Everybody’s Rockin’

Catch up with the first incarnation of the series by following this link. 

Subscribe to the second volume of The Hurting Gazette, a free weekly newsletter available here, right now. Sign up today and catch up with the archives - subsequent weeks feature writing about Tina Turner, Heaven 17, the Cars, and Steely Dan. This week’s newsletter, when it ships tomorrow, will have a brand new essay about Jimi Hendrix. 

And remember, the newsletter also has all my links, anime recommendations, new fiction, Udder Madness updates, and even reader mail. It’s a blast. If that’s not enough, remember I got a Patreon too, because it is dark and the wolves are out there.

3. Bananarama - “Only Your Love”

Perhaps the greatest gift I gave myself across my fraught mid-thirties was an abiding love for Bananarama. On the precipice of a crossroads, vexed by the awareness of a looming dark night of the soul I saw a Bananarama record in the store. And my goodness, but don’t those ladies look like they’re having a good time!

It’s easy music to love, in small doses. Like cake frosting, almost. You think because it’s sweet it doesn’t have weight, but listen enough and you’ll hear. You get sick if you gorge. There’s a totalizing energy, the greater sum of those three voices singing in perfect unison atop a just slightly more ahead of the curve aesthetic than you might think. If you hadn’t been specifically looking. Somehow these women have absolutely impeccable punk credentials. Paul Cook gave them a place to live when they were living at the WCA, and that place to live just happened to be above the Sex Pistol’s old rehearsal space. If you know anything at all about Bananarama, it might just be that factoid. They named themselves after a line in a Roxy Music song. What if the post-punkers started a girl group?

     

And then there’s this number, “Only Your Love.” Released 1990. Produced by the bassist of Killing Joke, I shit you not. 

    

This absolutely unorthodox group of people somehow came together in an intentional parody of the girl group form and made it stick. First album, 1983’s Deep Sea Skiving, has a different mood entirely. It’s closer to that engagement with post punk than you might remember. Their first ever single was in Swahili - “Aie a Mwana.” Cover of a disco song from Belgium by a pan-African combo - Black Blood. That was 1981. Think about that in the context of what was happening musically at the time, what was being played on the charts, at least on that side of the pond. I’d rather listen to Bananarama than Public Image, Ltd. any day of the week.

     

And you can certainly say they sanded some of those edges off to achieve international pop stardom. No one disputes that. But the interesting thing is, even if came to sound just a bit more in tune with pop radio than the college chart, the group never quite lost the understanding that they were originally pressed from a different ore. Their music was confident, not without a hint of sass. They traveled in a pack and knew how to talk shit. Their presence as a trio of equals on the front of the stage cast an impressive profile in an era and a space dominated by solo pop divas.

     

So, first thing that jumps out at you about the track - doesn’t just jump out, absolutely throttles you - is that sample. Yep, jumps right out - “Loaded,” by Primal Scream. And you might hear the Stone Roses, “Fools Gold,” too. (“Funky Drummer is in there, as well, but you’d probably have an easier time finding a song from 1990 that didn’t have “Funky Drummer.”) “Only Your Love” was recorded in March of 1990 - “Fools Gold” dropped in late Fall of 1989, “Loaded” in February of ‘90. Of course the guy from Killing Joke was paying attention to what was, improbably, at that moment both very popular and very good. The guy from Killing Joke was a producer, incidentally, working under the name Youth, known to the government as Martin Glover.

     

Unfortunately, the fact that this song sounded so absolutely contemporary to an interesting moment in the pop history of the UK meant that the group was as good as saying goodbye to the American pop charts. Indeed, this song wasn’t even released as a single in the United States. The group would continue to have success in their native lands, but less so. 

     

In hindsight the inflection point was probably the change in personnel. The group started as a trio, forming in September 1980. I’m precisely as old as Bananarama. Sara Dallin and Karen Woodward knew each other first, then met Siobhan Fahey after they loved to London from Bristol. That’s where they fell in with one another, met Paul Cook, and began their improbable rise. The original trio was together eight years, after which point Fahey left. She later resurfaced as Shakespeare’s Sister. Dallin and Woodward found a replacement, Jacquie O’Sullivan, who lasted three years, through the recording of the Pop Life album for which this was recorded. O’Sullivan left after that, and ceding to the inevitable Bananarama have been a duo ever since, and as well never again troubled the conscience of the American listener.  

