Green Day, STP, and Counting Crows may feel like three tremendously dissimilar bands in 2014, but in late October 1994, they were the three bands that began my long musical journey.
Back in college, I was at a bar once with my girlfriend at the time when Billy Joel's "Piano Man" started playing, and she commented how amazing it must be to write a song that just ends up transcending all eras/styles/tastes/context, and just gets played and sung along to forever. I think of that point every time I hear "Mr. Jones," which is a song destined to be sung anytime someone breaks out an acoustic guitar and begins taking requests, pretty much until the end of time. It's just that kind of song, the one that permeates into our collective subconscious, and provokes everyone to sing along even though they only know every third word and have definitely never considered what the lyrics mean or where the hell the "New Amsterdam" might be.
The actual context for the song is pretty interesting, as it hit #1 in April of '94, just a few weeks after Kurt Cobain died (and knocked R. Kelly's "Bump n' Grind" out of the top spot, no less). For a song ostensibly about wanting the benefits of fame, it was a bizarre time for that sentiment. "When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely," so says the song. I'm sure Kurt, if he heard the song before he died, would have vehemently disagreed. To those who seriously thought about these things at the time, a song with the lyric "We all wanna be big big stars" probably felt immediately dated, and maybe even in bad taste. But to the rest of us, it hasn't spent a single day feeling dated in the 20+ years since it came out, and maybe it's no accident that it hit #1 when it did--A few weeks after the Cobain tragedy, perhaps we were already hoping to wash away the negativity of what happened and find a new star to anoint.
(The video, on the other hand, definitely feels dated, particularly at the 42 second mark when Adam Duritz starts twerking at the microphone. You can't win 'em all.)
There are only a handful of arguments in pop music that fundamentally bother me, and here they are: When people think The Beatles are overrated, when people hate Springsteen for reasons that they can't articulate, when people think John Bonham was a better drummer than Keith Moon, and when people think Michael Jackson was better than Prince. In the case of the first three, the contrarian opinion is simply wrong. The last one is trickier.
Prince versus MJ can be approached in any number of ways, and I conceed that there isn't necessarily a "right" answer. But the two biggest things I think Prince has indisputably in his favor are that he was more interesting and more prolific. Arguing the merits of being "more interesting" and why that makes someone better is a topic for another day. But beyond simply being more prolific (which is just fact), I think Prince just released a lot more great music than Michael. Prince reached his A+ territory with startling regularity for a longer span of time than Michael, and a song like "17 Days" helps to illustrate that.
This song was the B-Side (!!) to "When Doves Cry," and the only place you can own it on CD is the 3-disc Hits/B-Sides compilation. The song doesn't even exist on YouTube, which is why I can't embed a video in this post (but here's a link to the song). It allegedly received a bit of radio play in 1984 (I can't exactly be an authority on that), but it's otherwise a pretty unknown song. Michael Jackson's discography, despite its many merits, doesn't feature any lost classics. With Prince, on the other hand, you could burn someone an 80-minute CD that featured entirely great songs they probably haven't heard. Of course, part of that's his own fault; he just released too much material and some of it was frankly bad. But that's the thing with Prince--his genius never had an "off" switch. The shit was just spilling out of him 24/7/365. There are so many great Prince songs out there, just waiting for people to discover them. For most artists, "17 Days" could have been their break-through hit. Prince threw it away on a B-side because he knew he had ten more songs to write the next day.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 28, 2014
Generally speaking, when kids first start really listening to current music around the middle school years, they don't initially understand qualitative differences. They know if they like something, and they know how popular that something is, but objective judgments of artistry don't come into the picture until much later (or never, for some people). As a middle schooler in the mid-'90s, my friends and I loved current alternative music, and we had a basic understanding of the hierarchy, but that understanding was really only based on duration. There were the bands that we'd only heard one album from, and then there were the bands that had released two or three. Anyone in the latter group was, obviously, awesome. If MTV was playing your second or third album just as much as your first, and the songs sounded just as cool, what else was there to know? To anyone that was five or more years older and seriously listening to music, it was obvious that Stone Temple Pilots initially existed as a shameless Pearl Jam rip-off. Their big hits off of their first album, 1992's Core, were all just re-writes of "Even Flow." But to middle-schoolers, that didn't enter into the logic lexicon.
STP's second album, Purple, was one of the first three CDs I ever bought, and I loved it immediately. The first few songs sounded edgy, "Big Empty" was on the soundtrack for The Crow, which was THE cool action movie of the time among my friends and I, and we even loved the hidden lounge-style track at the end. In retrospect, that hidden song was probably one of our first real encounters with irony. And then there was the huge hit, "Interstate Love Song," which was probably the most ubiquitous song on MTV in 1994 (Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" would be the other major contender). It was absolutely inescapable, and we couldn't get enough.
