"All That I Got is You" by Ghostface Killah feat. Mary J. Blige
Why is is that violins are able to push the limit between sentimental and maudlin so? The simple eight-bar sample of piano and strings, taken from a Jackson 5 song and played over and over and over, ought to be a sentimentality overdose. It ought to be tacky. Yet somehow it pierces the heart, just enough for Ghostface's words to pour in.
The Wu-Tang Clan was, in retrospect, a collection of talents so varied that some of them would never have gotten near a mic on their own (solo) merits while many of them were revolutionary in their own way. Their business plan was amazing, as was the fact that they were able to work at a pace like this - with, at its peak, a new RZA-produced release every two or three months. Obviously the quality was not 100%, but it was still remarkably high. Like most 90s hip-hop, a Wu-Tang related release would have upwards of ten songs that you'd never need to hear twice. But the remainder... if marketing considerations could ever allow for it, a real Wu-Tang 'Greatest Hits' album might just be one of the best CD collections ever. And it would most certainly have to include this song.
Ghostface, as he would ultimately shorten his name: a ghost. Something that skirts on the edges of reality, not always easy to see. On the Wu-Tang début, Ghostface Killah seems like one of the more marginal of the background players. He doesn't seem like a star at all. And in fact all these years later when he's managed to outshine any other Wu-Tang, he still doesn't seem like a star. He has a curious work ethic wherein he seems to keep recording out of a need to do so more than out of a need to be famous. His best stuff is quite subtle.
Like this curious creation: lengthy film quote, one super-long verse rapped by Ghostface start to finish with no pause or interruption, a 'verse' (if you want to call it that) sung my Mary J. Blige, some stoned babbling by an irrelevant hanger-on named 'Poppa Wu', nothing else. This process takes five and a half minutes. All that we've got in the background is that strings-and-piano sample over and over and over again. Ghostface's lyrical thrust is not quite MJB's, and neither are really complemented by Poppa Wu's, um, dissertation. It's three different songs that barely recognise each other. And one of those three is quite disposable.
Yet the result still never fails to bring out the waterworks. Ghostface's celebration of strength and resilience in the face of poverty is so heartfelt that you never for a moment doubt its autobiographical nature. Rappers are often very eloquent while speaking about their mothers, and Ghostface pays his mother a very touching tribute here.
Mary J. Blige is not playing the role of Ghostface's mother - his father leaving them is referenced only in passing, whereas it's the main point of Mary J. Blige's part. Ghostface's mother doesn't seem like the type to do drugs, whereas Mary J. Blige admits to it. I'm not sure if either party spent much time making sure they were on the same page, but it doesn't really matter. Mary J. Blige is a hell of a singer and she really performs here. This is pretty direct warts-and-all drama, tragic against the violins, where Ghostface rather brilliantly lets Blige and the strings carry the tragedy, so that his story can be truly effective while never actually using the language of tragedy. His story of strength in adversity is something that anyone who has lived with true poverty can relate to, and it ultimately says much more than Poppa Wu's 'sermon' at the end, which dissolves into a kind of stoned laughter that threatens to make a complete mockery of all that has come before, could ever hope to say.
"Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners
There are a few songs released in 1982 that take me away to an unknown place whenever I hear them. It must be something about a child's development: I guess at age seven, a child learns to love music in a certain way that leaves an indelible stamp upon him.
Alternately it could just be that there were some kick-ass good songs released that year.
Kevin Rowland doesn't matter very much to the world. A bit self-important, really, he thought more of himself than the public-at-large did, with the result that he spent about three years at the top of his game and generations a laughing-stock.
This is, however, the top of his game. It's rare, really, that someone's best song is also their most commercially successful (in fact, in the USA, this song is pretty closely associated with the state of being a 'one-hit wonder'). Rowland's dream of integrating soul with Irish music might have been revolutionary if Van Morrison hadn't already been spending decades at it by this point, but here he gets the balance pretty good. Being 1982, somehow this song manages to sound synthesised despite being performed entirely on acoustic instruments, yet it pulls the listener along from start to finish through an amazing ride of increases and decreases in tension as well as tempo. A wonderful vocal melody shares the spotlight with those fiddles and accordion and whatever else, with a result that must have struck a 7-year-old Canadian as in many ways other-worldly while still seeming so perfectly right.
I didn't have the first clue what they lyrics were when I was seven - I just heard it as another part of the music that would occasionally call out the title before lapsing back into mere sound. Had I never read them online, I might not have known that they reference Johnnie Ray and seem to be largely about getting a girl out of her 'pretty red dress'. And frankly at 7, neither of those things would have meant much to me. It is interesting, though, that like so many touchstones from my youth that make me nostalgic to hear now, it is a nostalgia piece itself - going back to 1950s radio with 'our mothers' crying in it. Ultimately, the music is all 'retro' too. Yet that doesn't stop it from being a truly awesome piece of work - with much less 'soul' than most other Dexy's Midnight Runners songs, but somehow with all the more soul as a result.
And ultimate proof that it really doesn't matter who or what you are, how good or how pompous a musician you are: it's still possible to find that elusive thing and pin it down for three minutes or so, thus entering you a place in eternity's record books.
"Curley Locks" by Junior Byles
I don't know that much about reggae. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert just in order to make this list as 'international' or 'eclectic' as possible. I like a lot of the reggae I've heard, but again I'm not an expert. This means, of course, that in including reggae on this list I run the risk of either choosing some incredibly wack song that happened to 'cross over' or genuflecting to reggae tastemakers to the point of convincing myself that some song with suitable cred is good - that is to say one of the 'best songs ever'.
So I include this without knowing much about it for the simple fact that I love it extremely. In fact, I've been quite obsessed with it lately, to the point of listening to dozens of versions of it to see which one I like best. I've settled on this one. The different versions, by different performers, range a lot in style but they all seem to have a certain beguiling sweetness to them.
So I guess that our protagonist has become a Rastafarian. His childhood sweetheart has been told by her father (presumably a Christian) to stay away. He is singing his heart out to her in an attempt to win her back. The balance between the never-mind sweetness ("The sun is shining...") and the trouble's-brewing warning ("Two roads before you...") is very delicately struck, and yet the overall feeling coming from the boy (who just might possibly be in prison or some place like that if I'm to understand anything from the "Thank you for the letter" part) seems to be a delicate, loving sensitivity. The end result is really very powerful - where so many political songs (and a song about religious conversion and family pressures is political) are strident, this one just seems to envelop its message in a kind of sweetness that proves its righteousness by not being consciously righteous.
It's difficult to imagine the Curley Locks in question not being swayed by this paean into ignoring her father and running away with the protagonist.