     

So was Pop Life a departure? Definitely. They were saying goodbye to the production team of Stock Aitken Waterman that had produced many the hits from their mid-80s commercial zenith. Eurobeat, such as it was, didn’t conquer the States but had a respectable run on the charts, thanks to the likes of Bananarama, as well as Kylie Minogue’s first American eruption. The “SAW” team were responsible for Rick Astley’s career, or at least the recording of that song you’ve heard so many more times than you ever expected. But, even as Eurobeat was a minority proposition in the States, it was still a legible sound. Going back to your roots, so to speak, checking back in to contemporary British post-punk with a trip to Madchester, that was not something that stood a ghost of a chance of stirring a pulse in the United States. The Stone Roses were a college band over here, for their sins. Music like that wasn’t getting played on the radio in this country.

     

My goodness, though, but that was definitely our loss. I don’t know if “Only Your Love” is even the best song on the album. Don’t get me wrong, “Only Your Love” comes out of those speakers like a house on fire, but “Tripping on Your Love” is a masterpiece. The girl group goes acid house, pure pop confection. One of the best dance pop songs of its era - sadly a fizzle in the UK, where the album as a while generally seemed to underperform. That single was released in 1991, and for once actually did better in the States, at least on the dance charts. It’s a great dance song, for what it’s worth. 

     

As pop songs go, “Only Your Love” is a real kick in the chops. Because, yes, I was being coy earlier, but it really does lead with that sample, right up front, big as shit. That takes chutzpah. It wasn’t the first song to get by with some chutzpah, the window was just at that moment beginning to close on that interesting moment when people were somehow sampling whatever the hell they wanted - KLF blazing the pop charts with the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” will do by way of example. That moment did not last very long, as most groups anywhere near as big as The Rolling Stones clamped down on the kind of casually transformative sampling that enabled Bananarama and the bassist from Killing Joke to sample “Sympathy for the Devil” for the pop charts, even down to those ragged “woo woos” we all know so well. They added a little piano, like a lot of dance songs are the time, just sort of going off in the background. There’s a breakdown towards the end where the group could easily have stuck some kind of guest rap, which was the move in 1990 on both sides of the Atlantic. Hell, they did it themselves on “Tripping on Your Love.” But no, they fill out the song with attitudinal taunts of “na na na na na na na,” a saucy call-and-response.

     

As a memory of a moment “Only Your Love” is a pop song that could only have ever existed at one place and in one time, the product of a band that may have been strained internally but still had an ear for a hook and the enormous swag to sell it. I believe the kids call it “rizz.” Go to your computers, right now, and watch the video for “Only Your Love.” That’s rizz, right there. 

     

Admittedly, three women in unison isn’t always the easiest sound to pull off. Familiarity with their catalog reveals a few instances where the approach struggled. But that’s no different than any band built around a certain kind of vocal style, just like like the Bee-Gees and their confounding male falsetto. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but when it works, well, damn. “Only Your Love” is the audio equivalent of getting hit by a train, if that train just happened to be conducted by three gorgeous women who probably weren’t taking the whole enterprise as seriously as you might think. That’s the only way the train ever left the station in the first place, after all. Tie me to the tracks.

Everybody’s Rockin’

Howdy, folks! We here at The Hurting are extraordinarily proud to once again embark on regular updates, beginning with the return of an old chestnut - Everybody’s Rockin’. (You can catch up with the first incarnation of the series by following this link.) The feature has been revived for the occasion of the second volume of The Hurting Gazette, a free weekly newsletter available here, right now. Sign up today and catch up with the archives - subsequent weeks feature writing about Bananarama, Tina Turner, and Heaven 17. This week’s newsletter, when it ships tomorrow, will have a brand new essay about The Cars. 

New installments of Everybody’s Rockin’ will appear here about a month after they appear in the newsletter, so if you like what you see here you can always go catch up on the newsletter archive. And remember, the newsletter also has all my links, anime recommendations, new installments of Jacqueline Thousand, Udder Madness updates, and even reader mail. It’s a blast. If that’s not enough, remember I got a Patreon too, because it’s a cold world, baby.

Phil Collins - “Sussudio”

Do you like Phil Collins? I’m serious. It’s a serious question.

I happen to like Phil Collins. Now, I should specify, I think Phil with Genesis is preferable, and I have a further preference for the 80s material. I’ve heard the early Genesis, yes, with and without Peter Gabriel. I have the box set, somewhere in the infinity of storage lockers. But, for all the prog bands that found chart success as pop acts in the 1980s - a surprisingly large list! Genesis always seemed the least grudging. They seemed to rather like writing songs for the radio, when they got around to it. 