It's amazing with hindsight to realize how much we didn't know in 1994, and how bad we were at recognizing quality. Sure, we all owned the great albums by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the Smashing Pumpkins, but we also all owned the popular-at-the-time albums by The Toadies, Seven Mary Three (definitely the most egregious of all the Pearl Jam rip-offs), Filter, Gravity Kills, Sponge, Candlebox, and so many other bands that have been very justifiably forgotten. All we had to go by is what MTV played and whether or not it sounded cool. The fact that it might have sounded EXACTLY like something else never entered the equation. Context is generally not a strong point of the seventh-grade mind. As an adult, I think Stone Temple Pilots are one of the most interesting bands of the era to analyze. They no longer fit into my easy 12-year old logic of "sounds cool = absolute greatness", but I'm also smart enough now to realize they didn't remain the Pearl Jam clone that they clearly started as. In hindsight, few bands have ever done a better job of redefining themselves with a second album as STP did in 1994. Though critics didn't recognize it at the time--and to be fair, it's difficult to mentally reframe a band that began so poorly--STP really crafted a follow-up album that acknowledged the criticism initially levied against them. While Scott Weiland couldn't totally alter the timbre of his singing voice, his Vedder-ish inflections are mostly gone now, as are the grunge-by-numbers riffs that drew so much ire the year before. More than anything, Purple just sounds like '90s classic rock, and I mean that as a compliment. "Interstate Love Song" remains one of the best songs of the era, a song that absolutely defies anyone to get sick of it. It's acoustic and melancholy intro, punctuated by a bit of twang, set the tone, and the chorus melody soars over the mainstream rock guitar. And that's really why STP wouldn't die despite the concerted attempts the critical community of the time made to kill them: their best songs had really, really good melodies, and after the years distance you from all the unoriginal sounds that got caked over the top, the melodies still sound great. STP's best songs initially made their commercial impact not solely because of who else they sounded like, but also because of how infectious they were, and two decades later, that's the part that still stands out. Check out the Song of the Day Archive!!
My tastes have expanded, grown, and matured a lot in the last several years, and so much of what I listen to now are things that I barely went near in college. But having said that, Indie Rock is still my favorite genre of music. The heart wants what the heart wants.
This is definitely one of my favorite Indie Rock songs from the last five years, and it's a good example of what the best of the form sounds like. Spoon are one of the better Indie bands of the millennium thus far, and their 2007 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was one of my favorites of that decade. Their follow-up, 2010's Transference, wasn't quite as good as its predecessor, but it did contain this gem, which just might be their best song yet. I remember I played it for my cousin back around the time it came out and it was my favorite song of the moment, and he said that the difference between he and I was that he "need(s) there to be some kind of hook for the song to be great." And that's when I knew we'd have to agree to disagree, because I think this song is ALL hook. The bass line is one of those that just stays in my head for hours after I hear it, and I love the way the angular guitar bounces in and out, almost like it's just throwing riff bursts at the bass line. So much hook.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 27, 2014
Anyone that's talked seriously about music with me knows I have a completely unashamed love for early Rod Stewart, and he's a contender for my favorite singer ever. That may seem odd given what Rod has been for the last 35 years, but he really wasn't always like that. Prior to "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" and his sell-out cultivation of the "mom audience" that continues to this day, he was one of the best rock vocalists and performers out there.
Few artists have ever had a hot streak like Rod had from '68-'73, when he hit a peak in three different genres. First he recorded two albums as the vocalist of the Jeff Beck Group, which a lot of rock historians credit with having created heavy metal. Then in '69 he started dual careers as a solo folk artist and as the front man for The Faces, who were nothing short of the best rock band of the early 70's not named The Rolling Stones or The Who. (Yes, they were better than Zeppelin.)
In some ways, it's problematic to even think of Rod's five albums from this period as real solo albums, because the other members of The Faces all played on them (and Ron Wood was even co-writing a lot of the songs). But the chief difference is that Faces albums were all-out rock and had all original material, while Rod's albums were mostly acoustic and folky and featured a lot of covers. This is one of the best.
To listen to Rod's cover of "Man of Constant Sorrow" is to fully understand why he used to be so great, no matter how hard he keeps trying to make us all forget it. This is a folk song from 1913, probably most famous in it's incarnation from the soundtrack to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, but this is the best version. The arrangement (probably by Wood) is wonderful, and Rod's voice is the perfect mix of Sam Cooke-soulful and whiskey-soaked growl that few other singers have ever come close to. The way he transitions from the song's loud climax down into the calming lyric of "I'm going back to Colorado" just slays me every time.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 26, 2014
Twenty years ago this week, I acquired my first CD player as an early Bar Mitzvah present, and I officially became a music buyer--a title which has cost me quite a bit of coin over the last two decades. That day, I bought my first three CDs, songs from which I will write about for the next three days as I begin a long look at the music of 1994.