Wikipedia tells me that Junior Byles recorded this song with Lee "Scratch" Perry, who also has a version of it released in his own name which seems to bear more of the "Scratch" Perry sonic trademarks that I'm familiar with. I mean, "Scratch" Perry songs don't all sound the same, but I always associate him with dub, and this recording (which I believe is in the genre called 'lovers' rock') doesn't bear much of a dub feel to it. Instead, its gentle skank plays like a lullaby, lulling its message into the Curley Locks' heart...
"Jolie Louise" by Daniel Lanois
Daniel Lanois is an interesting figure. Better known as a producer than as a musician, he’s the kind of producer who seems to add precious little of his own personality to his projects. No two Daniel Lanois productions sound alike, so there’s no sense that he’s made much of a contribution beyond getting it down on tape. Mind you, that’s not a criticism.
Doesn’t matter, anyway. The point here is that he also has a little sideline as a musician and singer – I doubt he’s ever earned much money from it. I don’t know much of what he’s done, but I do know this song, which is something that I rarely find in a song that I like, namely ‘charming’.
But it is. It’s a totally guileless, intentionally small song, evocative of several different francophone North American genres, a mid-tempo shuffle with a melody that could be five hundred years old as much as it could have been created last week.
Not being a traditionally ‘good’ singer helps Lanois here, as his rudimentary vocal chops carry a song about an ‘everyman’, a working class loser with a failed marriage and a drinking problem. Sung in a franglais so well-written that you barely notice he’s slipping between languages, Lanois’s vocal performance carries the song, making the Jean-Guy of the lyrics an entirely believable character.
This song manages in some way to touch on a very male kind of feeling, I think. The lyrics are sparse, so it’s difficult to figure them out for sure. Either he’s hard-working guy who is driven to drink by being laid off, or his drinking leads to him being fired. Either way, he enters into a downward spiral, drinking to hide his ‘shame’ from his wife and kids. He ends up hitting his wife, so he’s clearly no hero, but as she runs away with the kids, he’s left to mourn what was lost. You can’t exactly love the guy, but at least on some level you can see the guy as a flawed character trying to get through the meaninglessness that we call life.
Did I really call this song about alcoholism and spousal abuse ‘charming’? Well, on some level it is. You walk away from the song strangely uplifted, and perhaps that’s where that unmemorable folk-shuffle deceives. Just like the ancient folk ditties that tell of horrors yet are sung genially in bars, this song somehow manages to couch its rather distressing lyrics in a musical setting that encourages more than the lyrics discourage.
Hell, perhaps that paradox is the point: the out-of-left-field sucker-punch that is this song, movingly sung by a non-singer, genially performed by a non-performer, and undeniably great even though none of its constituent parts are all that special.
"A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell
Truth be told, I’m not all that impressed by Joni Mitchell. Perhaps it’s that at times I find her sincerity insincere, or it’s just that the iconoclast in me rebels against the reverence with which so many people view her.
More to the point, it’s probably that that reverence raised my expectations just a little too high, especially when in the 80s, what you had was 80s Joni, which is not the most pleasant of sensations.
This, i.e. the “Blue” album, is meant to be the starting-off point for Joni, but I reckon it’s an acquired taste. She sings like a child, plays guitar like a child and leaves all of her songs as frustratingly half-finished as Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”. The very definition of twee, it created legions of wide-eyed ingénues pouring their hearts over their six-string acoustics. Somehow, it’s the music of slumber parties, of girls clumsily expressing feelings they have but can’t identify.
So why is it not rubbish? Why is it, in fact, amazing? Well, I’m not sure, really, but I reckon it’s got something to do with that melody: indelible to say the least, on first it doesn’t resonate at all, but at the strangest points thereafter it reasserts itself in your memory. That childish three-string guitar line manages to haunt and ensnare at the same time.
Her poetry is, again, the poetry of the angsty high-school girl, yet in the same way that mawkish poetry can still touch, it is still beautiful, filled with a handful of great lines, involving such subjects as the devil, paint, the northern star. All set in a backwoods bar in some place presumably very, very cold in her homeland Canada, whose name Joni trills in the song, sending up our backs that queer shiver of embarrassed pride that we Canadians have come to call patriotism (I can’t imagine Americans would ever react in the same uncomfortable way at a musical mention of their homeland).
It all comes together in the chorus, though, where her voice trills in a way that will turn off as many as it will clue in, fingers squeakily sliding up the guitar neck as the voice squeakily slides up into a falsetto, and the awe-inspiring conflation of the blood of Jesus, the wine at the bar and the soul of the song’s subject.
Stunned into reverent silence by that beautiful chorus, the listener suddenly finds it all coming into place – this is music with no distance whatsoever between performer and listener. Joni seems so amateurish because those who we actually know in our real lives are amateurs too. She could be sitting on the edge of someone’s bed in the upstairs of a suburban house, or on a wooden barstool in the empty bar of the first verse. This is art as in the opposite of artifice, and all the more touching when you realise how readily Joni Mitchell is associated with artifice.
"Brass in Pocket" by the Pretenders
The sound of self-confidence. This amazingly sexy track gets where it’s going not by being kittenish or by being coy or by being in any way demure. This song is sexy because Chrissie Hynde demands that you find it sexy. She doesn’t holler or scream, she doesn’t even try very hard. She just has a gleam in her eye and a confidence in her stride that removes all doubt.
Chrissie Hynde is interesting. By now she’s been unimpressive for so much longer than she was ever impressive that it’s difficult to remember how high she once flew. For years and years now it’s been just one of those revolving-door ‘bands’ (like The Cure) playing MOR that pretends to be ‘alternative’ merely because its singer used to be.
How alternative did she use to be? Well (despite being from
The verses aren’t up to much, really. It’s all just a build-up for when we get to Chrissie delineating what parts of herself she’ll use to ‘make you see’, peaking in a great phrase where she sings, ‘gonna use my… my… my…’, baiting you into expecting something perhaps dirty, ‘imagination!’ she calls out, cool as a cucumber, and the joke’s on you because your imagination’s in the gutter.
She then points out what’s blindingly obvious, that she’s ‘special’, and a bunch of anonymous male voices (the remaining Pretenders, presumably) parrot it helplessly until she practically reaches out of the speakers, grabs you by the necktie (for this is a song from 1979, and thus you are wearing one, and a skinny one at that) and forcefully demands of your attention, “give it to me!”
Yes ma’am.
And we did, for several years more as she insisted on making further good music despite all kinds of tragedy in her band. Eventually, as must happen to all good things, she ceased being special.
