I Bet Your Mama Was A Tent Show Queen
Consider, for a moment, the songwriting talents of the Rolling Stones, and the way in which their songs are almost always sabotaged by their lyrics. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t necessarily have a problem with lines like “I can’t get no girly action,” because , Hey! Who hasn’t felt that they, too, were lacking some “girly action” at some point in their lives? but think of the title of that particular song for a second: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It’s a song, in case you aren’t familiar with it, about not being able to get any satisfaction. Or, to use another example, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” It sounds wonderful – The music, the arrangement, everything about the song with the exception of the kids singing at the start which never ever sounds any good, it all sounds great. But then you listen to the lyrics and you realize it’s all about not getting what you want but occasionally getting what you need – A realization that comes when you reach the chorus that goes “You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.”
Worse yet, though, is “Brown Sugar.” At first blush, “Brown Sugar” is a step forward for the Stones – It’s not called “We’re talking about having sex with black women,” for one thing – and the first couplet of the chorus (ie, the bit that people always remember) has something that’s as close to subtlety as I think the Stones can get: “Oh, brown sugar! How come you taste so good?” sings Mick Jagger, before immediately ruining it by adding “Just like a young girl should.” Really, Mick? Really? You couldn’t just leave the heavy-handed metaphor there for people to unpack by themselves?
It’s things like this that make me wonder why people even wonder why there’s a question of whether the Stones are better than the Beatles. Both have good tunes, no question, but you always knew where you were with the Stones – There’s no room for interpretation or personal reading. Say whatever you want about the Beatles, at least they put some thought into their lyrics. How else could they come up with something as deep as “Yellow Submarine”?
You Are Working For The Joy Of Giving
There’s a scene in a relatively early Grant Morrison comic called St. Swithin’s Day where the protagonist, a self-declared “neurotic teenage outsider,” manages to forget his troubles in the middle of everything by putting on a Velvet Underground song – I forget which one, maybe “There She Goes Again”? – and surrenders to it, the way it makes him feel, the way it makes him lose his inhibitions and dance and everything else melts away in the perfectness of the music. Belle and Sebastian’s “Lazy Line Painter Jane” is that song, for me.
It’s not a perfect song, I know that, and they’re not a perfect band. For the longest time, they weren’t even a band I particularly liked – They seemed too twee, too affected, posing instead of honest, a band pretending to be a band, if that makes sense – and it’s taken me leaving Scotland and getting older to appreciate them more (There are many bands I can say the same about, oddly enough). But even when I didn’t really like Belle and Sebastian, I knew that I completely adored “Lazy Line Painter Jane”; from the very first listen, I found myself unable to listen to it without my heart swelling in size, touched by the gentleness and swooning at the organ and jangly guitar at the end, surprised and excited by the rawness of Monica Queen’s voice in comparison with everything else around it (Her first words, the way she sings them, still make my ears stand up even now, years later; it’s like she’s saying “Yeah, this is where the song really gets going”). It’s one of those songs that I could sing from start to finish, but the lyrics that stand out are the occasional lines that ring in my ears and brain as being… I don’t know, honest? kind? somewhere between there, perhaps (“Being a rebel’s fine, but you go all the way to being brutal,” “Boo to the business world,” or the entire “But you read in a book/That you got free in Boots/There are lotions, there are potions/That you can take, to hide your shame from all those prying eyes” section). It’s a song that feels true, for some reason.
With the benefit of age, nostalgia and wishful thinking, I think I’ve realized why I’ve always loved this song; without any reason or specific experience to back this up, “Lazy Line Painter Jane” feels like something that completely describes the experience of being young and optimistic about the world at a point where everything is still scary and new and possibilities are as worrying as they are exciting. But maybe that’s just me.
Built On Shifting Sands
There are many things to admire about Paul Weller. For one thing, there’s his haircut, which seems to have essentially stayed the same all throughout the years with only minor variations in length and color. For another, there’s his longevity, managing to stay something close to contemporary from his origins in the Jam, through the Style Council and then the solo career that crested the wave of Britpop and earned him the nickname of the Modfather. But what I really admire about the man is that he managed to recycle the same guitar riff into two different songs that I still actually like.
