New Drive-By Truckers album came out, and, just like previous Truckers albums (basically all since Decoration Day), it's got some good songs, some OK songs, and some filler. It got me to thinking about why I anticipate each new DBT album the way that I do, and I realized that it all goes back to Southern Rock Opera.
It can be cruel the way that a work of art that results from total balls-out going for it can come to serve as an albatross around the artist's neck, but so it goes. As seen by the fact that the Who complained people thinking the band was called Tommy and the album The Who, it's not a new phenomenon.
The thing is, though, that there's a reason that people thought the band was Tommy. Tommy is an unbelievable accomplishment. As in, more unbelievably good as a thematic whole greater than the sum of its parts (and its parts are really good) than anything the Who had done before, or would since. And it's kind of crazy to expect them to do something that good again. Because a rock opera has to be the work of someone pretty anal and organized, what with the whole theme and variations and motifs requirements, and a band is a collaborative enterprise, and an album is really a collection of individual song units. It's like trying to write a musical in a completely different idiom - a musical, by its form, is rigid in its requirements, whereas a rock song is more ragged and free-form.
For that reason, Southern Rock Opera doesn't really hang together as a rock opera proper. There aren't any repeated musical motifs, unless you count three loud guitars operating all at once as a musical motif, but there are a lot of shout-outs to Lynyrd Skynyrd and a whole lot of lyrics about the experience of being Southern, which for Patterson Hood includes a lot of reconciling with Skynyrd. It's kind of a mess, but it's by far the Truckers crowning achievement, and I think they realized that which is why they distanced themselves from it immediately by cranking out another album (Decoration Day) and not allowing it to turn into Tommy. Which it is.
But just like the Who had plenty more bullets in the chamber ("Baba O'Reilly", for one large-caliber example), the Truckers had plenty of good songs left, and Southern Rock Opera doesn't even have the best lineup of the band, which right now is looking like the one with Jason Isbell on guitar. It's to their great credit that they just accepted that lightning in a bottle had hit them once and then kept on keeping on.
Still, I'm a greedy music listener, so I want another swing for the fences. Enough of this workmanlike rock, DBT. Go for the sequel. If it's good enough for Meat Loaf, it's good enough for y'all.
Ok, by all rights this should be terrible. '90s band with dead lead singer gets a replacement singer and attempts a comeback? We've seen this movie 1000x before. So why is this song rocking my face off? Well, in the Curious Case of Alice In Chains, there's a couple of factors at work.
1. Prime Alice in Chains is really, really repetitive. Granted, I'm developing somewhat of a retrospective appreciation of AiC, and as a balance to all the Grateful Dead I've been listening to they're a fine palate cleanser. But they are absolutely, unrelentingly dark. Dark harmonies, sludgy drone, and lyrics about dying and addiction from start to finish. Plus, you know the ending is not a happy one for Staley, so it can be a grim listen. It's not like the early oeuvre is untouchably perfect - there's a lot of draggy material.
So, the lightness of a "California's all right -somebody check my brain" lyric nicely balances the punishing heaviness of the AiC sound. A little yin to go with all that yang.
2. Jerry Cantrell wrote a whole lot of AiC material, and he's still around. Vocally, too, he's the architect behind those flat harmonies, so those are still around too.
3. That main riff. Good Lord, it's the sound of someone taking a club made out of concrete and just smashing it into a 500 year old oak tree over and over (and I mean that in the best possible way).
If, as I do, you enjoy both rock music as music and as a hilarious concept, chances are you'll enjoy Patton Oswalt's take on things. I also wish that I could make a piece of toast with melty cheese on it solely through the power of rocking. Glad I feel like I'm spoken for.
For an updated version of the kind of music video that Patton's talking about in that clip, The Darkness took a crack and did not disappoint. Without "guitah!" that squid thing would have devoured the whole band.
I'm wondering where the backlash stands on the White Stripes these days, as just in the last two weeks I've talked to people whose opinions on rocking I respect greatly that both possess an avowed dislike of Jack White and the White Stripes. One of these people is a drummer and I wonder if it is significant as another friend of mine that is also a drummer was the loudest anti-Stripes voice that I remember in college.
Both of them have not really given the Stripes more than a cursory listen, but both responded viscerally in the negative, which is interesting to me considering how much of breath of fresh air they were to me when White Blood Cells exploded out of the gate. But it's a strange band to write off sight unseen, as though they're just another Snow Patrol or Fall Out Boy, a mainstream act grabbing for the brass ring with an inescapable song or two and a blend of phoniness & ambition that marks the dregs of mainstream chart-dwellers.
In a lot of ways, the White Stripes seem to be victims of their own success, at least when it comes to perception, and the devil of it all is that they saw it coming. "Little Room" off of White Blood Cells is a simple metaphor for the plight of the artist rocketing toward success, and it clocks in at under a minute. After the release of that album, the Stripes were bound toward bona fide rock stardom, and figuring out how they got started sitting in their little room.
Aside: I remember seeing them at the Bowery Ballroom in NY with my friend Andrew right after White Blood Cells was released, and it was clear that the band was going on to bigger and better things. Probably the best concert I've ever seen. The amount of energy they poured into the place was nigh-destructive in nature; I've always wondered what it would be like to see some of the great high-energy rock acts at the go-for-broke club stage, your AC/DCs, your Nirvanas, your Rage Against the Machines, and this was what I imagine it felt like.
So, to me, the ways that the White Stripes are a great rock band, and why they don't deserve your hatred for their success:
1. Understanding of negative space. This was something that my friend Nate was talking about the other day (he is a drummer, he doesn't like Jack White and claims not to like the White Stripes either). The Stripes get a lot of shit for Meg not being a good drummer (especially from drummers), but I would argue that this criticism is a fundamental missing of the point of what they're trying to do. Meg is not a rhythmically challenged musical idiot - she keeps time just fine, thanks. What she doesn't do, ever, is play any fills. Her drumming is strictly patterned minimalism - when the band alters the sound of a section of a song, she'll switch from one symbol to the other, or hit the bass drum on the even beats, but she never plays a single drum fill. I think this is by design - the lack of drum fills makes the hits that are there much more powerful. My friend Andrew observed that Elephant was a great name for a White Stripes album, because the band sounds like an elephant trampling through the jungle. This is due, in large part, to Meg's drums, which hit hard on the downbeats and nowhere else. The space created thus makes the downbeats hit twice as hard as they would otherwise. The difference between the way a Who song "rocks" and the way a Stripes song "rocks" is like the difference between being knocked out by a devastating series of technically impeccable jabs (Keith Moon style, a million hits on a million different drums/cymbals) and being KTFO with one solid Tyson uppercut (Meg). Technically, obviously, Keith Moon is a better drummer, and that's an understatement...but the style of each person's drumming fits each band's music equally. Jack White plays with a forceful blues primitivism, and Meg's downbeat heavy drumming brings it to life.
2. Jack's diverse songwriting talent - for all of their sonic limitations, the White Stripes hit a pretty wide range of moods, which is due mostly to Jack's facility with songwriting. He can write guitar ballads ("We Are Going To Be Friends"), country songs ("Little Ghost"), punk raveups ("Let's Build a Home"), Zeppelin-style blues stomps ("Why Can't You Be Nicer to Me?"), and piano ballads ("I'm Lonely But I Ain't That Lonely Yet"). So, even though the sonics are not diverse, the songs themselves are.
3. Jack's a skilled guitarist and singer. Bands these days rarely have talented singers and talented lead guitarists - Jack White is both. For evidence of White as talented singer, see "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground". He hits that Robert Plant quaver without the preening to illustrate the desperation of love gone wrong. For evidence of White as talented guitarist, refer to "Ball and Biscuit". Never has the digital whammy sounded so good.