Yet the amazing thing about having once been so clearly special is that the allure never truly goes away. It doesn’t matter if she never releases another good song; decades later when Chrissie Hynde dies, she will still be special.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles
You know, there are few things in this life less interesting than reading people prattle on about the Beatles. The tendency to present the Beatles as something special, unique, unprecedented and in all categories distinct as opposed to a very, very good band that made a lot of good music for a few years has, in my opinion, backfired. Your average punter feels he can’t appreciate the Beatles the same way he might appreciate, say, the Who. I mean, I half feel that I need to create a special ‘directory’ when uploading them onto my MP3 player, for Christ’s sake.
The thing is, though, bravado and marketing aside, the Beatles were pretty amazing. There are at least a dozen Beatles songs that deserve a rightful place here, and presumably we’ll get to them all sooner or later. This one, not a single or even a song you ever hear much on the radio, is the concluding track on “Revolver”, without a doubt their finest album. From start to finish, there’s a total of maybe two or three songs that merely good, not exemplary. No hyperbole.
This one… well, this is John Lennon tripping out on LSD and reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Forgetting Aldous Huxley rhetoric for a minute, it’s all very Buddhist – Lennon apparently even wanted chanting monks on the track. Strange, though, that this is the Beatles as Buddhists, because instead of being calm and meditative, it is an unholy din from start to finish.
I can’t imagine what EMI must have thought when they heard the cacophony of seagull squalls, backwards guitars, lumpen misshaped drums and (most brilliantly) a one-note bass line. How cool is that? On top of all of that is Lennon clearly not going gently into the good night, shrieking into a chasm of echo. This is good-trip as bad-trip, or someone who can’t see the difference between the two or doesn’t care.
Apparently the mess of sounds in this track came to be through tape loops brought in by each member (the seagulls apparently Paulie laughing) – so in a sense this is a democratic “Beatles composition”, but it’s impossible to imagine it coming from the mind of anyone but John Lennon. I dislike the notion that has become established ‘truth’ that Lennon had all the talent and McCartney had all the white teeth – Lennon made his fair share of crap and McCartney more than his share of genius. But it is a different type of genius, and I don’t think Paul ever could have found beauty in what is deliberately ugly quite to this extent – even if he was the first one making avant-garde musique concrete. They were just too different. What Paul made was also brilliant, but I don’t know whether it was ever quite as… for lack of a less-clichéd word, provocative.
Nor, mind you, were Oasis, a band that tried to get rich off of Lennon-deification to the point of actually covering this song, a band that wouldn’t recognize unbridled genius of this nature if it bit them on the ass…
"Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Kylie Minogue
Ah, Kylie. What can I say?
I am neither a gay man nor a teenage girl, so by rights this song, like the rest of Kylie Minogue’s oeuvre, should do nothing for me. In fact, more to the point, it should trigger my gag reflex and send me hurling, right? That would be the expected typical adult heterosexual male response to Kylie? And then to run off and play some
Kylie’s music is angst-free low-calorie entertainment. The thing is that I reckon that’s a compliment. I’ll take genuinely artificial over artificially genuine any day. And Kylie brings to her pop ditties a legitimate dedication to, and pride in, making people happy.
“Can’t Get You Out of my Head” doesn’t mean anything. It’s a skip-rope melody over a roller-rink beat. Its catch phrase is ‘na na na’ repeated over and over again. A nine-year-old could dance deliriously to it and appreciate it in just the same way I do.
Is there anything wrong with any of that? Not a bit. Songs like this can fall very easily into tackiness, phoniness and deliberate childishness. In my opinion, this song has none of these shortcomings, and Ms. Minogue herself deserves most of the credit for that: her performance is filled with sexiness but confidence, a love of life that still takes life seriously. It took Kylie a long time to get to that stage (and she didn’t hold onto it long): between “I Should Be So Lucky” and this (not the widest progression musically) she went through all kinds of phases, but finally came back to what she was good at, with an appreciation that being good at this kind of music is (a) no small feat, and (b) a real gift.
The result made her superhuge, or else remade her as superhuge. The trick? Showing that ‘pop’ really does mean ‘popular’, in the most democratic vox populi manner possible. I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this song – in keeping with the opening paragraph, I should say that while I can imagine lots of people claiming not to like this song, in their hearts, alone in their rooms with their headphones on, I can’t imagine anyone not being transported to a place of simplicity and of innocence.
No wonder she’s such a gay icon!"In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
We’ve got a bit of a double-feature this week, looking at the same artist at his very best and at his very worst.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Phil Collins isn’t one of the greats. In many ways he’s exactly what’s wrong with the music industry, in fact. Genesis in the 70’s, meh. And it wasn’t his band, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s been Phil Collins’s dream to muck up R&B into chicken-dance music for retired old ladies ever since trying our for the Monkees, but spending the 70s in a band that had certain powers to ‘evoke’ led him in the 80s to intermittently feel obliged to continue putting out mood music, amongst the cheese. Both under the name “Genesis” and under the name “Phil Collins”. Let’s be frank: in the 80s it didn’t make a bit of difference which name was on the label, did it? The contents were interchangeable.
Apparently, Phil was getting a divorce. He was depressed. He was experimenting with his new studio. He was making demos. He improvised the lyrics and most definitely did not see a man drowning another man and most definitely did not train a spotlight upon said killer during a concert. Actually I can report to you a lot about what Phil Collins has said concerning this song. The reason, of course, why Phil’s spoken at such great length about this song is that it’s the only song reporters have ever wanted to discuss with him.
What, they were going to ask about that great horn line in “Sussudio”?
Have you ever heard of the phrase “suspension of disbelief”? This is, I believe, the correct way to listen to this song. Convince yourself that this is not the guy who slaughtered “You Can’t Hurry Love” or did that “I Can’t Dance” song. This is not a dodgy balding Conservative with on freak moment of glory. This is an absolute frickin’ genius. Lie to yourself. It’ll make it all better.
Concentrate on that amazing mood he constructs. The sparseness – the chainsaw guitars somewhere in the background, the drum machine casually trotting along like a person aimlessly tapping his pencil on a desk, the array of weird sounds over top. Concentrate on, get this, the majesty of Phil the vocalist: the thespian way he moves from quiet rage to white-hot rage. The way subtle effects like echo and vocoder come in and out of Phil’s vocal line to spice things up.
It continues that way for several minutes: tension, followed by more tension, followed by more tension still. Then, of course, like a famous story often told or movie often watched, we know what’s going to happen yet it still knocks us off our feet.