And the best part? It’s not even his riff. It’s not even, as many people have said, “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles – well, it is, but there’s something that’s even closer than that: It’s ELO:
Seriously, there’s something I genuinely love about the shamelessness of not only stealing from Jeff Lynne and getting away with it, but doing it twice and having both attempts be hit singles. No wonder that this era of Weller, the early Modfather days, is the one I love the most, the one I feel that all of his interests and talents came together, even in side projects like this:
It’s all just 1960s retro and Beatles love, of course, but… I don’t care. It’s what I would do, if I could play guitar and had such good hair.
On Saturday I Said My Goodbyes
Back when it was all happening, the Bluetones were one of those “also ran” Britpop bands. The ones who made the agreeable singles, but none that I felt were particularly noteworthy or exciting; I remember them most, from that era, because my friend Hannah loved them, and would make a point of playing me their singles when I’d be visiting her flat, trying to convince me that I should give them another try.
(That’s not to say that I didn’t like them; I did. I even owned “Slight Return” and “Cut Some Rug” as singles, even if I preferred the B-sides to both, because I was/am contrary like that.)
It took years, the death of Britpop and an unrequited something to get me to give them another chance. In an effort to spend more time with a friend whom I may or may not have had a crush on (I was never quite sure myself, to be honest), I agreed to go to a Bluetones gig one night, half-expecting disaster but found myself converted. Where, I wondered, had my brain been before? Sure, they may not have been the smartest, the sharpest or the funniest band of the era, but there was a solidity and sincerity to their songs that I had somehow missed before, and through the prisms of an enthusiastic Glaswegian crowd and heightened emotional somethings, that suddenly became enough to turn me around on their value.
These days, they’ve become this weird hybrid band – One that evokes some kind of second-hand nostalgia, for things that never happened and lives that weren’t lived, and also for the days when songs like this were ordinary enough to be ignored.
Right About Now: The Funk Soul Brother
Like most people of my age and nationality, I was a fan of Fatboy Slim. Along with the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim was the unofficial official choice for “dance music it was okay for Britpop fans to like,” most likely because the genre they invented/mined/made mainstream, Big Beat, was essentially making rock music with samplers and senses of humor (The more popular Slim got, the more oddly gimmicky and “wacky” his public persona got, it seemed. “Look! Here’s a fake dance troupe dancing to one of my songs! Here’s Christopher Walken!”) – no surprise, perhaps, considering that Fatboy Slim was actually Norman Cook, onetime member of sincere indie band the Housemartins, and someone who’d been trying his hardest to make dance music mainstream in various guises for years before Fatboy Slim broke through.
The official version of the Fatboy story has him as an underground success until the release of “The Rockerfeller Skank,” the first single from his second album, but that’s not the way I remember it at all; it was earlier (less mainstream) single “Going Out Of My Head” that I always thought made him a success, although I wasn’t convinced until someone – my roommate at the time, I think? – played me the B-Side, “Michael Jackson.”
From there, it suddenly seemed like he was everywhere: remixing anyone and everyone, releasing single after single as Fatboy Slim, songs used in advertisements or TV shows or playing in shops; stories about him in magazines and in tabloid newspapers, as he wooed a much-beloved radio personality. There was no escape, and the more I heard his stuff, the more 2-dimensional it sounded. It was all flash and surface and emotionally empty, muzak for a hyperactive audience, and I just kind of… stopped being interested.
That’s not to say I have no Fatboy Slim on my iPhone. But the few songs that are on there are novelties of nostalgia: Something I listen to when it comes up on shuffle and remember earlier, simpler times. They’re not something I’d listen to out’ve choice, when there’s so much more out there.
I Clap My Hands Along
I’ve become weirdly nostalgic for the TV show Later with Jools Holland lately, in part due to watching re-runs on Ovation TV over here in America. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s a (roughly) hour-long show wherein multiple musical acts of different genres and era perform live, each week – It’s not a particularly original format, but the choices of guests (and, in particular, the combination of, watching, say, Little Boots follow Eartha Kitt, who’s just herself followed Ladysmith Black Mombazo) and the performances make it required viewing. Even if it’s rare for an entire episode to keep my attention, it’s also rare for an episode to go by without me discovering a band or song I like, and didn’t know about before.