4. A keen understanding of history/myth as they intersect in rock and roll. Unlike fellow 2000s breakout band the Strokes, who always seemed keenly uncomfortable with being cast as rich rock dilettantes instead of embracing the role of, well, rich rock dilettantes, White famously got in front of the star-making machinery, making up a story that he and his ex-wife were brother and sister, talking up his adventures in upholstery, and talking about his rabid love of the blues. A mix of truth and absolute, bald-faced lies, this gave White a persona and an escape route - he wouldn't have to answer Fleetwood Mac style questions about the fallout between his and Meg's relationship because he was lying from the start about the entire thing. Instead he could concentrate on his real loves, storytelling and the blues.
In Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman's excellent memoir of an '80s pop-metal drenched childhood in North Dakota, he spills a lot of ink defending the music that gets popular over music that gets the nod from the critical establishment. In his formulation (and I paraphrase), a lot of what's considered beneath contempt at the time due to its lowbrow/lowest common denominator appeal winds up being more culturally resonant than what's championed by the serious musical critics and thinkers at the time. So, for example, Led Zeppelin, famously critically reviled, has since been a beneficiary of revisionist history by dint of their hugely influential discography. And likewise, AC/DC has outlasted and out-endured anyone that originally held them to be unoriginal and repetitive (sure, they are, but so is a Mantra).
This divide between popular and critical opinion is fascinating to me; half of the time I agree with music critics that take terrible acts like Matchbox 20 down a peg, but the other half of the time I think that the position of cultural arbiter goes to the brain and it becomes difficult to identify those artists with a certain kind of visceral appeal of the kind that AC/DC and Led Zeppelin both exemplified.
Which brings me to Kid Rock. Now, I'm not going to argue that Kid Rock is someone whose artistic output is any kind of shining peak of musical accomplishment, but there's a a reason that Devil Without A Cause sold something like 8 bajillion copies. At heart, Kid Rock is musically inclusive, and did a better job than anyone this side of Rage Against the Machine of integrating the cadences of hip-hop with the enduring musical idioms of blues-rock. And Rage, I would argue, for all their hip-hop influences, fall on the stiff side of funky- musically, they seem more out of the hectoring KRS-One side of the hip-hop lineage than the G-Funk party music side of things.
Kid Rock, on the other hand, is all about the party. This doesn't necessarily diminish his output - so is AC/DC. So is Snoop Dogg. So is Chuck Berry. The linchpin of Kid Rock's inclusive musical spirit is right there in his first big hit: "Get in the pit and try to love someone". What this means musically is a shotgun wedding between Southern/Midwestern sleaze rock with the bombastic boasts of hip-hop. When it works, it's an inspired fusion that could be called a truly original hybrid. "Cowboy", one of the Kid's high-water marks, lays out Snoop's Cali fantasies over a loping, funky rock bed, expanding the gangster boasts sonically by setting them to the sounds of self-confident southern rock.
Current hit "All Summer Long" is a rock mashup of "Werewolves of London" and "Sweet Home Alabama", a remix for the rock idiom in which the Kid spins out a summer fantasy straight out of Grease (well, with a lot more booze and weed) over the recontextualized sounds of summers passed. "Picture" is an old-school country duet with Sheryl Crow that showcases Bob Ritchie's embrace of the occasional classicist move.
Now, on the downside, Kid Rock I think is ultimately going to serve as more of blueprint than the finished edifice, more Elvis than Beatles, because for the most part his lyrics are terrible. He brings in hip-hop, sure, but he employs the couplet structure of early Beastie Boys/Run-DMC with only the occasional witty touch. For the most part, it's empty bluster; read any interview with the Kid and one comes away with the impression that he shares some traits with our soon-to-be-departed POTUS - a love of self precluding introspection and a self-satisfaction that impedes forward progress.
Nonetheless, some of Kid Rock's best songs apply the kind of rock/hip-hop fusion that points the way towards the inclusive musical future that we're all heading toward. And he carries the torch for the forgotten Midwest, a self-proclaimed American bad-ass who is going to wave the flag, chug Jack straight from the bottle, and let a midget rock the guest verse while a black woman holds it down on drums. Don't write the man off.
I saw My Morning Jacket at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley; after said experience I will recommend it to anyone. They put on a titanically powerful show, dropping all of the reverb from their recorded output and pushing the rock throttle into the red. Of note and impressive was the facility MMJ displayed in moving from longer, moodier, almost Pink Floyd-ish songs to bashing rockers steeped in a hefty amount of Replacements-isms. Floyd, actually, is what I kept coming back to as a touch point, especially when the light show started playing through the Bay Area fog in earnest as Jim James unleashed his howling tenor. Usually, I'm a lyrics person, but I have to admit that with the exception of "Golden" and "Mahgeetah", I usually don't have the faintest idea as to what James is singing -partially because of the reverb-soak, but partially because he deploys his voice instrumentally- all high lonesome vowels with very little enunciation.
There was also a whole lot of righteous guitar soloing, which I support without reservation. As I've written before, the guitar solo seems to be a lost art these days, but MMJ pulled out some serious guitar duels throughout the night. Unlike the kind of white noise production that passes for instrumental passages for many rock bands these days, these solos were clear and piercing, and mostly melodic and forward moving.
Which got me thinking about Lynryd Skynyrd, since the guitar stomps tended to sound Skynred-esque, instead of Floyd-esque; they were swampy instead of spacey. I realized, though, that, much as Floyd has, Skynyrd has become a very specific aural touch point for bands in way that speaks to true cultural penetration. Not only are the sonic qualities of Skynyrd and Floyd instantly identifiable in the manner of most unique and potent bands, but they stand on for an entire aesthetic conception of music, a rarified height for a band to achieve. Even the most influential and respected bands do not always stand in as the ur-band of their genre; and even when a band is "first" to break through in that musical style they are not always blessed with ur-band status.
Skynyrd, though, stands as synonymous of Southern Rock to the point that in the hackneyed hypothetical of "If Aliens Landed And Asked What [Subject] Is..." you would hand said alien a copy of Gold and Platinum: Lynyrd Skynyrd's Greatest Hits and call it a day. If the alien was still confused you'd probably suplement it with an Allman Brothers album, but the Allmans are a little on the jammy side, a little jazzy, a little highbrow, a variation on the ur-text. Skynyrd is the pure strain, the Platonic ideal of Southern Rock.
It's always impressive, then, when another band doesn't just display influences from a band like that (because, really, the whole point of being the Platonic ideal is that everyone genre-wide is influenced by your sound) but rather starts to seem like a complementary piece of the fundamental picture. There were points during the show when MMJ would launch into a set of dueling solos where it felt like watching the next step of Southern Rock; that they had not merely taken Skynyrd as an influence but had fully integrated the sound and philosophy and were serving as modern emissaries of it.
This I know runs counter to MMJ's stated goals of innovation and boredom with traditional rock structures, and as Evil Urges gives way to the next genre experiment I have no doubt that MMJ will follow the Wilco path of expanding into fresh territories only to encounter diminishing returns (I hold that Being There was Wilco's masterpiece, not Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, because it marked a true experimentation with roots rock orthodoxy instead of leaving it behind almost completely). This evolution has not reached their live show yet, though - if you've ever listened to "Sweet Home Alabama" and had it go straight to the heart despite the ossification of classic rock radio, you owe it to the 'Merican South to see this band before it's too late.
Of all the '70s rock dinosaurs, singer-songwriters, disco divas, and punk agitators, only Randy Newman now seems, in retrospect, that he had a plan all along on how to stay incisive, relevant, and consistently excellent: he decided that he was going to be old starting in his 20s, with his very first album, with his very first song.
Interviews with Newman, from his own website. http://www.randynewman.com/tocinterviews
"Love Story (You And Me)", the song in question, traces the arc of a relationship, from the first verse detailing the courtship, the second verse describing adult life, and then the black-veined final verse:
"When our kids are grown/With kids of their own/They'll send us away/To a little home in Florida/We'll play checkers all day/Until we pass away"
Sure, Newman suggests in the song, there are songs to mine out of the experience of falling in love, but unlike so much of popular music's treatment the subject, from early Beach Boys to Usher, Newman follows it all the way to the (possibly bitter) end. Not just interested in the fireworks of infatuation, the push and pull of attraction, repulsion, and coming together, Newman drives ahead to the end, equally engaged with what happens at the end of a relationship, at the end of the life, and how the knowledge of that greater endpoint makes the initial feeling so much more special and poignant.