Phil, bathed in vocoder, grunts out the line, “it’s no stranger to you and me”, and then suddenly it happens. At exactly 3:39, the world temporarily comes to a stop for the single most glorious drum break in the history of recorded sond. It starts at 3:29 and is over by 3:42. Phil Collins earned his place in music history with precisely three seconds of music. But there’s no way to overstate it. No human can resist air-drumming at this point, as Phil Collins invents the best advertisement ever for drumming as a professional career.
But like I give a damn about technically impressive instrumentation. You won’t find any Yngwie Malmsteen on this list, and for good reason. The thing is that the drum break, and the eternal drum fill that follows, makes perfect sense in terms of the emotional weight of the song: it’s the explosive summit of a three-minute crescendo, a gradual increase of tension until it shatters stupendously into relief. Shakespeare could not have scripted it better.
Forgetting boring discussion involving Ahmet Ertegun and overdubs, Phil was dead brave to release this as a single. Radio was brave to play it. The public was brave to love it. It was an amazing moment when Phil suddenly looked like the Genesis member to beat, artistically.
And in history’s most lunk-headed move, he proceeded to follow it up with the faux-cheery “I Missed Again”, the first in a long string of grandma-rock ‘classics’.
But if you close your eyes and just wait for that drum break, you can picture Phil Collins as the coolest man in history.
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" by the Shirelles
Ah, youthful innocence. There are, and have always been, people who claim that this generation loses its innocence more quickly than the previous generation. Being now old enough to claim that if I so choose, I do wonder. I think that a lot of the perceived generational differences we claim have to do with our own shifting perspectives, not those of any given generation. As we slide into age-induced conservativism, perhaps we colour our own childhood memories differently, so that when we see a child today behaving more or less exactly as we did, we misremember our own youth and see today’s kid as more licentious.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we truly are going to hell in a handbasket, morally.
To learn, let’s go back in time – way before I was born, before even my parents were old enough to worry about the sentiments expressed herein. I have no idea what age group the record labels presumed this was written for, but I suspect it’s the teen age group. Popular music is generally marketed to teens, and in 1960 I don’t think anybody marketed anything except movie soundtracks and big band music to adults.
So this is an experience meant for teens. The lead singer’s crystal-clear vocal performance is so filled with fear and anticipation that you suspect it really was recorded on the verge of her ‘first night’. The strings (an absolutely gorgeous use of strings) conspire to inflate the romance inherent in the event, but the singer is all about uncertainty. She is quite naïve, not very worldly at all, and quite dependent on her boyfriend for emotional satisfaction: all very pre-Kennedy era.
As Carole King’s lyrics, artful yet conversationally plain, explain, she is about to surrender her virginity to her boyfriend and is terrified that he’s just in it for the conquest and will disappear the next day.
In that light, almost fifty years seem to have changed nothing. Girls today – and if not at the same age group then at least in the neighbourhood – ponder the same dilemma. This girl is not married; this is not a ‘wedding night’ song. This event is happening in a bedroom in either her house or the boyfriend’s house, with the parents downstairs watching TV, unaware. They’re both young, emotionally unaware, yet going with it anyway.
And she’s looking for assurance. Perhaps the most explicitly female emotion there is, outside of motherhood, is the need for that ‘first sexual encounter’ to be a sharing and bonding experience for both of them. This is a need that men, particularly teenage men, are almost entirely bereft of. This is why it matters that the words were written by a woman, and an 18-year-old woman at that (addressing, no doubt, her songwriting partner and soon-to-be husband). In an era where older men were awkwardly putting insincere words into the mouths of teenage girls, this song is so completely legit because it’s written by someone who knows, who feels the emotions expressed in the words. This is virginal female sexuality laid bare, and though it might be filtered through a the lens of a more inhibited era, the emotions are just as raw and real as if they had been written today.
I hear this song with a bitter nostalgia: not for the era, which is almost a full generation before me, but for the age at which girls feel this way, and age that has now long passed for me.
And perhaps if I find myself judging the kids of today, it’s with more than a twinge of jealousy.
"Ojos Así" by Shakira
Okay. Let me just say it and get it out of the way: Shakira is an immensely talented woman who deserves financial recompense for her talent at whatever cost that may entail. Whew. I feel better.
I say that sentence because I’m not a snob, truly. I don’t sit there with a latte sniffing and accusing any underground artiste who’s ever sold in excess of 10,000 copies of their music of ‘selling out’. Glamorizing obscurity (or in this case ‘authenticity’) for its own sake is a little pointless. It is genuinely a pity the sacrifices artistes sometimes have to make for a wider audience, but life is not always fair.
So… who am I to criticize Shakira for going blonde, moving to the States, collaborating with Gloria Este-frickin’-han and singing repeatedly about the size of her breasts? Right? Hey? Plus, “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Objection” are all right. The less said about songs whose titles end in “…Clothes”, the better.
But this… this is a hurricane, a whirlwind, a force of nature. This is something fundamental in the human spirit brought forth and recorded onto modern machines. Exotic as hell, it seamlessly mixes Arabic and South American – Lebanese and Colombian – with a guitar sound and an attitude out of American heavy metal, all grafted onto a Euro techno pulse. Yet despite all of this, it never sounds anything less than natural and never for a minute pushes you away by being foreign or disparate. Listening to this song makes you feel that there’s a little bit of American- and European-influenced Lebanese Colombian in all of us.
Okay, tongue ever so slightly in cheek. The thing is that I really don’t understand why this is not enough for the world. Why something this stunning, this powerful, this forceful didn’t suffice to make Shakira a star, why inevitably it came down to the language she was singing in. The first question I have is whether or not we here in the English-speaking world are truly so provincial that we cannot connect to music whose lyrics we can’t understand. For every “99 Luftballons” whose original happily manages to outsell its ‘translation’, there are a dozen singers taking English lessons in order to pursue that golden ring. And the second question is why, outside of the English- (and in this case Spanish-) speaking markets, sales should increase the moment the singer puts out an English-language song. I mean, a foreign language is still a foreign language to, say, a German, isn’t it?
Shakira speaks excellent English and writes great lyrics in English too. But I’m not sure if I can find an English-language song by her that has quite the passion we can hear in this song as she declaims forth over that beguiling mix of eastern percussion and western machines. No, I don’t know what she’s saying. But I fee what she’s saying. And since music is a gut-reaction experience, that’s the more important thing, in my opinion.
Pity so few people worldwide, or at least so few record companies worldwide, appear to agree.
Oh, and as a final note, isn’t she drop-dead gorgeous as a brunette?