All art recycles ideas constantly; the trick is in recycling them in ways that actually feel new instead of derivative. As a 12-year old in 1994, I can verify that Green Day felt like something new even though we didn't understand how or why. At that point, we were about three years into the new era of music and youth culture that Kurt Cobain hath wrought, and we were already being described as the generation that didn't care. (I guess that's marginally better than the current generation, which is undoubtedly the generation that hates everything.) For people just becoming teenagers at the time, it was a bit troubling, because we weren't even old enough to have figured out what we were supposed to care about.
Good punk music generally arrives out of a dissatisfaction with a status quo. In England in the '70s, it was mostly Thatcherism and the class & economic separations of the people, while at the CBGB's scene of New York, it was mostly about the boringness of the rock and roll being ushered in by prog, disco, singer/songwriters, "classic" rock, and pretentious Led Zeppelin drum solos. Those things all sustained punk for several years, and then in the '80s MTV provided whatever motivational fodder was still needed. But Green Day retroactively feels like the first punk band to capture the dissatisfaction of just being dissatisfied.
"Welcome to Paradise" is my favorite song on Dookie for a few reasons. Sonically, the opening riff is both the most immediate one on the album and the most visceral. It just sounds like punk music in a nutshell. You could play it for someone that didn't have any idea what punk sounded like and they'd fundamentally understand the style within four seconds. In that sense, I was probably going to like this song regardless of its lyrical content, but growing up in Muncie, IN really sealed the deal. As far as I knew at the time, in my sheltered laboratory school life, Muncie didn't have any crack streets or broken homes, but it sure as hell felt like a wasteland, and that's a sensation that would only grow and fester over the years.
What Green Day did with this song, and the entire Dookie album, was tap into a collective feeling that the youth of this country was experiencing, make it sound hostile enough to feel dangerous and alienating to our parents, and yet somehow also catchy enough to be really enjoyable to listen to. Basically, it's music that felt universal and exclusionary and fun. Not an easy combination. The other best songs on the album, "Longview" and "Basket Case," were (respectively) about being so bored that even masturbation and channel flipping had lost their luster, and about appearing crazy to everyone else even though you feel completely normal. It was music that somehow felt like it was speaking to just us, even though it was collectively hitting us all at once. And by the time Green Day became superstars a few months later, it caught us all by such surprise that any backlash would have felt unfair. And it just wasn't a backlash kind of era.
Dookie came out around 18 years after the advent of punk music, and around 16 years after the advent of pop-punk. They were not a sonically original band, but their repackaging of older sonic ideas with lyrical themes that were distinctly of their time was a breath of fresh air, even to nascent teenagers of the time who didn't have the requisite knowledge to recognize whether something was repackaged or not. And regardless, some things are just fundamentally exuberant enough to transcend a lack of originality.
A few days ago I went through the fifteen names on this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF) ballot, dissecting the candidacy of each artist. But the equal (bigger?) debate when the ballot comes out each year is who wasn't on it at all. Without further adieu, here are the eligible artists not on this year's ballot that I think are most egregiously missing from the RRHOF. 1. Gram Parsons As I mentioned with Kraftwerk, there's a difference between artists who first take a sound to the masses, and artists who first take a sound to any attention at all. Often it's the artists that find mass appeal who receive all the historical credit, while the artists who first paved the way continue to languish in obscurity. There is little question that The Eagles were the most responsible for taking country rock to the masses. Yes, Linda Ronstadt, and Neil Young, and Poco, and certain Stones songs, and others all had an impact, but The Eagles are probably why the sound broke through. However, the RRHOF seems to be strangely ignoring why this sound even existed to break through in the first place. Before Don Henley met Glenn Frey, before Richie Furay formed Poco, before Neil Young recorded in Nashville, and before the Stones recorded "Honky Tonk Women," "Dead Flowers," or "Sweet Virginia," there was Gram. Gram Parsons is the biggest reason country rock exists, and really, there's no close second. He's who got Mick and Keith interested in writing country songs ("Wild Horses" was actually written for Gram's band a whole year before the Stones released their own version), he's who made the various members of The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield start seriously recording country music, he's who first released a major country rock album (The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo), and he's who gave us Emmylou Harris. The old cliche about The Velvet Underground is that only a thousand people bought their first album, but everyone who did ended up forming a band. With Gram, maybe only a few thousand people bought his albums, but everyone who did was already in a band, and immediately started writing songs like