Newman's one-eye-on-the-endgame attitude has long made him an odd fit among whoever happens to be his contemporaries at the moment. My favorite photo of Randy is the recent one in Rolling Stone, showing him in the 70s with Lou Reed, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen. The other three all wear the cloak of easy cool that comes from being rock royalty - the slouch and sneer of early Presley all shimmering around them. All three are smoking, all three wear T-shirts or V-necks untucked; loose rock star glamour.
Newman stands apart, his button-down shirt tucked in, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, his glasses and haircut making him look more like an offbeat teacher than a rock star. Who knows how much of this image is deliberately cultivated on his part, but still it's a bright bold line that he has drawn in his music over most of his career.
A lot of rock lyrics are written in the first person by the author's rock persona at the very least - presumably we are to assume that the Bruce of "Thunder Road" bears more than a passing resemblence to Bruce Springsteen himself. After all, rock 'n' roll is primal, and often gives a lot of play to expressions of the id. Randy Newman, by contrast, in interested in using songs as a medium to explore the psychology of character, often a kind of "Randy Newman" that is materialistic, shallow, and boorish, but often also characters that have very little to do with Newman himself. Thus, the huckster slave ship owner of "Sail Away", an angry God in "God's Song", a rich decaying New Orleans playboy in "Shame", and many others.
What is often shared in Newman's characters is a blithe ignorance of the kind of endgame awareness in something like "Love Story". The fallible fictional creations of Newman are often so concerned with their own localized pleasures and challenges that they have no sight of the length and arc of a life, and of how many of the shallow trappings they care so much about matter so little in the end, when having your kids put you in nursing home and you play checkers until you die actually counts as one of the happiest endings of all.
The fact that Newman is very aware of this, I think, is what accounts for the consistently high quality of his original albums. 1999's Bad Love has just as many great songs as Sail Away from the '70s. Many artists have recorded "return to form" albums, especially Newman's contemporaries in that photo, but if critics are honest there's no way the most of the rock stars of today can live up to their work when they first burst onto the scene. Newman is an exception, the man with the plan. If his vision strikes some as overly dark, it's possibly just because he's able to see a little farther into the tunnel at the end than most.
I saw Radiohead at the Outside Lands Festival in SF, and, much like the previous time that I saw Radiohead (on the Amnesiac tour at Madison Square Garden), was left with an inescapable conclustion - Radiohead in the last five years have established themselves as peerless large-scale rock performers.
This is, in some ways, exceedingly strange. Radiohead is very different from artists like The Killers, or Kid Rock, or other bands whose stock in trade is pump-the-fist-toward-the-sky anthems. The last time Radiohead put out an album of fist-pump anthems it was 1996 and they called it The Bends. In fact, you could even argue that The Bends, though exceedingly guitar centric, is almost an anti-anthem album, seing as how it's shot through with the alienation of a band attempting to reject the hell out the success of "Creep". Which really means that you have to go back to 1993 and Pablo Honey to find a Radiohead album that finds the album consciously reaching for the rafters. It's hard to remember now, especially since the band has lapped Pablo Honey artistically again and again, but go back and listen to a song like "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and it makes sense why critics kept citing U2 as such an influence on early Radiohead.
The major chord chorus in that song is the "Beautiful Day" move, basically - after the grungy noodling of the verse, Yorke & the gang deploy that chorus like a set of afterburners: Pablo Honey Radiohead was looking for 60,000 strong singalongs.
But then they got it with "Creep" and took a left turn that just kept on going. "Black Star" and "Street Spirit" on The Bends are fairly anthemic, but the rest of the songs on that album, while definitely guitar-based rock, are not really stadium anthems, and then with each successive album the music got steadily more moody and introverted. Yorke's vocals reached more towards drone, and the electronic textures that were such dynamic accents on OK Computer were brought more and more to the fore. By the time of In Rainbows, the lead single was a moody ballad couched no longer in acoustic guitars and Yorke's falsetto choruses, but in electronic synth textures and a kind of meandering mantra-like chorus.
Which doesn't mean that it's not good - on the contrary, late-period Radiohead turned out to be way more interesting than anyone predicted when Yorke was rocking a dyed blond ponytale playing the MTV Beach house in the mid-nineties. But what the recorded discography suggests is a band that increasingly skews internal and moody and away from external and anthemic. This would seem to logically suggest that as a live band, Radiohead should have gone from better at performing large shows to being much, much worse. The Smashing Pumpkins are an obvious corrollary here - who in their right mind would prefer to see the Pumpkins on the Adore tour as opposed to the one for Gish or Siamese Dream?
Fascinatingly, however, the move toward greater introversion in their recorded output was matched by the sculpting of a ferociously dynamic live performance aesthetic, so that listening to Radiohead in the headphones is almost a completely different musical experience from listening to them rock a crowd. Live, they let the guitars drive the songs, just as they did on Pablo Honey and The Bends, but Johnny Greenwood uses the electronic accents developed through the latter albums to drench the songs in an otherworldly haze of sonic effects that make them harder, stronger, and more compelling.
"I Might Be Wrong" live is a towering, walloping beast of a song, complete with audience clap-along and tambourine. Similarly, the introverted anthems of late-period Radiohead are turned inside out, and Yorke expertly brings intimate dynamics into play at large-scale shows. This, I theorize, is the secret of Radiohead's success as a live band - they expertly scale up the dyanism of their songs, such that the quiet desparation of "Exit Music (For a Film)" is exquisitely balanced by the guitar explosions of a "Paranoid Android". I only wish that they would bring to bear all of this firepower for the next album; it seems strangely miserly to keep it only in the ephemeral realm of live performance. Although quite possibly it just keeps it special.
Maybe this is an elementary question, easily answered by the most neophyte music historian, but nonetheless it never fails to completely baffle me - why did everyone go echo-heavy in the '80s?
The occasion of my wondering is reading about Paul Westerberg's new album, which always gets me to go back and listen the Replacements stuff that I have since it's all so legendary and all that, and, though I readily admit that the band put out some classic, classic, songs, it's a strange legacy for me to grapple with because of issues of sonic quality. Quality not bad vs. good in this sense, but rather in the sense of sonic qualities, like "a sonic quality of Lil' Jon's club hits is a reliance on repetitive siren-like hooks" (YEEEEAAAAHHHHH!).
When I dove into the most critically respected part of the discography (Let It Be and Tim), I found that the songwriting on Tim, especially, was a high-water mark whose praises seemed deserved (Let It Be I think gets overrated - more filler on that CD than the critical conscensus would lead one to believe). "Bastards of Young" and "Little Mascara", especially, are simply two of the best-written and tuneful rock songs that any post-Beatles four-piece have put together. To me, those two songs sound the most like the Replacements conjured up by their critical reputation - desperate, a little unhinged, but melodic and empathetic and gorgeously and passionately sung.
But good God. They practically drown under all the production goop. The echo and reverb is so overpowering that it sounds like the band is playing in some kind of rock-flattening underwater room. The drive and kick of the songs is clearly detectable underneath all of the slathered-on echodrums, but only because they are so exceptional. Hearing the power of the songs, in some ways, requires listening past the way that they were recorded. Mountains of echo are all good when you're talking about Def Leppard, but the ragged glory of the Replacements at their best needed production that highlighted immediacy and volume - something like the way that the Rolling Stones were produced - another outfit that balanced ragged and tight.
So clearly there was an epidemic - this band was so reactionary (musically) as to record one anti-MTV screed and follow it up with a video consisting of speakers in an unmoving room, so it's not like they were necessarily lockstep with the sonic times. Randy Newman's '80s album drown in echo and synthesizers as well, and the man spent the '70s working a masterful variation of piano trios and orchestral arrangements. Plus, the Replacements were a rock band - Newman is an arrangement whiz that's done full-on legit film scores- his choices were undeniably deliberate.