"Hot Burrito #1" by the Flying Burrito Brothers
I think I’m starting to understand country music. The ‘keening’ vocals are not meant to be conventionally attractive, so all those years I spent wondering what was attractive about the forlorn dog-whine, I was missing the point. In fact, the vocals on the best of country songs sound that way because it’s a more direct combination of form and content. The successful country singer’s voice breaks as his heart breaks, and somewhere in the process, we the audience are drawn into the drama. And, potentially, hooked.
If there’s any truth to this theory, it seems ideally best presented in the context of weepy country songs. Hoedown stuff, the ‘western’ half I suppose, I still can’t explain. Garth Brooks I can’t explain either.
And, as a further caveat, if there’s any truth to this theory, then I reckon the vocal melody is essential. A weepy country song without much of a melody behind it is just, well, annoying. The kind of thing that people who detest country imagine when discussing how much they detest country.
Which explains the miracle of this poorly-titled song performed by a poorly-titled band who were hailed as ‘country rock’ at the time for reasons I can’t fathom (this is all country, no rock, though granted its fraternal twin “…#2” does have a fuzz guitar on it): the melody. Gram Parsons sounds as if he’s at risk of crumbling to little bits like a dried clay sculpture at any minute, particularly when his melody tests his thin vocal talents. And yet it is precisely the marriage of his vocal performance to his vocal melody that gives you the feeling that you’ve entered this poor man’s head. Suddenly ‘weepy and self-obsessed’ becomes ‘profoundly universal’, and the words appear to be conveying a meaning much deeper than they truly are. (And why isn’t this song called “I’m Your Toy”?)
Some day they’ll make the movies they’ve been making about Ian Curtis now about Gram Parsons. And presumably they’ll be just as interesting. Just like 2Pac (there’s a comparison you don’t meet every day), Gram Parsons is perhaps accorded too much glory merely for dying young, but this particular rich kid did float ethereally through the music industry for a few years, inventing Emmylou Harris and giving the Rolling Stones the keys to the magical Credible Country Vault. Along the way, he wrote a handful of beautiful songs with indelible melodies, and sang them all with that voice that could be a torture instrument, but somehow manages to convince you that everything will be all right precisely because it so self-evidently won’t.
"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" by P.M. Dawn
Does not compute.
We all know what hip-hop is. We all know what rap is. It’s testosterone, it’s aggression, it’s ‘hard’, it’s ‘raw’. It’s all about ‘keepin’ it real’. Verbal dexterity, the dozens, etc. etc. etc.
What it’s not is soft, sensual and dreamy. And it doesn’t sample Spandau Ballet.
Okay, nobody’s ever going to use the word “revolutionary” in reference to P.M. Dawn. By now, the word most people will use is “who?” The fact is, though, that P.M. Dawn showed us a new direction for music just as conclusively as N.W.A. did. The fact that N.W.A. launched a 10-year industry and P.M. Dawn bore the insults through gritted teeth for a few years before giving up the fight has nothing to do with the relative quality of those artists’ outputs and everything to do with public expectations. I like N.W.A., but they became famous by pandering to peoples’ expectations / fears of what rap, and young black males, should sound like.
I don’t imagine anybody saw this coming. Prince Be was a large man decked out in loose-fitting gypsy robes and dreadlocks. Apparently Christians, at this early stage they evoked no specific religion but just a kind of all-encompassing spirituality that gave Prince Be a sort of Buddhaesque demeanour. You got the impression that he would release mosquitoes back into the wild rather than kill them.
Additionally, he was something that, in 1991, a rapper could be, and perhaps even aspired to be: a ‘poet’. I don’t like that word much in describing lyricists, but this song and others of its vintage weave a pattern of images and turns of phrase in a way that nobody in hip hop is doing today and even back then few people attempted. He was also something that a few people were at this stage but nobody had been until that time: a rapper capable of singing, or a singer capable of rapping, and thus actually wrote songs as opposed to verses.
And then there’s the Spandau Ballet part of the equation. I mean, what, was this team of siblings sitting in their
But that early-eighties synthetic groove, over top of ‘Paid in Full’, somehow worked amazingly, as the result is soulful, seductive and spiritual: one of those hip-hop songs that would still be compellingly listenable as an instrumental.
That is, if this is hip-hop. Among avenues left unexplored, if P.M. Dawn had found more success and spawned more imitators (okay, in a sense it did, but the ‘positivity’ acts that followed wouldn’t necessarily credit P.M. Dawn as an influence so much as a coincidence), would it have wound up coalescing into a genre not called hip-hop but called something else? Listening to second-biggest hit “I’d Die Without You” (in no sense a ‘rap’ song) makes you wonder…
"Lodi" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Creedence Clearwater Revival holds a strange place in history. Burning bright and quick, they left their legacy in a period of tremendous creativity measurable in months. Yet most similar ‘flashes in the pan’ blaze a revolutionary trail across history. CCR were hardly revolutionary; if anything, they’re reactionary. So why should we care about them all these years later?
It’s strange. They single-handedly created the genre of beer-commercial music. Those who follow in their footsteps tend to be agonizingly dull. On occasion they stumble into hokeyness, and frankly they never stray very far from it. John Fogerty sings all his songs in a hokey fake Southern accent and half of the time his lyrics seem like a Mark Twain book, or that painting with the old farmer couple and the pitchfork, set to music.
Yet they have a pure simplicity, devoid of any nonsense or pretense, that makes them actually quite nice to listen to. More importantly than that, they exhibit an instinctive sense of what pop music is and contain melodies that can stick in your head for ages.
“
Complaining about the life of a traveling band always seems a little bit too precious in rock music. What’s nice about “
Which it is. “
Amazing. Though nobody else on the planet will make this comparison, that rate of productivity recalls the Smiths. As does the commitment to ‘pop’ music at its purest.
And pretense, too.
"Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John
“There was once a time when Elton John was wonderful – putting out amazing songs that weren’t in the least contrived and hackneyed at a rate of two albums a year or more.” Tell it to the kids of today and they won’t believe you…
Hell, tell it to the parents of the kids of today and they’ll have no reason to believe you. The Elton John I grew up with was a terrible embarrassment, chirping out meaningless drivel like “I’m Still Standing” or – gag – “Nikita”. He just seemed to get worse and worse. So logically, I presumed he had always sucked.