     

In hindsight a natural progression. In the beginning they were certainly prog. And not just any prog, but among the very best, the utmost arch, with ambitions more pertaining to art school than Tolkien. Early Genesis had the advantage of being the incubator for Peter Gabriel. Despite both Peter Gabriel and Genesis enjoying extensive chart success in the decade after they broke up, their music together was the least outwardly commercial of their respective careers. And yet, after splitting, both parties gradually began to incorporate pop hooks and concision into their repertoire. “Solsbury Hill” hit the airwaves in 1977, Genesis’ “Follow You Follow Me” in 1978. A rare example of lead singer departing a band and both parties going in a poppier direction, just separately. In both cases their gradual blossoming as short form songwriters seemed freeing, in a way it rarely seems for established artists. You can argue the results, perhaps, but there’s no getting around the fact that Invisible Touch and So were released about a month apart in 1986. Both monumentally successful in an era defined by monumental successes, and proven as enduring as anything else from that era. And let’s not forget, Mike + the Mechanics also got in a few good licks in those very profitable years. They charted with a really spooky number, “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground).” Genuinely eerie. It feels very contemporary, if a little on the nose for the present moment.

     

In any event - what a remarkable group left turn for the arty bunch who did The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway!

     

Now, I liked Genesis the moment I heard them - this would have been the mid-80s, around Invisible Touch. Is that the first example of my tastes veering significantly from my parents? They didn’t hate Genesis, I just think they wondered why I did. They hadn’t cared one whit for prog, neither of them, and raised me listening to the music they did, simply by virtue of them being adults and having access to the car stereo. On reflection I don’t think my mother found Phil Collins’ voice a pleasant sensation. She quite liked Peter Gabriel, and so did I for that matter. But she didn’t care for Genesis. 

     

And if she didn’t care for Genesis you can just imagine what she thought of Phil Collins solo. Truth be told, I hadn’t given the solo material much airing myself. It doesn’t have the best reputation, in hindsight. Or at least, it didn’t - I realize I’m speaking in present tense by way of decades’-old critical consensus that may have itself evolved in the years since last I looked. It’s probable that the poptimists already rehabilitated our boy. 

    

“Sussudio” came out in 1985. Collins wouldn’t release another solo album until 1989, three years from Invisible Touch. Not that any lag time should have mattered. No Jacket Required sold twelve million copies, just in the United States. . . . But Seriously “only” sold four.

     

So - first of all, it’s not why we’re here necessarily, but “Take Me Home”? That’s a jam, right there. That’s what I got stuck in my head, prior to making the conscious choice to go listening to Collins’ hits. In hindsight, very contemporary of its era. In terms of the kind of club music being played in the clubs, or even college radio at that time, it’s not incompetent. It’s actually really good. Even if you hate the guy, you have to acknowledge: hand to the Bible, “Take Me Home” is a jam. How the hell did a guy like that figure it out?

     

How, indeed! And you’d not be wrong for thinking him about the most unlikely candidate to provide serious competition for the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna, during both of their commercial heydays. To say nothing of Prince, to whom Collins surely owed very much, as “Sussudio” demonstrates. In hindsight it seems like it must have been some kind of fluke of nature. At a certain moment in time a chemical reaction occurred in the brain of Phil Collins, mild mannered British musician, whereat he figured out precisely how to make a song he knew was going to get played on the radio and sell a lot of records. There’s a pleasantly workmanlike quality to those eighties records, perhaps also mistaken for insincere. Honestly, I think there has to be more than a little bit of awareness on his part as to that fact. Anyone that good at making a product that other people would find ingratiating enough to bring into their lives must also on some level cherish a small degree of contempt for that same audience. I learned that from Stan Lee. 

     

Solo Phil doesn’t care about producing something you’re going to want, or that you think you want. He figured out the trick to jumping straight to making something people like. Just that eagerness to please, leaping over preference to reflex, is disconcerting for many, I believe. Not everyone likes the sound of Phil Collins voice, so the fact that he proved uniquely gifted at writing very memorable songs is the source of no small enmity.

     

To be fair, I partially inherited this bias from a comic book. “Sussudio” is a punchline in Ambush Bug, specifically Son of Ambush Bug #1, where the song proves foul enough to flush the title character out of a bar. It’s a memorable gag. They’re right, of course. If you don’t like Phil Collins, it is a terrible song. Getting an annoying song stuck in your head is considered by many a fate worse than death. I’m pretty sure that’s why my mom never cared for him.

     

Now, me, I like Phil Collins. But even I had to peel back my ears to give this one a fresh airing. Did you know who did the horns for that song? If you already know, this isn’t for you, but I’m willing to bet at least a few of you don’t. They’re not programmed. They might sound programmed because they were both precise and very powerful, compressed to sound percussive coming out of cheap speakers. But that’s not a synthesizer, that’s the motherfucking Fenix Horns. You know, from motherfucking Earth, Wind, and Fire. Collins was working with a guy named David Frank, who would go on to have a discography as long as your arm in the world of R&B. Played synthesizers and keyboards. An extraordinarily talented support crew. 