What's even more strange about the echo epidemic is that modern rock production dials it completely back. The '70s rock production style is what's being approximated by Newman (on his most recent 2 albums) and every single guitar rock band to release a debut album in the '90s and beyond. The Strokes stand as an exreme - they bathe Casablancas's voice in echo, but the instruments are as clean and clear as obvious sonic touchpoint Television. The scrim of technology that the echo production lowered over every '80s rock song was raised again, making an entire decade of rock music (give or take) a constant battle between its production style and its songwriting.
Because ultimately, the siege of echo contains the energy spilling out at the margins that mark the best rock songs. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" is a masterpiece, but it's a pop masterpiece - there's no real danger or edge to the song. Impeccably sung, machine-buffed, not a note out of place, the production style fits with the glam aesthetic. But "Bastards of Young" is an anthem of listless confusion, a howl (or mumble) into the abyss of young adulthood - it shouldn't have the same drum sound as Def Leppard. For the pop end of the spectrum, echo/processed sounds were just another ingredient. But they seriously degraded (and continue to degrade) some top-notch rock and roll songs.
A popular trope in music criticism is referring to whatever power pop band the critic is referring to as having songs that "should be" or "would be" hits in some idealized alternate universe, while bemoaning the fact that melodic guitar pop songs just don't become massive hits anymore. I'm going to have to call BS on this assertion, and I think it's interesting to look at why it gets made so often about it and why it's so wrong. I was reminded of this when I heard "Hey Jealousy" the other day on the radio, and remembered how critics always cited the Gin Blossoms as one of the few bands to escape the power pop ghetto to have honest-to-God hit songs.
The cause for all this bemoaning is, I think, rooted in nostalgia - Pete Townshend apparently coined the term in 1967 to describe the early Who, and the bulk of the critics that I used to read were formed by the musical output and developments of the '60s and '70s. Nowadays, when music can be plucked from the air thanks to filesharing & iTunes, or sampled without cost on YouTube/muxtape/internet radio, there's much more cross-pollination and acceptance of genre, but until Napster broke everything wide open, I'd say that musical subgenre was still something that critics put a huge stake in. Since guitar pop was pretty much the name of the game until disco & punk broke, there's a vested interest in the part of critics whose musical tastes were formed in those decades to champion the form. It's the same way that I respond instantly to songs from the '90s grunge mode - music etches its deepest grooves in certain years.
So, nostalgia - critics feel that breezy guitar pop songs should be hits, because they used to be.
Secondly, the genre name is a misnomer. Power pop in its ideal is a fantastic idea - in its practical term, the bands that get the appellation are often practicing something much different from the platonic ideal. What Townshend was speaking to was the way that aggression and angst form such an aesthetically pleasing dialectic when paired with catchy hooks and shiny instrumental surfaces. What results is a kind of musical sucker punch - the sing-along melodies draw you in, but the naked aggression (of, in the case of something like "I Can't Explain" the drums and manipulativeness of the lyrical narrator) provides the cathartic, emotional release.
Most of what gets labeled power pop is anything but - it's just shiny, empty, major chord guitar pop without about as much staying power as the deep tracks on a T-Pain album. For the most part, what gets labeled as power pop is a whole lot of pop with very little power.
Let's take a touchstone - "I've Been Waiting" by Matthew Sweet. So, this is off of Girlfriend, which Allmusic.com says "melds all of Sweet's influences into one majestic, wrenching sound". Well, that would be nice, but there's nothing majestic or wrenching here. The song is about as saccharine as a ten-gallon bag of equal. Sweet hits every note without a trace of emotion, and the 12 string guitars jangle prettily, but it's pretty much all sweetness and light. Catchy it is, but there's no really no "power" to bounce the pop off of. Ok, he wants the girl, he's waiting, he may not get her, but nothing really feels at stake.
Contrast with "Sick of Myself:
This one's got more distortion driving the main riff, and the singalong chorus is a pure expression of self-loathing; instantly, much more dramatic friction around the same subject. Any wonder that "Sick of Myself" was Sweet's biggest hit?
In looking at the "power pop" bands/songs that have broken out and become hits, this comes into focus - either the instrumental parts are actually, you know, powerful and aggressive, or else the lyrics contain enough sleaze/depression/anger/sadness/twistedness to play off of the shiny surface of the instrumental part.
A sample: "My Sharona", the Knack - all about leering at younger women. "Hey Jealousy", Gin Blossoms - a drunk screw-up returns to his hometown to ask his ex-lover if he can crash at her place and maybe drive around and get chased by the cops. "Semi-Charmed Life" - Third Eye Blind - crystal meth addiction "Buddy Holly," Weezer - So what I'm a geek - I dig you, baby!
etc. etc. etc.
I would also argue that a lot of songs are classified as something else but should be power pop. Sorry, Kurt, but "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a classic case - sing-along song crammed full of hooks, with volume & lyrics about alienation to provide the friction. For some reason, power has come to mean 12 string jangly guitars in the critical vocab, when everyone knows power comes from power chords (duh, it's right there in the word itself!)
Other songs that actually fit the "power pop" literal definition, not the music criticism version:
"When I Come Around," Green Day. "Mr. Brightside", the Killers "All The Small Things", Blink-182 "Interstate Love Song", Stone Temple Pilots "Last Nite", the Strokes "Remember", the Raveonettes "Stars" - Hum "A Praise Chorus" - Jimmy Eat World "I Got You (At the End of the Century) - Wilco.
Ah ha! All of the sudden it looks like we have a viable subgenre on our hands, doesn't it? So let's throw our Rickenbackers in the closet and play some rock and roll already.
I don't know when the lead singer sans instrument fell out of favor, but I'm just about ready for a serious comeback. The point I think was made, and made well, and probably first by Bob Dylan: you don't need a classically "good" voice to be a good rock vocalist. But Bob illustrated the other side of that coin, namely: sometimes a "good" singer would really, really improve a song. I think specifically of his croaking work on "Lay Lady Lay", which obscure band the Stands turned into a gorgeous pop song merely by subbing in some competent vocals. I pity the poor lady that Dylan tried to convince to get on his brass bed - had she not been able to see his face, she might have assumed she'd been kidnapped by an asthmatic bear cub.
But taking shots at Dylan's voice is too easy, and I do it out of lazy reflex - the man has proven himself to be for the most part an exceptionally expressive vocalist, even if his limitations do rear themselves every once in a while (ok, often). But not every singer/songwriter is on the level of Bob, able to turn a pretty abrasive instrument into a thrilling, expressive one. Sometimes they're just bad singers.
I think the DIY influence of punk and '80s indie rock caused a whole lot of bands to decide that they didn't need a good singer, that the songwriter behind the band could do just fine with his nasal whine/atrocious croak/etc. Some songwriters/band visionaries have great voices, and this works, but some could have really benefited from having some vocal talent behind the mic. And hey, sure, maybe sometimes a band can use the flawed voice of one of the songwriters, but keep a real singer around (see: the Who).
Bands that really could have used/could use a decent lead singer:
1. Dinosaur Jr. 2. Foo Fighters (love Dave Grohl, but he should be the Pete Townshend of this band's vocal output). 3. The Jesus & Mary Chain 4. Imperial Teen 5. Sebadoh 6. Drive-By Truckers (love Patterson Hood and Cooley, but their ranges are both limits on their songwriting ambitions) 7. Jellyfish (nothing ruins power pop like thin, reedy lead vox) 8. Calexico 9. Meat Puppets 10. Steely Dan (had one, got rid of him) 11. Smashing Pumpkins
Bands that have really benefited from a good lead singer:
1. U2 2. Rage Against the Machine 3. Pearl Jam 4. Magnetic Fields (lead singer farming out singing duties) 5. Van Halen 6. Guns N Roses 7. Blur 8. The Allman Bros.
Incomplete lists, both, but I'm ready to see the comeback of the lead singer in all of the bands just now flowering into being.