Gram. Now here's the problem with Gram: No one knows how to induct him. He released six albums in his life time, but those six albums were by four different artists. The first was with The International Submarine Band, who are not worthy of the RRHOF. The second was with The Byrds, who are already inducted, but Gram is mysteriously not an inducted member (even though he was the mastermind behind Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which might be their best album). The third and fourth were with The FLying Burrito Brothers, who were hugely important, but no one outside of music snobs has ever heard of them. Then the fifth and sixth were solo albums. So what do you do? I don't know, and even more importantly, I don't see why it's worth halting progress over the issue. It's the rock equivalent of a trivial semantic argument. The other key Burrito brother (Chris Hillman) and all of the relevant Byrds are already in, so just induct Gram Parsons and be done with it. 2. The Replacements 80's indie rock and alternative music (what was at the time labeled "college radio") has thus far been a mostly ignored genre in the RRHOF. We basically have R.E.M. and U2 inducted, and that's completely it. There are a huge host of artists from that decade deserving further consideration (many of whom appear further down this list), but The Replacements are one of the only bands that I think should be completely non-negotiable. I just don't see how we get to the 90's alternative music explosion without them. Their sound, their style, their sloppiness, their attitude, their journey to a major label, their evolution to more crafted pop songs, their substance issues, their unashamed love of metal (they covered Kiss on their best album, 1984's Let It Be), and so much more… the 90's as we know them just couldn't have happened without The Replacements. 3. Brian Eno Like Gram Parsons, Eno is a bit tricky because his name was so many different (important) places that it's difficult to figure out precisely how to induct him. And again, I don't see why that should be a hindrance. As the original keyboardist of Roxy Music (also being conspicuously ignored by the RRHOF), a solo artist largely responsible for bringing ambient music and "pure" art rock to greater attention, and a producer responsible for some of the greatest albums of the post-60's (not hyperbole), his contributions are just too seminal. Three already inducted artists--Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads--released what are (un?)arguably the best albums of their careers with Eno at the controls, and they'll all happily tell you that he was more than simply a producer. He was a guiding force for those artists creating their most innovative and important work, helping them to tap into a side of their artistry that they might not have ever accessed otherwise. A case could definitely be made that he's the greatest post-60's producer in pop music history. He produced 11 albums on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Ever" list from a few years ago, which (I believe) is more than anyone else. His solo work, while important, can just be looked at as a bonus to a career deserving of RRHOF induction. 4. Joy Division/New Order Here's a case, like The Small Faces/Faces, where we'll probably have to bite our collective tongues and allow these two bands to get inducted together, else neither will get in. Yes, they're different, but they're the same enough. After all, Joy Division was already headed in a synth-ier direction with their last few songs prior to Ian Curtis' death. Who's to say they wouldn't have basically become New Order anyway? Anyway, either of these bands should be locks to get in on their own, and together, I don't see how they can be left out. Joy Division was one of the most important post-punk bands, who sonically paved the way for both goth and indie-rock, and lyrically paved the way for the profound effect Morrissey and Robert Smith songs would have on a generation of depressed teenagers. And New Order are the most important and greatest British dance band since the BeeGees. (And yeah, I can't believe I just typed that sentence either.) Anyway, the influence of these two bands is literally everywhere, in bands as disparate and seemingly unrelated as Interpol and The Scissor Sisters. 5. Nick Drake Nick Drake is one of pop music's great casualties, because not only did he die far too young (he didn't even live long enough to be in rock's "Forever 27" club), but virtually no one bought or heard his three lovely albums in his lifetime. In the forty years since he died, that's obviously changed. Right now, Nick Drake is one of the most important folk rock musicians ever, as well as one of the best. More than anyone else, he's who moved folk rock away from the nasally meandering sound of the Dylan disciples and brought it into its current styling of somber etherealness. With the booming success of a new generation of Indie-folk artists like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, and Iron & Wine, it's prime time for Nick Drake--the primary influence of all three--to get inducted. 