     

But that 909 is credited to Collins. He knew how to drum and he also very clearly knew how to program a drum, which isn’t something you see very often. He knew what a beat should sound like. 

     

The song itself is about as much of a trifle as you could ever expect to see - there’s a girl that’s been on this guy’s mind, you see. He thinks about her all the time. Etc. You know the score. Her name is “Sussudio.” Of course, that’s probably not her real name. Probably just a cutesy nickname he has for someone who he knows very well, but who, we are told, doesn’t even know his name. 

     

All very unexceptional, as these things go. The stuff of rock & roll - no, the stuff of popular music since the dawn of time. I love a girl, she doesn’t love me, oldest story in the book.

What’s maybe not so expected is the willingness to play the schmuck. Sadly not an active participant in his own desires. A familiar and common, if under-discussed area of humiliation. Straight men aren’t supposed to know about yearning fruitlessly. That’s a secret. For lesbians.

     

Another treatment of a similar sensation - “Anything She Does,” from Invisible Touch. One of a handful of pop songs to touch on man’s relationship to their favorite pin-up model, a topic of no small pathos for many reasons profound and pathetic. A good song, a rocker on an album stuffed to the brim with good songs.

     

And that’s where we’re left with Mr. Collins. A guy who put out albums stuffed to the brim with good songs at a fair clip for many years. Just knew how to do it, just like you or I might know how to trim a hedge or bake a chicken. Someone who played drums for a prog band in the early 70s. Genesis wasn’t his first band. He wasn’t even the first drummer Genesis had. He had to audition for the gig. Can you imagine such a thing! Such is history, to pivot on such formalities. 

Everybody’s Rockin’

Howdy, folks! We here at The Hurting are extraordinarily proud to once again embark on regular updates, beginning with the return of an old chestnut - Everybody’s Rockin’. (You can catch up with the first incarnation of the series by following this link.) The feature has been revived for the occasion of the second volume of The Hurting Gazette, a free weekly newsletter available here, right now. Sign up today and catch up with the archives - subsequent weeks feature writing about Phil Collins, Bananarama, and Tina Turner. This week’s newsletter, when it ships tomorrow, will have a brand new essay about Heaven 17. 

So, we’ve already got a nice stockpile. New installments of Everybody’s Rockin’ will appear here about a month after they appear in the newsletter, so if you like what you see here you can always go catch up on the newsletter archive. And remember, the newsletter also has all my links, anime recommendations, new installments of Jacqueline Thousand, Udder Madness updates, and even reader mail. It’s a blast. If that’s not enough, remember I got a Patreon too, and much like the city, it cries for vengeance. 

Introduction; The Bee-Gees - “Jive Talkin’”

I have spent my life for many years in vacation from myself, a sorely lamentable set of circumstances that restricted my every choice and deed for half a decade. What’s more, this period of struggle was itself preceded by an era of intellectual rigor and subsequent nervous breakdown that left me in little shape to read anything or listen to any music other than what I already knew well.

     

The situation was, in essence, that the portion of my brain responsible for processing new sensations was almost completely quiescent, as I simply didn’t have the emotional or intellectual bandwidth to concentrate on anything whatsoever. I didn’t even read very many comics during the period, only whatever I wrote about for the Journal. As the period continued, I gradually began to stir my faculties, enough for at least a renewed engagement with comics. It was, I reasoned, that factor in my life in which I had so far achieved the most lasting success. I have a bit of notoriety, a steady gig that actually pays a little, the goodwill of a fair percentage of the community. Those aren’t things to take for granted. Whatever I build from this point forward, if anything, has to be on that foundation.

However, I have lived many lives. 

     

In another time and another place I wrote a great deal about music. In truth, I believe I wrote too much about music, because I burnt out by writing as much as I did. I burnt a lot of bridges when I flamed out of music writing. No defense. Simply fell apart in a lot of arenas of my life around that time. Not a good time in my life, in hindsight. Music writing had become a burden, but literally everything had become a burden. That’s when I left the Journal, as well.

     

Once upon a time I greatly enjoyed it. I was knowledgeable about some things, could do my research on others. Learned an incredible amount about music by being open minded at a semi-professional level. But I did too much of it. It made me hate a lot of things about music. 

     

I do miss getting free stuff, not going to lie. But I’m sure it’s all digital these days. I’m still on a great many music promotions mailing lists that never update or purge, however, so every now and again I get a sneak of something I enjoy. A nice little present from another time in my life, perhaps. 