The trouble is one of range - the limited vocals of a J. Mascis are fine on one song, but they get wearing on an album length. When you've got an Axl Rose or Eddie Vedder, or even Stephen Merritt's stable of singers, to throw around, the songs are capable of being a lot more versatile.
A while back, I wrote a bit on mashups and Girl Talk, and with the recent release of Feed The Animals, Gillis's Night Ripper follow-up, the subject seems worth revisiting. Like a pair of CCR albums that I've been listening to recently (Green River and Willy and the Poorboys), the second album seems like a continuation of the first, as though the artist in question simply took a break after writing an album's worth of songs, got up, got a up of coffee, sat back down, and knocked out another one of similar mood, style, and overall quality. It's successive albums like this (or strings of them) when bands can come to seem like superstar athletes, locking into the realm of the unconscious and sinking shot after shot or hitting homer after homer, making it look identical and uniform. What's amazing is that for an athlete this comes in the span of minutes and hours, while for a band it often comes in spans of months and years.
It can be toxic to artistic development, especially when self-consciousness creeps in and they're no longer knocking it out of the park without even thinking. God forbid it happen at the beginning of the artistic career - then you've got the sad spectacle of chasing after ghosts for an entire articstic lifetime. It seems to me that bands that stumble first or often along the way can then more easily revist the peaks later in their career. So I feel reassured to know that Girl Talk put out two terrible glitch-pop DJ mixes before detonating Night Ripper all over my face.
Quick list of bands that hit multi-album strings of similar quality & style:
The Strokes (Is This It & Room On Fire) CCR (Green River & Willy and the Poorboys) Randy Newman (Sail Away & Good Old Boys) Ben Folds Five (s/t & Whatever & Ever Amen) Pixies (Surfer Rosa & Doolittle) Arcade Fire (Funeral & Neon Bible) etc.
vs.
Bands that show marked & ragged development
The White Stripes (s/t to De Stijl to White Blood Cells) Nirvana (Bleach to Nevermind) Radiohead (Pablo Honey to The Bends) The Hold Steady (Separation Sunday to Boys and Girls in America) The Clash (Give 'Em Enough Rope to London Calling) etc.
So Night Ripper is the Leap, but Feed The Animals maintains the spot on the plateau, and creates the beautiful illusion that Gillis could keep putting out 46 minute masterpieces like this until he dies or doesn't feel like doing it anymore. A perilous position to be in, for sure, because where's the escape hatch? But in the meantime it doubles the Night Ripper-quality output for everyone to enjoy.
Previously, I lauded Gillis for ignoring obscurity, which is the guiding principle for many DJs - the recontextualizing of the obscure. Listening to Feed The Animals, what's striking is the almost scientific way that Gillis isolates the hooks of the songs that he features. Every sample comes form a hit (and usually a massive, U.S. or worldwide hit), and for a song to hit like that it has to have at least one (and often several) monster, undeniable hooks. Usually that comes in the chorus, but as Gillis shows in his two monster pop albums, not as often as you might think. He shows an uncanny knack choosing the best or catchiest 10 seconds of each song he samples, and forms his weave out of those 10 second moments threaded together from beginning to end.
So, for example, he shows that most of Eminem's "Shake That Ass" pales next to the opening verse, and that the pop rush of Nirvana's "Lithium" really does come from those descending "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" - which cleverly calls out that Pixies/Nirvana loud-soft-loud move as the pop hook that it is, not the abrasive attack that it seems to position itself as. It's like the way William Goldman claims his Princess Bride is the good parts version, without the unnecessary boring parts - Feed the Animals is all good parts. That can make it somewhat exhausting, like catching a case of contact ADD. But it's the same thing that makes the album/mix/song/set such a rush in the first place.
So, sure, Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" was a watershed moment, but it feels like the combination of rap with rock 'n' roll music still hasn't explored any past the front gates. I know that there was a period there where rock radio was filled with the likes of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park and such, but just because something combines rap with rock doesn't mean that the music is any good. Conversely, it doesn't necessarily make it bad either, but the graceless lunkheads sprayed across hit radio after the Fred Durst & Co. hit it big sure would give that impression to the casual observer.
Rage Against the Machine is probably the most critically and commercially successful example of the genre, and I would posit that the Roots crew is the current paradigm of underground indie success. But both represent very specific paths toward the fusion of hip hop and rock, which means, Occam's Razor style, that there are a multitude of paths still left unblazed.
Because of the lack of workable models, Rage stands as the paradigm of the primarily "rock" act working in the hip-hop mode, which is somewhat strange due to the limited nature of their focus. Limit not meant in the pejorative sense, but literally - Rage's music is designed to accomplish a narrow set of aims - namely, make the listener feel just as pissed off and energized bout left-wing politics as Zach De La Rocha. The name of the band is the thesis statement of their sonic and lyric concerns - this is not a band given to experimentation. In this way they operate with the same kind self-limitations delineated by punk - like the buzzsaw pop of early Ramones, Rage's bludgeoning assault operates within a narrow range of tempo, attitude, and sound.
Now, this is not to denigrate the band - just to frame it. Rage has a lot of crucial strengths, and their central (and only) innovation was/is a powerful one. Recognizing that hip-hop's lack of melody and ratatat rhythms allow form of vocalization more assaultive and dramatic than anything sung could be, they proceeded to alloy said vocal style with the similarly amelodic and staccato rhythms of metal. The produced music that was assaultive to the core, but catchy through its rhythm (as opposed to its melodoy). Thus, the perfect message of form and function - when de la Rocha pops off about bulls being on parade, he really does come across as calm like a balm. There's no sing-along chorus to blunt the impact, but it's not deliberately alienating or off-putting like the Cookie Monsters of metal - it's just aggression, flattened down and welded the hip-hop's insistent beat.
So, a triumphant example of an aesthetic realized, but not exactly a viable model for the genre - Rage is pretty much a niche unto themselves (similar to a band like the Violent Femmes, and similarly inextricably linked with the powerful and powerfully peculiar personas of their frotnmen), and as such are more of an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
An actual step toward a successful fusion is the Roots crew, whose live performances are legend and well-known as bringing serious instrumental fire. Like Rage, the Roots musical dynamic is a push and pull from the musically restless ?uestlove and the solidly earnest MC Black Thought. "Here I Come" is the most rock 'n' roll song from the band that I'm familiar with, and it, like Rage, courses with the best of the 4/4 rock beat and aggression, riding ?uestlove's drums and the wah'ed guitar out of the gate all the way to the close.
Still, though, the Roots work solidly in the vernacular of hip-hop - their commitment to live instrumentation sets them apart and gives them a rock sheen, but really their project is to bring live instruments to the hip-hop sound. Thus, their songs are not structured as rock songs; with riffs, verses, choruses, bridges, and dynamic shifts/peaks/valleys. They're structured more as hip-hop songs - with the instrumental there as the bed for lyrical dexterity. It's somewhat of an fallacy to say that the play rock/hip-hop - really, they're almost pure hip-hop with live instruments. "Here I Come" rides the same riff the whole way through - were it taking from the rock vernacular there would at least be a solo - or the guitar part would change during the chorus (like Bulls on Parade).
Still, Black Thought is a more varied MC than de la Rocha, so stacking the 2 bands up next to each other illuminates the yawning gap that is still open for a fusion of genre to fill. Pop acts have taken hip-hop sounds for a while now (see: "Every Morning", Sugar Ray), and vice versa (see: every hip-hop song with an artfully placed female-sung chorus) - rock is a genre that's encrusted with a bit more traditionalism. Still, though, it's 2008 - it's time to get with the program. I'm about ready for Led Zeppelin fronted not by Robert Plant, but by Nas - which means not just hip-hop with live instruments, or aggression-dialed-to-11, but a full range of moods, styles, and instrumental color in the rock style with some rhyming woven through. Too much to ask? I'm keeping the faith.