Not so, as present evidence can confirm. I may have heard this song a million times, yet every time it manages to take me by surprise. The emotional depth it presents still continues to stun. The dynamics it possesses, the tension and release. Elton sings it like he means it, and as far as I knew in the 80s, Elton didn’t mean anything. To anyone.Elton was not completely innocent of suckage in his glory years. (“Bennie and the Jets”, anyone?) This song comes from an album that apparently is a ‘semi-autobiographical account of he and his songwriting partner’s lives’. The cover is all done up to look like a superhero comic and it has a similarly crap title that I can’t be bothered to Google at the moment. It didn’t have any ‘hits’ on it, so I never gave it a second thought. I don’t even know under what circumstances I first heard this song, but it left such an impression that I immediately hunted it down. Apparently, I have since learnt, it’s based on a true story in which Elton’s life was saved, from a suicide attempt or an overdose or something, by his brave and gallant lyricist Bernie Taupin (the songwriting partner I mentioned above).
To write a song, and a magnificently beautiful one, as thanks is a lovely gesture, except… well, Bernie Taupin is the lyricist. So if this is true, then Mr. Taupin saved his famous friend’s life and then composed a song of gratitude about it for that friend to sing back to him… masturbatory, anyone?
Doesn’t matter. If it is a true story, perhaps it cuts deep, and perhaps that explains why Elton here managed such a bravura performance, making you feel both the desperation and the gratitude. Or perhaps it’s just that Elton had yet to blow his emotional depth away with mountains of cocaine. Who can be sure?
In the end, what matters is this seven-minute slab of beauty and the emotional weight and ense of drama it carries. If it took Bernie Taupin saving Mr. Reg “Elton John” Dwight from an early death to bring that to life, then I guess the 30+ years of maudlin ick that followed it are worth it.
"Temptation" by New Order
At this point in this project, I’m planning on not duplicating artists. Sooner or later I’ll have to get over that – I mean, when it comes to sacred cows like Bob Dylan or the Beatles, you can’t just throw in one song as representative of them and be done with it. Certainly each of them have quite a few songs worthy of being considered among the ‘best ever’.
I mention those two ‘golden-age’ performers, but I haven’t gotten around to either of them yet. As strange as it may seem, at this point the artist I’ve had the hardest time narrowing down to a single song has been New Order.
Their modish design ethic on a chic boutique indie back in the 80s may have obscured the point, but New Order were shockingly consistent. Listening to their singles collection “Substance” reveals not a single song that couldn’t by rights appear here on this list. Their approach was so assured that they were pretty much guaranteed of quality each time out.
They’re an interesting bad, New Order. The path they took from generic punk on “
Through it all, the main constant in Joy Division and New Order has always been Peter Hook. It is his bass playing that makes a New Order song, and whatever else it sounds like, if he is on bass, it’s genuine. “Temptation” has great lead bass lines, but what it also has is both melodic guitars and punchy drums. In other words, it’s an intermediate step in their journey, and being the single coming immediately before the iconic “Blue Monday” is the last time that they were truly stumbling in the dark, holding onto Joy Division’s residual audience without truly finding a new one of their own. They were soon to be heroes, but weren’t yet.
"Troy" by Sinéad O'Connor
I remember it. Toronto in a... well, I don't remember the weather. I do remember being a kid and playing hooky from school. I remember watching MuchMusic and seeing the VJ introduce some woman with a funny name and a funny accent. She was bald, which, to my twelve-year-old mind, was absolutely hysterical. I was only half-watching as whatever banal questions were met with whatever banal answers. So far, so irrelevant.
Until they played the video.
I don't recall when else I have been so utterly captivated. There's not much to the video except her naked and in gold paint. Yet somehow the video perfectly complemented the song. Which was...
It was...
Twenty years later I still can't explain why this song effects me the way it does. Something about it just pierces through my (admittedly thick) armour and slays me. Every time.
Maybe it's the way she effortlessly goes from whisper to scream, all the time in perfect control, with a searing heat, both of passion and of anger. Maybe it's the way those strings create a perfect vessel on which to navigate the stormy seas - tiny and plain but never capsizing.
Maybe it's just how completely and utterly new this strange creation was; how it was able to take my prematurely-wizened "been there, done that" twelve-year-old mind and slap it out of complacency, saying "There is much more out there that you still have no idea of".
It was just as mythical as the phoenix she sings about.
It seemed to show that there were entirely new modes of expression I was unaware of. Entirely new definitions of beauty and of power. I was completely floored. Transfixed, silent, mouth agape for the six-plus minutes of the song.
Turns out after the video, when they cut back to the studio, the entire working staff of MuchMusic was as shocked and transfixed as I was. There was the kind of reverent silence you probably get when a statue of the Virgin Mary starts crying. Then there was just this applause all round. It was so intriguing to me to see people spontaneously react that way on TV (remember that in the 80s, spontaneity on TV was a bad thing). Especially seeing people spontaneously react the same way I just had. It was truly wonderful.
Then, of course, Sinéad O'Connor became superhuge with a Prince cover, tried to continue pushing the envelope while under the spotlight of fame, messed up tragically, became a punchline, then, after all that... recorded a reggae album.
Strange...
Still, before becoming a parody, she was the future of music. Hell, perhaps she was the future of Western Civilisation.
And after this accomplishment, a million punchlines are irrelevant.
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" by Public Enemy
Being the age that I am, I missed several key 'Year Zeroes'. I wasn't born when Elvis, or Chuck Berry, or Ike Turner, or whoever it was who somehow magically 'birthed' rock and roll came out with whichever magnum opus was 'the first rock and roll song'. I wasn't alive for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" or "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag". I was alive for "I Feel Love", "God Save the Queen" and "Rapper's Delight", but just barely - and more interested in Ernie singing "Rubber Duckie" than any of the above.
One of the few true "Everything you knew is wrong" moments in music history that I can actually say I've witnessed is the release in 1988 of Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back".
I think one of the main reasons I was slow to warm to rap music was that the early era of rap music was, let's face it, decidedly light on meaningful lyrical content. The music was great, the verbal dexterity was impressive, sure. But lyrically most of the rap that was on the radio in the mid-eighties was pretty vapid lyrically.
Or, more to the point, if there was any depth I wasn't hearing it. Rap was okay, but it wasn't compelling. Chick D, on the other hand, had both a voice that pulled you in and the lyrics to make you shut up and listen. Hanging out with my friends and a boombox, I can only remember once being absolutely stunned into silence with a rap song. It was this particular one, though it could have been almost any on this album.
It wasn't just that piano riff (sampled apparently from Isaac Hayes). Like so much of the Bomb Squad's work, it seemed annoyingly compelling, or else compellingly annoying at the time, but years later I see it as a great exercise in tension and release. More specifically, each of those repeated clashing chords steps up the tension, until the bar-ending piano line lets it out. And then over and over again.
And over again.