     

(They never purge: I’m still on promo lists, I’m pretty sure, dating back to when I did college radio. I haven’t done college radio in almost twenty years. It was a big part of my life for a surprisingly long period of time, and frankly I do miss it.) 

     

Over the subsequent years I continued to write about music, but never new music, and only on my blog. I don’t know how many of my readers cared about me talking about Daft Punk’s Homework - twice! I was so out of it I wrote the same article twice, years apart! But that I did. Wrote a whole booklet’s worth of essays about They Might Be Giant’s premillennial output - it’s available as an ebook on the ol’ Patreon - Whistling in the Dark - A (Very) Short Book About They Might Be Giants. Wrote about Fleetwood Mac and Fatboy Slim. 

     

I also started a series. It actually made it to four whole essays, which - long time readers of the blog should remember - was a rarity for me. I always trailed off from ambitious essay series I’d start. I’m sure it was frustrating for readers - how do you think it felt for me? But I made it through four essays under the rubric Everybody’s Rockin’. Wrote about Nine Inch Nails, The Beatles, Pavement, Kanye - it was another world, in so many ways, believe me! But, that notwithstanding, I really enjoyed writing those essays and had every intention of doing more, but for the fact that they were written during a period of my life in which I had no ability to follow through on anything at all. 

     

And as these years have progressed I have moved further away from a steady engagement with new music. That’s not who I ever wanted to be. But I simply didn’t have it in me to do anything else. It was a source of great unease at the time, to be frank - I remember admonishing myself, that I really needed to listen to newer music than the same old stuff. But it apparently takes effort to learn new things. The bandwidth was full.  

   

But I know that has to change, and I’ve been taking steps to reengage. I find I don’t have a lot of occasion to listen to music, but I should probably change that. I never wear my headphones in this house. I need to be aware of what the cats are doing at all times for so long as Rodger treats his poor brother like open sport, is the truth of the matter.

     

It was in this spirit that, on a particular peevish errand one bitter hot morning I found myself flipping to the Essential Bee-Gees playlist. Now, as a rule, I can’t stand the Bee-Gees. I’m sorry if that renders me a cultureless cretin in your eyes, I just don’t find their voices pleasant. Their brand of male falsetto strikes me almost like a bird call. Someone upset that poor bird.

     

And yet, the other day I happened to hear a song - a song which, I assure you, I had heard many times before in my life, even if rarely registering it over the level of supermarket loudspeaker, or the occasional afternoon’s dive on the oldie’s station - called “Jive Talkin’.” And let me tell you something about this song - hear it once, and you’re gone. You have that drumbeat in your head for the rest of the day, and that inconceivable keyboard fake outro. The most asinine little melody that you probably know by heart. Because, even if you hate the Bee-Gees, you have heard that song and that keyboard outro many, many times in your life.

     

Anyway. I was just trying to give myself something to think about other than the aforementioned peevish errand. So I pulled up the song and actually listened to it. For real listened to it. And you know, it really is a little miracle. You think it’s a slick disco number, because you’ve only heard it over shitty supermarket speakers, or not for years otherwise. But if you listen to the song, for real, it’s not overproduced at all. It’s not a slick disco song. It’s a funk song. Stripped down, too. Whatever the hell those boys are singing about, the drummer’s getting it done. I just checked and its a man named Dennis Byron. Welsh fellow. I guess they know how to funk in Wales. 

     

It’s actually kind of simple, when you break it down. Not a lot of frills. Clean, of course, but that just meant you could hear everything pretty well. Got a kind of nasty baseline, in a polite sort of way. If you’re not careful, you might mistake the opening percussive guitar for Stevie Ray Vaughan’s intro to “Modern Love” eight years later. Can’t say Bowie didn’t nick a trick himself. The sound James Murphy devoted his life to trying to replicate in a laboratory.

     

But then, there’re those weird dudes. The brothers. An uncanny bunch. Knew from a young age, apparently, that they were going to be professional musicians, and set about a lifetime of chasing trends. I say that with affection, mind. Trend chasing has a bad rap, but only because its usually a sign of desperation or inauthenticity, a break from the norm as opposed to the whole deal. It usually doesn’t work. But the thing about chasing a trend is sometimes you can actually catch it. The Bee-Gee’s made a long and fruitful career out of trying to figure out what people wanted to hear. No bones about it, heart on their sleeve they wanted to get their albums played on the radio and to sell records and all that jazz. Very authentically ingratiating about wanting to be popular. That doesn’t make them cool, just makes them people who wrote a handful of songs you know by heart even if you hate them with a burning passion. That’s not nothing. And it doesn’t mean they haven’t also been residents of the uncanny valley since before anyone knew what the uncanny valley was. 

