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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure some of you were wondering how long it would take me to post a Bruce song, and I guess the answer is three weeks. I was planning on waiting a lot longer, but then I read that yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the release of Born in the USA, and it seemed like a great occasion to spotlight this little gem, which was the first track on side two.
"No Surrender" is a great rock and roll song, but more importantly it has some of my favorite Bruce lyrics from the era, opening with one of his best lines ever:
Well we busted out of class,
Had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record, baby
Than we ever learned in school
For Bruce and the E Street Band, this really was true. Growing up on the Jersey shore, these guys were practically pirates, with '50s and '60s rock as all the buried treasure they could ever need. None of them cared much about how they looked, they just cobbled together whatever version of thrift-store Elvis they could find and afford. None of them had drug problems or went to college. All of their time, money, energy, and passion went to living and breathing rock and roll. If any group of people were born to carry the torch of real rock and roll into the Reagan administration and far beyond, it was these guys, and that's what this song is all about.
Like the chorus puts it, "Well we made our promise, and swore we'd always remember/ No retreat, baby, no surrender." As the mid-'80s saw virtually every '60s and '70s rock legend embarrass themselves again and again, this song was a mission statement and a declaration of defiance. These guys would still be who they always said they were. Their passion wasn't waning, and it never would.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 5, 2014
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.
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.
I had never heard of Otis Taylor or his music until 2009, when one of my favorite directors, Michael Mann, featured this great song in the John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies. The film was decent but flawed, and certainly not one of Mann's better efforts. But the inclusion of this song (especially in the trailer) was fantastic, and Mann has always been one of the best filmmakers at setting action to music. I like the choice of this song to represent the feel of the film, because it aesthetically recalls the depression era dust bowl setting of the story, while still having an exciting modern flair (just like Mann's style).
I haven't explored Taylor's discography as much as I should since first hearing him, but I do have the album that contained this song, 2002's Respect the Dead, and it's quite good. Anyone interested in contemporary blues should definitely check him out.
This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 4, 2014
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.)
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.