Six and a half minutes is crazy long for a mid-tempo rap song. The only real reason this song can go on so long is that Chuck D is telling a great story. Hell, it was revolutionary enough that he was telling a story at all, but this noir tale of a draft dodger breaking out of prison is just a good story. The black power rhetoric (here is a land that never gave a damn...) stunned me but in a way that somehow felt refreshing, exciting. It set up a tale that, while bloody and subversive, was profoundly righteous. Going through idealisms at a teenage rate as I was, that was highly impressive.
Lastly, sorry to say, "Black Steel" is brilliant because Flavor Flav's role is minimal. One of the more frustrating people in hip hop, Flavor Flav took solo pieces like "911 is a Joke" and made them compelling. He was a good rapper. Yet so much of his "Yeah boy-eee" shtick was tired that it actually regularly served to bring down everything Chuck D had built up. So here, absent except for verse-delineating 'phone calls', Flavor Flav is exactly as present as he ought to be.
"96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians
This tinny little recording is iconic for oh, so many reasons. They talk about how it started 'garage rock', or even punk rock. It gave a generation of people something to play in organ showrooms, and ? himself is even lauded as an early Hispanic American role model.
All of which is good and well. For me, though, the thing that's wonderful about "96 Tears" is how truly democratic it is. It's completely anonymous, so simple that anyone can play it, utterly devoid of alienating showboating or anything that a musical education could give you.
Yet it's indelible and it's immediate. It doesn't tell you the meaning of life, but it does lift your spirits. It's just fun. The fact that it's so anonymous that the band name is deliberately so is exactly the pont (as is their status as 'one-hit wonders'). There's a famous line that not many people bought the Velvet Underground's albums but all those who did started bands. I love VU, but I wonder if their intellectual freak-outs actually convinced as many people to think, "Hey, I can do this too" as this little ditty. It is easy to imagine this being the sound of any amateur band in any city in the world at any time since the 1960s. There are hundreds of bands in the world that sound exactly like this. Some will get better. Many won't. It doesn't matter because if ? and the Mysterians (whoever they even are) can come up with something lieke this, so can they.
Music is all about dreaming anyway. Bruce Springsteen made a career writing about it. These people probably only made a few hundred bucks but personified it.
"Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S
When I first heard this song, I was going through some kind of irrational ‘no hip-hop’ phase. I don’t really know why – it was probably hip-hop’s best ever era, and here I was more or less refusing to listen to it (though oddly I seem to know all of the era’s greatest hip-hop tracks – somehow.
What I was listening to was all kinds of arty English music – you know, playing the part of suburban Canadian sophisticate. My wardrobe wasn’t entirely black, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the songs I was listening to.
Anyway, suddenly there was ‘Pump Up the Volume’. To somebody with the musical rigidity of a North American radio station, ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was uncategorisable and thus did not compute. It was on 4AD, home to the artiest of the arty and the Britishest of the British, and had a cover that looked like it. It was by a band that technically didn’t exist (M/A/R/R/S were a one-off collaboration between two bands I’d never heard of and would never hear from again), it had about a million different remixes (okay, probably 5 tops, but that was revolutionary back then), and best of all, it wasn’t really a song at all.
It may not seem like such a big deal now, but that fact that ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was actually bits of a bunch of different songs cobbled on top of each other completely amazed me. I mean, I’d heard plenty of songs with samples and/or with scratches (and I’d heard ‘Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ and tried – and failed – to me impressed by it), but this was somehow more compelling. I immediately gave myself over to silly rhetoric about how all songs would sound like this in the future (for a brief moment, they did, first and foremost the Coldcut remix of ‘Paid in Full’, which might as well be the same track). What they call the ‘magpie’ aesthetic appealed to me conceptually, while still sounding good. It's a rare beast that, as they say, appeals to the mind as well as to the body.
Now, of course, songs like this are illegal (for the most part)… It’s easy to get overly swept up in the politics of sampling – it is an interesting discussion where things really aren’t clearly black-and-white – but what I miss about song constructions like this is how they manage to be both arty (thus appealing to my teenage self) and undeniably visceral as well. It seemed like people really were pushing the boundaries of what music was, all the while creating product that was genuinely enjoyable and danceable (not that I would have been caught dead dancing back then…). It isn’t often that you hear songs that are genuinely ‘prophetic’ – giving you a sense of what the future will be like – but listening to Ofra Haza trilling exotically over a flood of breakbeats, chants, soundbite phrases, scratches, guitars (how déclassé!) and kitchen sinks back in the day really did give you a sense that music was somehow changing.
Even if it turned out to be a false prophecy in the end…
Incidentally, if you ever doubt the arty credentials of this song, consider this: I have never seen it since or even found reference to it online, but I am absolutely sure that I can remember, when the song was popular, seeing its ‘sheet music’ for sale in a music shop. Picture, if you will, ‘sheet music’ for this song. Has there been a better conceptual-joke objet d’art since the glory days of dada?
"If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight and the Pips
Okay. I do admit it – my musical tastes have, on more than one occasion, been described as ‘gay’. It’s all good. I don’t happen to be gay, but as there’s no proven link between sexual preference and musical preference, all innuendo just washes off.
See, it’s all about the divas. I, you see, am a bona fide fan of divas. Not Mariah Carey – can’t stand her. Just the old school ones. Even at that, I am rather discerning with my divas. Allow me to elucidate.
I recently saw an ad touting a new season of “Canadian Idol” (the Canadian version of, surprise surprise, “American Idol”). Among the wannabes soundbited on the ad was a particularly histrionic woman screeching (as opposed to singing) “Come on and take it” (presumably to be followed, post-soundbite, by “Piece of My Heart”. We’re meant to watch and say ‘Hey! She can’t sing! She can only screech!’
People worldwide will hate me for saying this, but… That seems like a pretty decent imitation of Janis Joplin. I’ve never understood the appeal of Janis Joplin. She is, to me, what a diva should not be – aggressive, dissonant, indeed histrionic. What a diva should be… I’ve heard it said that power without strength is nothing. Having the pipes is nothing if you don’t know how to use them.
Observe Gladys Knight. With or without the Pips behind her, Gladys Knight can sing (so well, I’m tempted to spell it ‘sang’). To me, that means having a great instrument and having expert control over it. Diana Ross can exude personality, take you on a journey with the way she sells a song. But her pipes are not the most powerful. Aretha Franklin can tear the roof off of a church merely with her voice. But… wait. I can’t criticise Aretha Franklin – that’s a crime in certain jurisdictions. In any case, what Gladys has is the power and the glory. You can hear, or could at one point, an a capella version of this song on YouTube. It is a thing to behold. The girl can sing like hell. She’s broken hearted, she’s triumphant, she’s wilful, she’s dreamy. She sells it all so convincingly that you want to throttle the bugger that’s choosing some other girl over her. I mean, what, is he deaf?