     

When was the last time you listened to “New York Mining Disaster 1941”? That’s a weird song! Dark and sparse, for its time. You can hear Mark E. Smith clearing his throat in the parking lot. From an album described as the Bee-Gee’s Sgt Pepper. The Bee-Gee’s were around long enough to have done a Sgt. Pepper. Then they spent some time in the wilderness after their 60s success, and got hungry for a hit. They went from that depressing jangle-folk with sort of a nervy undercurrent to a pretty funky dance band in the space of about eight years. To do that, and not fall on your face takes agility and ability both, I have to acknowledge even if I am lukewarm on many of the results. There’s something almost refreshing about that attitude towards music: oh, yes, we just want to make something people are going to like. Lots of people, not just whoever liked our last thing. What are people listening to now? 

     

To be fair, by 1975 there weren’t many people interested in what the Bee-Gees were doing. They weren’t clicking with anyone, until they went to America and discovered The Meters. But they did, and it worked. Wouldn’t probably have worked for anyone else, but somehow it worked for them. 

     

I found myself returning to another song as well, a weird choice but a melody that got lodged in my brain. This despite it being not very good: “You Win Again.” You probably don’t remember it. Very representative early 90s adult contemporary, in most respects. Gloopy synthesizers up the wazoo.

     

There’s never been a time for adult contemporary like the 1990s. All the old rock stars from previous decades graduated to generic soft rock pop records that sold like crazy. There were some younger acts in there, too, but it was still squarely aimed for the middle-age demographic. Bowie, for all his many achievements, never had a big adult contemporary hit. Never even strayed a toe in that direction, even though he almost certainly could have made a lot of bank on an album that sounded like everything else on the radio. Occasionally a real gem snuck through, of course, even given those strictures. “Constant Craving” got played on a lot of adult contemporary stations. In terms of production and ubiquity, if not subject matter, it was an exemplar of the form.

     

I couldn’t tell you what “You Win Again” is about - the boys sound like they’re having a very one-sided conversation. And yet somehow that melody just lopes through your head like a baby elephant. It’s the damnedest thing. Doesn’t look like it did that well in America, but they did still chart a couple more hits in the coming years. On records that sound very contemporary to their times, for better or for worse. Oh look, the music boys are back.

Midweek Mixes

On the Floor of the Boutique, Vol. 1
Mixed by Fatboy Slim

In the rush to write premature obituaries for the compact disc, more than a few important things carry the risk of being forgotten. Like any medium the CD has its share of weaknesses, but more than a few strengths as well. (This is opposed to the cassette, whose only real strengths at the time were its size, portability, and recordability, the first two eventually eclipsed by smaller and more portable formats with far greater fidelity, and the third finally superseded by the spread of CD burners at the tail end of the nineties.) The CD had the advantage over cassettes in terms of fidelity and longevity (tape fidelity decreased with every play), and over vinyl in terms of length, size, and again, longevity. The question of fidelity in regards to compact disc sound quality in relation to vinyl is complicated by a number of factors, some of which are simply too technical for all but the most committed audiophiles. But for many listeners, the "warmth" and "personality" (grating pops and clicks) they ascribe to vinyl is actually distortion based on old media and poor equipment. A new vinyl record pressed from analog master tapes is indeed excellent, but will degrade every time it is played and requires expensive equipment to be properly appreciated.

Not so for the humble CD. I can go to my closet and pull out a twenty-year old CD and it will sound the same - just as good or bad as its mastering - as the day I bought it, even if I've played it every day in the intervening time. I don't need a particularly elborate piece of equipment to enjoy the sound. I don't own an expensive stereo, which surprises some people. I listen to music on my computer or in the car, or on headphones. Contrary to what someone like Neil Young would have you believe, humans do not possess super ears. There are only so many frequencies we can hear, and any attempt to increase fidelity beyond these frequencies is quixotic, unless your goal is to play Steely Dan for your dog.

The story goes (possibly apocryphal, but it's too good to let go) that the reason why early CDs were 74 minutes long was so that one disc could hold the entirety of Beethoven's 9th. The length was soon expanded to 80 minutes when engineers figured out there was another six minutes to be had on the disc's surface. What is important here is that I think - and perhaps this is just me - 80 minutes is probably the upper limit for most peoples' attention span when it comes to sitting down and listening to any single piece of music. Maybe it's because we've been conditioned by the length of the CD to think so, but 80 minutes is a long time. Long enough for a medium-length car ride. Long enough for most symphonies. Anything longer and you need an intermission.