Listened to the new Girl Talk album all week, basically. If you haven't heard it yet, then don't waste any more time reading this missive about guitar music - go find it. I'll probably have more thoughts comprehensive thoughts later, but one thing that came about in the listening that I wanted to explore is the question of the guitar solo. Or perhaps I should say: the guitar solo? The question in question being prompted by the use in "Feed the Animals" of the guitar fills of "Jailbreak", the Thin Lizzy song.
Now, I love guitar solos. I'm a highly biased observer of music in this way. The idea of the guitar solo is so endemic the basic rock song structure that you can pretty much trace a straight line through from Chuck Berry to GNR, unbroken. The point on that graph are composed of solos. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always there. Like choruses, or songs about devil-women that are bad for your soul by being so goooooooooooood in bed, yowza!
Then, static clouds the signal around the time of the grunge explosion. After the smoke cleared, I can think of very few hit rock singles that really utilized the guitar solo. The temptation is to blame this on Nirvana, and, indeed, Cobain's reluctance to make the rock-star move and solo away post-Bleach surely made an impact on everyone following in the footsteps, but Nirvana hardly operated in a vacuum. The other high-impact grunge bands featured classic-rock inspired solos (Pearl Jam), metal-inspired solos (Soundgarden), and solos inspired by someone giving Billy Corgan a dirty look while he was in line at the post office (Smashing Pumpkins).
But looking at the post-grunge rock bands that took off reveals a glaring lock of solo action. Third Eye Blind, matchbox 20, and Collective Soul were the 3 titans of the charts in the post-grunge hangover (a painful triplet of oatmeal-ish pseudo-rock, to be sure), and as far as I can tell none of their hit songs had a solo. Is this really a case of everyone imitating Cobain, even though Mike McCready is probably still sitting in a studio finishing up the "Evenflow" solo? It seems like the spate of hit singles coming from the pop-punk end of things also contributed the development - the Offspring & Green Day had nary a solo to be found, instead hanging their hats on the reductive musical equations of the Ramones.
I think that this is the legacy of the 80s indie & punk scenes, where guitar solos were equated with the poofy LA metal bands that deployed them so frequently. So, as musical memes do, they came to signify something other than their original meaning: instead of to-be-lauded virtuosity they came to mean pompous head-up-ass posturing.
But man, this is the kind statement that only has to be made once, not over the course of a decade's worth of rock music. Short of Tom Morello, I can't think of another guitarist who put the solo imprinteur on his mainstream rock outfit. And, even more strangely, I have a hard time conjuring up any mainstream rock hits in the last 15 years or so with guitar solos at all to speak of. This seems like a vast opportunity lost.
I'll never forget going to see the White Stripes after the release of "White Blood Cells" at the Bowery. I had heard they put on a good show, but I was expecting hi-NRG amateur hour - after all, Jack White had consciously put no solos on the album, and the earlier albums had a little bit of slide work, and that was it. So when he proceeded to shred half of his songs to pieces I was practically catapulted out of the back of the establishment. The songs on the albums were blueprints - the man was creating buildings.
And, formally, I get why "Fell In Love With A Girl" doesn't need a guitar solo to make its point. But would Jimmy Page have let that song out the gate without a face-melter? Doubtful. Sure, you don't need 4 legs to have a table stand up, but that fourth leg really helps.
An arbitrary list of post-1991 songs that really could have used a guitar solo: "Woman" - Wolfmother (organ solo? back to drawing board please gentlemen) "Possum Kingdom" - The Toadies "Mr. Brightside" - The Killers "How You Remind Me" - Nickleback "Fell In Love With A Girl" - White Stripes "Hate To Say I Told You So" - The Hives "Semi-Charmed Life" - Third Eye Blind "Interstate Love Song" - Stone Temple Pilots "Cannonball" - The Breeders
Well, consider expectations met. Weezer's new album (idiotically titled "The Red Album" - someone please inform these guys that 3 self-titled albums is not clever, but rather carries the unmistakable stench of creative bankruptcy) is pretty bad.
Not bad in the way that the previous 3 were bad, which were soul-crushingly, agonizingly, terribly bad. This is more like the kind of bad where it becomes apparent that your favorite band is running out of ideas, and is no longer a band because of any pressing needs to communicate through music but rather is a band because, well, it beats working a desk job.
Some of the stuff on there is, as my friend Andrew observed, some of the best material they've put out since Pinkerton. "The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived" picks up the punk rock opera thread from Green Day's "American Idiot" album, cramming in falsetto, overly dramatic monologues, tempo shifts, nods to "Simple Gifts" (yeah, "Simple Gifts, as in the song you may remember from middle school chorus...I know I do), and references to mages and magic spells. Unlike anything from albums 3-5, it's not burdened with crushing self-consciousness, and is rather a window into the peculiar workings of Rivers Cuomo's pop-musical mind.
"Dreamin" is a servicable song, 1/2 epic, 1/2 pop trifle, complete with verbal harmony breakdown at the end and a whole lot of ooh-ooh's. "Troublemaker" is catchy and dumb, with several lines that made me smile for real and a chorus that was stuck in my head for 3 days. Closer "The Angel and the One" is decent, as well.
All of these are markedly inferior to "Pork and Beans", which is the kind of sledgehammer pop that marked Weezer as special all those years ago. "I don't care what they say about us anyway" is now "I don't give a hoot about what you think", and it's all backed up by that glorious 4/4 grind. It's also hookier by far than anything else on the album. Does it point its way toward a potential road to recovery?
Hardly. Depressingly enough, Rivers revealed to "Rolling Stone" that he wrote the song to fit an old riff from '98 that he never used. Hmmm, '98. Right around the time before his talent up and left, apparently. This was crushing news to me. It's gone. The man's a pop song architect now by occupation, not a regular geek with vague dreams of success and happiness gloriously unrealized.
Further evidence of creative bankruptcy - Rivers lets the other members of the band contribute songs to the album. In a long-ago "Alternative Press" article much was made of his dictatorial tendencies, so the fact that he's letting other people get songs onto his band's album surely shows improvement as a person, and I can always support that. But, man, listening to these songs gives me newfound appreciation for Rivers-the-asshole back in '96. Maybe it was just misguided quality control, because the non-Cuomo songs are terrible.
So, 6 songs from Rivers, with 1 great, 1 solid, and 2 decent. 4 terrible songs from the rest of the band. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang. And I'm left to wonder again, what was it about Matt Sharp? Sharp was the most frustrated, had the biggest axe to grind of any of the non-Cuomo members of Weezer according to that long-ago article, and, if the results of the first 2 Rentals albums are any indication, dude had a legitimate gripe. Unlike the dreck churned out on "The Red Album", Sharp has a handful of songs to his credit that not only hit the quality bar set by the first 2 Weezer albums, but also share their unmistakable sonic instincts. It's not like he was churning out sub-Cracker forgettableness like "Thought I Knew" (thanks, Brian Bell, but no thanks), he was touching up songs like the fabulous "The Love I'm Searching For", which had plenty of that chugging melodic low-end drive that earned Weezer so many ducats (and continues to do so - "Pork and Beans" is apparently tearing it up on the charts).
But by all accounts, Rivers was a tyrant then, and dictated the sound of early Weezer with the zeal of a Fidel, so theoretically losing Sharp's bass & falsetto was just a matter of finding another warm body with the same instrumental abilities.
But theory apparently diverged from practice. Something about Sharp's presence or influence seems to have functioned as some sort of quality bar for Rivers, because the fall-off after he left the band is simply astonishing. I'll never know if it was Matt Sharp, or if his departure miraculously coincided with the complete erosion of Rivers Cuomo's musical instincts, but it's a question I ponder anew with each new crappy facsimile of past glory titled "Weezer" and labeled by color that comes down the pipe.
Weezer was the first band I really, truly loved, in that way peculiar to teenager-hood, when a band really can seem to speak as some sort of totemic signifier of everything that you feel and feel that you are about.As the strains of their new single leak out, and hope renews that maybe, just maybe, they’ve got their shit together this time, my mind again turns to the matter of how painful it is when a band breaks your heart.