Here’re some examples of why I love the show so much:
(Dig Bernard rocking out at the end:)
Waiting By The Mailbox, By The Train
I know that I wrote about Gorillaz before Plastic Beach came out, but this album was genuinely one of maybe three good things that happened last week, and this song in particular something that I kept listening to, over and over again like a musical talisman. It reminds me of the “old” Damon Albarn, somehow – There’s something less affected, less distant about the song (The bit where he says, “And I just have to tell you that/I love you so much these days/I just have to tell you that/I love you so much these days/It’s true,” in particular, makes my eyes heavy and my heart swell with its bluntness and artlessness), but it’s not just that, it’s the mix of melancholy, optimism and, amongst it all, surrender that gets me. This song makes me want an album of duets between Albarn and Little Dragon singer Yukimi Nagano.
Greatest Hits
I had, for the longest time, this snobbery against “Best Of”s and “Greatest Hits” collections for bands and musicians; it was probably in some part brought on by the whole Britpop thing of, if you were really into a band, then you bought the singles and cared about the B-sides (Well, CD extra tracks, but you know what I mean) and that somehow made you a “real” fan in a way that someone who only knew a band from their greatest hits wasn’t. Similarly, perhaps, a feeling that any band who’s had a compilation album is past their prime and therefore ready to be retired and moved on in favor of someone more worthwhile of my time.
Looking back, of course, both those attitudes are ridiculous and, in many ways, an accident of youth. When I was moving to the US, I culled my music collection by burning CDs with only my favorite songs from the countless singles and albums I had, creating my own Best Ofs for the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Small Faces, and so on and so on. A lot of it was for practical reasons; I literally didn’t have the space to bring all of them, but there was also a sense of, “I don’t need to listen to half of these songs again, and I really don’t care about remembering which songs come from Hunky Dory and which from Low anymore.” I’m not sure whether that counts as maturing, or just getting older; there are times and bands for whom I miss that level of intensity and compulsiveness (Don’t get me started on the difference between the two versions of Gorillaz’ “Latin Simone” and why the original is better than the album version), as well as the fetishistic attitude towards albums as art objects, meant to be listened to as a complete and final thing instead of zipped about through iPod playlists, after all. But for everything else, “Greatest Hits” suit me just fine. As long as they don’t have to include the hits I never liked in the first place.
They Got Locks On The Gates
With all the buzz surrounding Gorillaz’ new album, Plastic Beach – buzz that I shamelessly added to over at io9 – it should probably come as no surprise that I’ve been listening to a lot of their old stuff (as well as their new; that NPR stream of Plastic Beach reveals that it’s another great one, and maybe one I like even more than Demon Days). While I liked the first album well enough, it was the second that made the project seem like something other than a half-baked Blur-a-like (The singles aside, Gorillaz is surprisingly light, I think). It was with Demon Days that the mix of pop, hip-hop and melancholy really came together to create something special, and on first listens, Plastic Beach does the same thing. It’s the last of those ingredients, the sadness and longing and (despite everything) hope that comes from the songs on the latter albums, that feels most important, most necessary to their Gorillaz-ness, for want of a better way of putting it.
I remember listening to Demon Days almost non-stop on the way to and from work, back when it came out. It was one of those albums that existed as a whole thing, not a collection of songs but something that started at the beginning and had to be listened to all the way through to the end (or, until I got off the N Judah; whichever came first). One of the reasons was that, hey, I was still listening to CDs for the most part back then and that’s how they worked, but it’s also because Days ends with a three-song-cycle that not only has to be heard altogether, but redeems the sadness and hopelessness of what came before; it’s impossible for me to get to “Demon Days” (the song) and not feel uplifted by the choir singing “To the sun” at the end, and there was something about that that brought closure to the listening experience.
Like Elliott Smith, Gorillaz’ music is the kind of thing I can listen to when I’m feeling down, and somehow feel better because of. It’s something I can’t explain, but am continually grateful for, especially when said music seems to appear at exactly the times when it’s needed.