Mix CDs popped up in the mid-90s as a response to the growing popularity of electronic music, and particularly the rise of celebrity DJ culture. Any faceless producer could compile an anthology, but only a DJ could make a mix. It's an odd phenomenon, on its face: you're buying a CD by an artist composed primarily of other peoples' songs. You're making an investment in the curatorial instincts of a disc jockey. Maybe it was a live recording of a night out, complete with flubbed transitions and crowd noises, maybe it was a studio creation precisely constructed on Pro Tools. Maybe, like Kiss Alive, it was a clever amalgam of both approaches. While a few pioneering electronic acts had always performed live, for most DJs and producers the DJ mix was the closest they could get to an actual live album, a relatively easy revenue stream rock and pop acts had been exploiting since 1963 when James Brown dropped Live at the Apollo. (The Orb's double album Live 93 was an early outlier, as a "live" album by an electronic act, something many at the time mistakenly believed to be a contradiction in terms. The Orb, being the Orb, had some fun with the idea.)

1998 was a good year for Fatboy Slim. You've Come A Long Way, Baby was the kind of pop crossover album American record companies had found somewhat elusive in the midst of the "electronica" push of 1997, which yielded only two real superstar releases (The Prodigy's Fat of the Land and Madonna's Ray of Light), alongside a number of respectable-if-not-blockbuster imports like the Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk. Much of America was perfectly comfortable accepting house and techno as the new default soundtrack for video games and movie trailers, but for most artists that did not translate into sales. Fatboy Slim was the nom de guerre of former Housemartins bassist Norman Cook, who had made a career for himself in the early part of the 90s as a remixer and house music producer using a number of aliases such as Pizzaman and the Mighty Dub Cats. On paper, Fatboy Slim was just another in a long line of disguises for Cook, one concocted for the specific purpose of producing music in the style of the newly ascendant "big beat" genre, a stupid name that was essentially invented to describe the peculiar hybrid of acid house and hip-hop pioneered by the Chemical Brothers on their 1995 album Exit Planet Dusk. (Fatboy Slim's first album was called, appropriately, Better Living Through Chemistry.) The Chems' sound was expansive, stylistically catholic, and defined by a potential for pop crossover.

The "problem" for Cook, if it can be called that, is that Fatboy Slim soon became a lot more famous than any of his other aliases. Fatboy Slim was in reality an modest and slightly goofy guy who was far more comfortable hiding behind the decks in a DJ both than on center stage. "Fatboy Slim" didn't exist, and this tension was obvious from the fact that Cook continued to produce remixes and occasionally perform under his real name at the peak of Fatboy Slim's popularity. There was, to be fair, no indication that You've Come A Long Way, Baby would be as popular as it became, but for a while there it was simply ubiquitous. You couldn't throw a stone in a movie theater in 1999 without hitting a movie that either used a Fatboy Slim song in the trailer or prominently on their soundtrack. "The Rockafeller Skank" was a weird anthem for a dance craze that never existed, but for a solid year the song was everywhere. You probably still remember the hook.

But before You've Come A Long Way, Baby, Cook dropped On the Floor of the Boutique. The Big Beat Boutique was the house club for Brighton-based Skint records, Fatboy Slim's label. The On the Floor of the Boutique series tapped out after two more entries, one by big-beat also-rans the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars and a third by label head Damian Harris under the name Midfield General. Both are good - I listen to the second disc a lot more than I've ever actually listened to the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars' actual albums, for instance - but the first release is the best.

Like any mixtape, different mix CDs are designed for different purposes. Some are more intimate affairs, some educational. On the Floor of the Boutique represents, with eighteen years' hindsight, a kind of historical artifact - anyone wanting to understand the "big-beat" sound outside the context of Chemical Brothers albums could do a lot worse. Skint mainstays like Cut La Roc and the unjustly forgotten Hardknox show up, alongside a pair of Fatboy Slim tracks (the excellent "Michael Jackson" and, of course, "The Rockafeller Skank" at the disc's climax). But there's also a bit of history, beginning with Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache," one of the most frequently sampled songs in the history of hip-hop, similarly important to the industrial and hip-house sounds that converged in "big beat." The Jungle Brothers show up with a remix of their 1988 track "Because I Got It Like That," a welcome inclusion that also highlights the debt owed by contemporaneous British electronic music to late 80s and early 90s hip-hop, particularly Public Enemy and the Native Tongues groups.

More importantly, though, it's just a good mix. Listening to it again in preparation for this I was reminded again of just why I played the album so many times back in the day. Although it wasn't released in the United States until 1999, I ordered it from the UK soon after its release, as one of my first orders from Amazon.com. (I don't think it was my first order, but it's impossible to know since I can't see any records of Amazon purchases before 2007.) Like most good dance music, it's a great CD for driving.