A history of my discovery – back in the day of 30 second .wav file samplers, I played the one for “Buddy Holly” on loop.I loved the song.I wanted to own it.But, concerned that it would be the typical nugget-of-gold-on-a-mound-of-trash so typical of so many full albums (I’m looking at you, Better Than Ezra) that flooded music stores in the wake of the Nirvana explosion, I actually bought the single, not the album.
This led to a couple of discoveries – 1) I had made a mistake.I loved the crappily recorded live versions of “Surf Wax America” and “My Name Is Jonas” just as much as I loved the main event, and now I knew I had to own the album.2) I experienced that perverse pleasure of music loving, the discovery of the obscure b-side, for the first time.“Jamie”, the b-side for that single, remains to this day my favorite Weezer song.It’s basically what I imagined the Jesus & Mary Chain sounded like from reading the reviews of Psychocandy – a pretty ‘50s singalong melody about a girl that sounds like it’s being played inside a tornado.I learned later that the song was recorded as part of someone’s graduate school project in sound engineering (details fuzzy), and it sounds like it.The guitars sound like a thousand amplified basses, all being played through a fuzz pedal.It’s glorious, and remains so.
I snapped up the S/T album and devoured it.Obviously, it’s great.It was then, and it remains so.The chief accomplishments of the album are sonic and lyric: sonically, it balances perfectly on the delicate fulcrum between sugar-sweet pop melodies (and delivery – Rivers Cuomo is a talented singer, a crucial component of the band’s appeal), and sledgehammer guitar fury – both the roaring 4/4 drive of the twin-guitar rhythm section and the Winger-meets-the-Pixies guitar solos.Lyrically, Rivers works a masterful variation on one of the definitive rock variations – the scorned geek.Backing those gorgeous melodies and venomous crunch is a boy/man that’s been rejected by the ladies, one that looks like Buddy Holly, one that plays a mean game of D&D, one that is holed up his garage trying to put a band together so he can tell the world just how thoroughly it’s done him wrong.
The persona is not original – Gordan Gano worked it to perfection on the Violent Femmes’ debut album, just to cite one example.But the engaging part of the Cuomo persona-in-song is that He Is Us – that is, like Elvis Costello was once purported to be, the workings of his mind seemed to mirror mine exactly.I could never relate to a Kurt Cobain; swirling down a drain of heroin and inchoate rage at modern existence.Rivers’s grievances were mine, blown up to Technicolor proportions.
Like a lot of people that liked the debut, Pinkerton left me cold at first.Both the sound and the lyrical persona are sharpened – Cuomo digs deeper into the lover-scorned persona, peppering in ever more personal details and letting some of the humor from the debut curdle into true alienation/bitterness.Sonically, the bright sheen is no longer present – the guitars hit hard and flat, feedback squalls are everywhere, and the drums sound reverb-less; the whole album has a lot of the sonic qualities of Surfer Rosa, but with a whole lot more bass on the guitars and a lot less of the Santiago surf-whine.
As a relistened, the album grew on me for these reasons – it’s a more adult album, and a messier one, and I’d put it in the top 5 of the nineties on my own personal list.It didn’t sell worth a damn, and it’s not hard to see why.It’s not cute, like the debut.It’s not really that funny, either (well, except for maybe “Pink Triangle”).The lyrical specificities make listening to it feel oddly voyeuristic; intimate in a frightening way.Watching the overanalytical superego of a nerd crushed by romantic failure bash away at the self-imposed cage with gravelly, feedback-laden storms does not immediate radio hits make.
Then, a long hiatus.Weezer was broken up, or took a break, it was hard to tell in the pre-blog saturation Dark Ages.I sought out all the b-sides I could, and discovered even more greatness.I was amazed – here was a band that had never put out a song I disliked.After 6 years, I was in college, and the rumors stirred – they were coming back.Sure, Matt Sharp was long gone, having pursued his own muse with The Rentals, but surely the bass could be replaced.This was Rivers Cuomo’s show.
And, then, the horror.The third album.Lyrics, once sharp, insightful, personal; now dull, generic, unmemorable.The sound – no guitar solos.No longer tuned down half-a-step for that gravel crunch.The songs, that most crucial of components, the songs were just terrible.Actual bad songs.Trash.Songs I would never in a million years want to hear more than once.One line, just to pluck from many: “Open your heart and let the good stuff out”.What?What the hell?Who was this Stepford Wives version of my favorite band?I had no idea that Matt Sharp was so important to the quality of Weezer’s songs, but maybe I should have been after hearing the highs of some of his Rentals material.I felt genuinely betrayed.A band that I had wanted to return I now wished had gone on permanent hiatus.
It makes me appreciate all those diehard Rolling Stones fans, the ones who must have realized at some point in the ‘80s that their heroes had peaked.a while ago, and that while Exile In Main Street will endure, the current iteration of the band is mostly going to crank out forgettable crap.The titans of the ‘60s and ‘70s already had their peaks and declines frozen into a coherent discography/narrative – Weezer was the first band in which I experienced that rollercoaster personally, viscerally, for myself.Having read about the Replacements sad decline, and the Clash, and Zeppelin, and all the rest, here was the painful lived experience.
And now they’re back, with another new single, and this one comes the closest in a long while to recapturing the feel of the original.The old hope comes flooding back, and the phantom nature of it just makes it more agonizing.Is that the old guitar churn?Those oddly personal and clunky lyric touches?Matt Sharp’s still M.I.A., but is it possible Rivers is paying attention again?I know it’s not, and I know the letdown is coming, and for that reason it would be best for my musical piece of mind if they would either become great again, or just give it up.The Stones loom like a grinning specter, and still I’ll get my hands on the new album as soon as I possibly can.
For all the oceans of mythologizing ink devoted to Nirvana and their influence, a little distance – Nevermind is 17 years old now – pegs their influence as stranger and more far-reaching than the standard “musical touchstone” type influence.They were both more influential and less than they were perceived at the time.
The dominant critical meme in the immediate post-grunge climate was that Nirvana’s success had, in one fell swoop, wiped the kind high-style, low-content ‘80s metal off of the map, along with prefab pop and glossy synth/dance music.Supposedly, the watershed moment was Nevermind supplanting Thriller at the top of the charts; the Moment that marked the changing of the musical zeitgeist.
Well, sort of.Prefab pop laid dormant for a while as grunge music suffered from the usual cycles of diminishing returns (A-Listers like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots giving way to B-Listers like Dishwalla, Collective Soul, and Live and then to C-Listers like Matchbox 20 and Third Eye Blind), but came roaring back with a vengeance when Jive records unleashed the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and Britney on the world.
Plus, oh yeah, hip hop simply blew rock out of the popular reckoning.Not a lot of critics saw that coming.You want influential?Try Biggie.Way more of an impact on the last 15 years of popular music than Kurt Cobain, and his lyrics are a lot better written.Doesn’t scream as well, though.All the disposable top of the charts lowest-common denominator stuff that Nirvana was supposed to sweep away in some kind of musical tidal wave?Say hello to Sisqo.Have you heard?He likes thongs.
Nonetheless, even if in retrospect the radio heyday of grunge looks like the last dying light of the supernova that is/was rock’s stranglehold on popular music (which doesn’t mean that rock itself is over and done – just that it is now another in a series of viable genres, with another genre holding chart primacy over it), the question of Nirvana’s actual musical influence is an interesting one.
One immediately curious thing about Nirvana’s success is that so few bands sound like actual musical descendants of the band.And, rest assured, this is not because their sound is so unique and out there and impossible to replicate.Sure, a lot of bands had success with the quietLOUDquiet formula (Better Than Ezra – "Good", Radiohead – "Creep", Stone Temple Pilots – "Big Empty", etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.), but it can be argued (and often is) that Nirvana just took that from the Pixies.“Gouge Away” and “Gigantic” are the obvious touchstones, both for the melodic nature of the bass lines and because they carry a lot less of the Santiago guitar madness that sonically distinguishes the Pixies from Nirvana – I challenge anyone to find surf rock influences anywhere in the Nirvana discography, whereas it’s all over the place for the Pixies).