There might be many out there who deride Motown and say that Gladys was at her best after Motown. I do know, especially from an instrumentation point of view, what they’re saying. But what Motown could do better than anyone out there is chain enough monkeys to typewriters that stunning compositions like this would come along often enough to keep everyone on top of their singles games (albums? Well… that’s what ‘greatest hits’ compilations are for…). In this particular case, the song is heartbreaking. The melody is as evocative as any screenplay and the dynamics tell as much as the words could ever hope to. For anybody suffering from a severe case of Jon-Cryer-as-Duckie-style unrequited love, this song couldn’t ring truer.
Difficult to imagine it happening to Gladys, mind you.
Lastly, the Pips, frankly more often an anchor than a set of wings, are perfectly fine in this song, staying to the background and making the gender-shift a little less annoying than it otherwise might be.
"Born Slippy .NUXX" by Underworld
It’s a funny thing, memory. I was just listening the other day to Black Sabbath, to the Sex Pistols, to Nine Inch Nails. I even tried to listen to Led Zeppelin (couldn’t quite bear it, though). I was struck by the fact that songs that seem in our memories to be hard as nails turn out, listening again, to be soft little lumps of Jello. I mean, Ozzy Osbourne gurgling “I am Iron man!”? That’s comedy, not horror.
Which brings us to the present song, perhaps the only song in history to be harder than memory serves. Unlike so many songs that end by simulating dawn, this one starts in sunshine until the babbling words and thumping drums conspire to slowly drag you down.
Down where? Into hell? No, no, but at least into oblivion. This is a song that makes no sense pouring out of little computer speakers. It can only truly be observed on a crowded dance floor bathed in strobes and sweat. Apparently there are lyrics, though all I’ve ever heard is the words ‘boy’, ‘lager’ and ‘mega mega white thing’ over and over again. Of course, the lyrics aren’t the point at all.
Well, what is the point? Our boys in Underworld insist the song was all a joke. It’s apparently a remix of a song that I’ve never heard called “Born Slippy”. The remix was meant to be preposterous, its shouted vocals and relentless beats meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Which goes to show you, of course, the truism that it is the people who create art who are least likely to be able to evaluate it. Additionally, it goes to show just how much Underworld themselves have stumbled aimlessly through their career like an escaped mental ward patient.
Underworld started in the early eighties in a group that, years before Prince did it, were known only as a squiggle, though they did relent and allow themselves to be called “Freur”. They then turned themselves into a crap band called Underworld, not to be confused with the middling band in question called Underworld. This one survived for precisely two albums., whose covers make them appear to have been Adam and the Ants or Sigue Sigue Sputnik or some nonsense.
Only after all that did Underworld, like the Bee-Gees before them, realize that they weren’t quite too old to start making the intelligent dance music that the kids were digging. Even at that, of course, though the music’s listenablility improved, they were still pretty much a failure. It took “Trainspotting”, the movie about Scottish junkies whose soundtrack was a defining feature of 90’s British musical ethos, to transform the two-year-old b-side of a flop single into an international hit and slice of ‘zeitgiest’.
Thank God for Scottish junkies.
It’s actually amazing in today’s more conservative musical climate to think that there was once a time when a song as extreme as this could even approach mainstream success. As it was, it was no Christmas number one, but it was ubiquitous enough that your grandmother might have spoke about ‘that strange song about lager’. Almost ten minutes long, largely amelodic thumping, it’s unlikely to inspire a Britney Spears cover. Yet there was a time when this is what radio sounded like.
That time was more than ten years ago now. And yet Underworld, active since the early eighties, are still soldiering on, unaware that they remain a 25-year one-hit-wonder.
"They Don't Know" by Tracey Ullman
Music tends to be, in my experience, a struggle between irony and sincerity. With the advantage of added-on hipness, usually irony-mongers dominate the FM dial and critical opinion. Sincerity-mongers, on the other hand, often dominate the AM dial and are sneered at.
"Mr. Jones" by Counting Crows
1994. My last year of high school and first year of university. "Alternative" music is as popular as it has ever been and ever will be. Kurt Cobain has just killed himself but Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and God knows who else from Seattle are still there to keep up the overly serious moping.
I had spent my whole life listening to 'alternative' radio stations and watching 'alternative' video shows (yes, there was a time when non-music TV channels had 'video shows', just like they'd have a 'news broadcast'). This was a time for redemption! A time when my musical tastes were vindicated!
I was bored out of my mind.
Stuck in my university dorm with whiny white males shrieking at me on all sides, I became about as contrary as I could be. I responded by blasting out Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash - before they became cool, mind you, before Rick Rubin had 'rehabilitated' both of them in the minds of 'cool kids'.
I get no credit for my progressive music tastes...
Anyway, I was still very much into new music. There was a lot of new stuff I was digging and exploring at the time - both inside and outside the mainstream. Well, in any case, the 'mainstream/alternative' spectrum had been altered, and first-year university students are obsessed with being as 'alternative' as they can be (not just musically, of course), yet within that range I found myself with pretty catholic musical tastes.
Adam Duritz has found plenty of ways in the years since to annoy the bollocks off of me (dating Jennifer Aniston, for example). Yet this initial volley still inspires me. It's almost Dave Matthews Band or even Spin Doctors, and sooner or later it's bound to soundtrack a beer commercial, yet there is something real and genuine here. Wikipedia claims that Duritz suffers from dissociative disorder. I would have no idea about that, but if it's true, it would make a more than a little sense - or rather, this song might make a little more sense. I've never seen Counting Crows live, and if I've seen a video for this song it doesn't stick in my mind, but I imagine Duritz singing it in a kind of spaced-out reverie. He seems to be well in his own world here, emoting to and about his Dylan-rip-off acquaintance (note: if you're stealing your signature song's archetype from a Bob Dylan song, you might not want to actually say "I want to be Bob Dylan" in your lyrics). He doesn't quite take flight, but you sense that he performs this song without really any awareness of the people around him.
If it's so, that might be creepy, but it taps into something transportative about the best music that I constantly find myself looking for. Music should send the listener somewhere. It needn't send the performer somewhere, but if it does, it can create a bond between listener and performer - a bond, of course, later undone if the performer happens to be kind of a wanker. Adam Duritz is, clearly, speaking a load of rubbish here about whatever comes into his head ("Grey is my favourite colour; I felt so symbolic yesterday. If I knew Picasso, I would find myself a grey guitar and play") and I imagine listening to a dozen songs just like "Mr. Jones" would be a fresh hell. Yet as a one-off, as a novelty, "Mr. Jones" still works.
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