6. The Cure Who started or created "Goth" music is debatable, and whether you want to credit The Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or someone else is up to you. But far less debatable is which of those bands actually reached a large audience, and it's The Cure. Would goth music have ever even become a thing without Robert Smith leading the way for as long as he did? Doubtful. Just as important is that Smith didn't languish in one style, but rather moved from post-punk to goth to alternative to synth pop to dance pop, and then back through all of them again. As he cultivated an audience in each genre, he brought that audience with him to other places they hadn't been before, and that can't be underestimated. And for what it's worth, The Cure released music central to their legacy in three different decades, which comparatively few bands can ever say. ("Boys Don't Cry" was the late 70's, and "Friday I'm in Love" was the early 90's.) 7. Sonic Youth "Art Rock" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It's a term that's fairly impossible to nail down. But even if we can't really define it, we can absolutely have associations with it. Has any band been called Art Rock more frequently--or accurately--than Sonic Youth? Has any band, other than maybe (maybe!) The Strokes, more perfectly embodied New York City over the last 40 years than Sonic Youth? Has anyone--other than maybe John Lennon in the opening seconds of "I Feel Fine"--ever made feedback sound cooler and sexier than Sonic Youth? For that matter, how many bands have ever even had a cooler and sexier name than Sonic Youth? How many albums not by Bruce Springsteen have more perfectly encapsulated the follies of the Reagan era than Daydream Nation? Has any rock and roll marriage ever seemed more perfect than Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon (until it depressingly ended, which we've all tacitly agreed not to talk about)? Forever a defining archetype of indie-cred coolness, we just don't celebrate Sonic Youth as much as we should. 8. Depeche Mode Say what you will about synth pop, but it changed and defined the 1980's as we know them. Depeche Mode took the raw material of Kraftwerk and reforged it into something that could be enjoyed by millions and millions of people. They also did so in an extremely catchy way that never remained stagnant, constantly shifting to darker and darker sounds, images, and subject matter, remaining relevant even into the 90's alternative explosion despite defiantly remaining loyal to synthesizers. Not an easy task to pull off, but so little of what Depeche Mode did well was ever easy. 9. Boston Yeah, I know. Trust me, I know. We aren't supposed to take Boston seriously. But it's about time we did. What Tom Scholz and Bradley Delp did was, along with punk, and completely adjacent to it, seize rock radio away from the interminable drum solos of Led Zeppelin and the interminable classical influences of prog-rock and forge a new era of pop songs played with huge riffs and sung with soaring melodies. This music is slight and uninteresting, but it also conquered the world and all of us secretly love singing along to it. I'm not remotely suggesting inducting all of the major bands in this field--Styx, Journey, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, etc.--but Boston is the godfather to them all, as well as maybe the only one that never feels 100% uncool listen to. 10. The Pixies They bridge the gap between the feedback and artiness of Sonic Youth to the punk for the masses of Nirvana. They're an undeniably important stop on the journey to the 1990's, but also a band that released great music. Fight Club has, perhaps undeservedly, become one of the defining films of the 90's, and a Pixies song ("Where Is My Mind") is used to define the crescendo of that film. "Loud quiet loud" has become one of the most overused style descriptors in rock music, and The Pixies likely didn't even create that sound, but the term was created just for them. Kevin Bacon always said he may not be the greatest actor ever, but he's the only one with a game named after him. The sound of The Pixies has become one of the defining shorthands in rock music, just as Die Hard did for action films. For years, every pitch meeting described "Die Hard on a…" Today, we still describe new indie bands as "like The Pixies, but…" A Baker's Dozen of Other Deserving Candidates MC5/The New York Dolls--The two halves that made the whole of The Stooges, the garaginess and volume of the MC5 and the trashiness and showmanship of the New York Dolls. Both eventually deserve their rightful place. De La Soul--Responsible for arguably the greatest rap album ever (3 Feet High and Rising), as well as the kaleidoscopic soundscapes the more innovative hip hop acts continue to explore to this day. Television--I've argued before that they're the first Indie-Rock band, and they created a defining guitar style. Gang of Four--Anything ever described as "dance punk" starts here. Steve Earle--No way he can be inducted before Gram, which is why he's down here. But he helped bridge a new generation between rock and country. Duran Duran--Helped define the sound of a decade, as well as the look of MTV, which can't be understated. They're susceptible to the same slightness arguments as Boston, but damn did they write good songs. Black Flag--There are a lot of other 80's underground bands that need to be inducted before we can travel down this road, but eventually… The Jam--The missing link between the 60's Englishness of The Kinks and the 90's Englishness of Britpop. The Smiths might have been the ones that brought back the guitar sound, but The Jam kept the Union Jack cool as it came to band identity. Phish--An entire summer concert and festival industry exists at their behest. Dinosaur Jr/Husker Du--The next tier down of the 80's American underground, but also the progenitors of extremely influential guitar sounds. The Stones Roses--Where Britpop and British House music meet is a place created by these guys.
I'm a film, music, & entertainment critic & journalist honing my writing voice and knowledge of pop culture history, while also continuing steady consumption of the best modern arts & entertainment culture has to offer.