Nirvana’s sonic template is the musical template of “the personal is political” – raw, extreme pain communicated in universal terms, alternatingly bludgeoning and off-putting (“Milk It”, “Stay Away”) or bruised and inviting in the manner of bird with a broken wing (“Lithium”, “All Apologies”).Foregrounded always is Cobain’s pain; sometimes specified, often not, and, by virtue of his gift for melodic phrasing and genuinely powerful vocal abilities, inviting rather than alienating.Even at its most abrasive, Nirvana’s music has a warm, tactile quality lacking in the dentists-drill vibrations found in the Pixies most abrasive concotions.
This empathy-inviting pain is communicated in simple, catchy melodies wedded to simple, punk-inspired piledriving instrumental sections, often pared down to 4 chords or so.Basically, the extreme end of power pop is the result (and why that term has been appropriated for the limp stylings of Todd Rundgren types is a mystery for another day) – tuneful melodies girded by titanic, galvanizing, and simple chord progressions/melodic bass work.On top of that, layer the sarcastic sense of humor behind lines like “It’s ok to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings” and to title a song “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”.And scream a lot, especially at the climax of the song (see Daltrey, Roger – "Won’t Get Fooled Again")
Nobody followed this template.Instead, everybody tried to copy Pearl Jam, whose music was also labeled grunge, but whose musical template was way, way different: mushy, complex interlocking guitar parts, chunky Neil Young-style chord progressions, a lot of acoustic/electric interplay. Longer songs, with more complex instrumental parts.Vocally, the incomparable Eddie Vedder, who I have come around on but once believed to be the worst vocalist in the entire universe.Like I said, I’ve come around, but Eddie influenced way more rock vocalists than Kurt did, namely in the following ways: heartfelt singing, without the sneer.Lyrics that reach for the mystical.Deep mumbling, with a whole lot of vowels.A distinct lack of irony.And, weirdly, ballads that are much, much more tuneful than the rockers (just compare the melodies of something like “Better Man” to something like “Why Go?”it’s not even a contest).
So, while Nirvana got all of the copy; admittedly, most probably because of the suicide, Pearl Jam had the influence.Nobody banged out albums of tuneful, sarcastic, 4 chord sledgehammer expressions of anger.Or, I should say, no one did that reached the top of the charts.Everybody released songs that sounded like Pearl Jam (Staind – "It’s Been Awhile", Seven Mary Three – whatever that song is, even Hootie and the Blowfish sounded like watered down Pearl Jam half the time – listen to "Let Her Cry" and tell me that couldn’t be a PJ song.The bands that achieved success in the post-grunge, pre-Backstreet radio days did so with songs that sound like Pearl Jam rips.It wasn’t until “Get Free” from the Vines came out that I realized it, because that was the first song I heard on the radio that sounded like a Nirvana rip-off.
The only band that sounded like they were actually influenced by Nirvana to me was Local H, a band that I hold dear to this very day.Only where Kurt’s pain was inviting, Scott Lucas’s was alienating in a way that Kurt just never could pull off, mostly because of that whole wounded baby bird thing.
Lucas, the songwriter/guitarist/semi-bassist/driving force behind the band, has a regular-guy practicality in lyrics and persona that lend the aggresive drive of Local H's music a bitter bite that Nirvana often deployed. Listening to the open, ringing phrasing of a song like PJ's "Daughter" or "Evenflow", what's notable is the claustrophic economy of the song. Where Eddie Vedder often writes in generalities, painting a feeling with images that's not always clear, and where Cobain often just strings together phrases for maximum frisson/impact, Lucas keeps his lyrics sharply trained on the objects of his wrath; which run the gamut from 1)himself to 2)other people.
"One more thing/before we go/stepped over everyone I know" goes the climax to "Fritz's Corner", a 3 line cocktail of triumph, rage, alienation, and guilt wedded to a supercharged pick scrape into that familiar 4 chord bludgeon. Sure, Nirvana did it first. But who else even attempted it?
Like others whose radio lives during high school/middle school were dominated by grunge and then the post-grunge smorgasbord (OMC - How Bizarre, because, well, why the hell not), the teen-pop boom that achieved absolute and sustained domination until Napster and file sharing sent the music industry cratering into rubble was an awesome and terrifying force to behold, definitely, but a distant one, like an exploding supernova way off in the universe. I was busy listening to Radiohead and waiting for Weezer to reunite, and pretty much cherry-picked what I thought was the best of the teen pop boom off of the rest of America's computers (O glorious Napster, I lament thee). I didn't have to endure the onslaught directly; I'm sure there are people just slightly younger than me for whom NSYNC was their NKOTB directly, as in, inescapably dominant and perhaps transcendently irritating, but me I observed from afar.
Imagine my delight, then, when the cream of the teen pop crop of singles turned out to be such a series of blissful peaks. I became (and remain) convinced that the finest singles of the early 2000s teen pop boom stand their ground with some of the finest teen pop singles of any era. Sure, Phil Spector's a sonic saint (though hardly a real life one), but I'd hold "Baby One More Time" up against half of his peak Ronettes output. The sonic trappings are different, sure, but both are defiantly maximalist for their respective eras, rearing back and slugging with the desparate haymaker force that comes from a true reaching for the stars on the backs of kids whose every moment is an epic writ large in their own minds. A parasitical enterprise, perhaps, but a devastatingly effective one.
With a little more research, then, I was awed by the fact that just as Spector's fingerprints are all over the '60s girl-group crime scene, one man had an equal impact on the best of the 2000s version - a certain Max Martin (given name: Karl Sandberg). The genius Swede absolutely owned the peak of machine-tooled 00s teen pop, and his empire didn't just stop there. Just read over the list of songs that the man wrote or co-wrote, and marvel at the magma-temperature hot streak:
Backstreet Boys: As Long as You Love Me Backstreet Boys: Everybody (Backstreet's Back) Backstreet Boys: I Want It That Way Britney Spears: "...Baby One More Time" Britney Spears: "Crazy" Britney Spears: "Oops I Did It Again" Bon Jovi: "It's My Life" Kelly Clarkson: "Since U Been Gone"
That's pop domination in 8 easy steps. My favorite part of the list is final song, a song so good that I remember an article in Spin or Entertainment Weekly or some such talking about how almost every musical notable couldn't stop talking about how good it was (I remember specifically Dave Grohl being really into it), and they are absolutely right. That song kicks ass. All of them do. I don't mean in an ironic fashion, I mean these are all great pop songs. But "Since U Been Gone" is something else entirely, and to me it really sums up the genius of Martin (and his co-writer, Dr. Luke). As they tell it, they were trying to write a Strokes song. They were frustrated that all of the Strokes songs never made the big rock move, or the big pop move, or whatever you want to call it. With a nod to Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it; it's the "Whoa-OOOH!" part of "Livin' on a Prayer", for easy reference. So they set out to write a Strokes song with a big rock move, and that was that. They did (hint: it's the beginning of the chorus, as it should be).
And what it really shows is that this guy is on another songwriting level from all of the bands that get venerated by the rock critics, and on another level from those that produce the tasteless pop that fades away after the sugar buzz wears off, because I would never argue that all pop music is great. Sometimes, obviously, it is spectacularly awful. But Martin basically said, OK all you Strokes/Vines/Datsuns/Yeah Yeah Yeahs/insert "rock is back" band here, I see what you're trying to do here, now let me DO MY THANG! And he wrote an anthemic stunner that everyone can agree is a)catchy as hell and b)a great rock song. And, more than that, it can be be karoaked to within an inch of its life, because of the cocktail of drive and energy that he melded to the usual big shiny hook. Plus it directly steals the bridge to "Maps", which is kind of shameful, but also kind of awesome. And in so doing he wrote a better song than the Strokes ever did, while performing the valuable service of reminding anyone with ears that the best songs, and the best bands, and the best songwriters, have at one time another just closed their eyes and tried to knock it out of the whole damn ballpark.