A good DJ functions not just as a curator but as a master of ceremonies as well. Even if you're just sitting at home listening to the disc on your computer, it's designed to approximate the experience of enjoying a crowded night out on the dancefloor. I've never enjoyed dancing even though I love dance music - weird, I know - but I have seen Cook DJ once, at the height of his popularity in 1999. He knows how a night at the club should operate. Not every track can be a climactic banger. You build to multiple peaks over the course of a set. "Michael Jackson" comes in at about a third of the way through the disc, and serves as the disc first climax before dropping down into a more reserved mode with DJ Tonka's "Phun-Ky." There's another climax about twenty minutes later with the transition of Aldo Bender's "Acid Enlightenment" into Hardknox's brutal "Psychopath," before falling down again in anticipation of building into the one-two climax of Cut La Roc's "Post Punk Progression" segueing into "The Rockafeller Skank." More than just a live memento or a compilation of good tracks, this is textbook example of how a good DJ maintains the ebb-and-flow of a live dancefloor in real time.

With CDs on the outs and many music consumers either regressing into vinyl fetishism or wholly embracing digital (hope your music doesn't disappear when the cloud drifts away!), the poor mix CD has become something of an afterthought. Just like the album itself, people still make them and people still buy them. But the format is a poor fit for the digital age, where segued tracks in a single mix can't be easily extracted or incorporated into shuffle settings. Listening to a DJ mix requires patience, the conscious decision to sit down and listen to one thing for over an hour. Sometimes, though, it's worth the effort.

Availability: Even though I paid like $20 for an import back in the day you can probably find this for under $5 if you have a decent used CD store near you.

Everybody's Rocking

Kanye West - "Slow Jamz (Feat. Twista & Jamie Foxx)" (The College Dropout, 2004)



I went through a Kanye West phase a few months back. I realized one day that although I had 808s and Heartbreaks, My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy, and especially Yeezus damn near committed to memory, I really didn't know his first three albums at all. (Fun story: I live with someone for whom Yeezus is one of their favorite albums - even though she's not usually a hip-hop person, for something like six months running that was her default car listening music. So I'm kind of sick of it now.) My excuse is simply that, from my perspective, 2004 was a pretty weak year, in the middle of a pretty weak period for commercial hip-hop.

This isn't any reflection of the what was actually happening in rap, but an admission that for the most part I tend to be an unimaginative hip-hop listener. I can point to The Roots' Tipping Point as one of my favorite albums from that year (I know it might seem strange, but in many ways I prefer The Tipping Point even to Things Fall Apart, even if I also acknowledge that Phrenology is probably the superior album to both). That was the year Madvillainy dropped. Ghostface released the fairly tepid Pretty Toney. Outkast and Jay-Z were still riding high off late-2003 blockbusters. Other than the artists I already followed, what I heard was 50 Cent, G-Unit, and a thousand clones of the same. I worked at the children's residential facility during the height of 50's dominance and that's the dominant memory I have of that era of hip-hop: a bunch of developmentally-challenged and mentally ill children putting pictures of 50 on their walls because he was the best masculine role model a group of disadvantaged orphans could find.

Given that, can you understand how someone with very little investment in contemporaneous hip-hop - and, let's be frank, very white buying habits - could have completely slept on Kanye West? I just wasn't paying attention, but I knew enough about hip-hop history to know that there are few less promising sales pitches than that of a well-respected hitmaker producer deciding to be a rapper and dropping a solo album. (I used to know a guy who was obsessed with Jermaine Dupri, which, you know, I guess there had to be one.) Sure enough The College Dropout spawned a few biggish singles, but nothing that stuck out to me at the time. But instead of putting out a medium-hot album and disappearing (which is how these things often work), he came out with another album a year and a half later, and in the context of a less crowded hip-hop scene this one made a much bigger imprint. This was due in large part to "Gold Digger," which was everywhere for approximately half a year back in the dark days of George W. Bush's second term. But not only was the song itself inescapable, but the controversy following Kanye's (completely justified) outburst at the aforementioned George W. Bush during the Hurricane Katrina television benefit catapulted the man from being a star to being, well, Kanye.

It wasn't possible to ignore Kanye after 2005, but it didn't necessarily follow that I immediately came around. I thought "Gold Digger" was pretty noxious and patently misogynistic (which it still is, to be fair). His follow-up, the similarly-huge Graduation, made the further mistake of sampling Daft Punk on "Stronger," which I dismissed out of hand. he was hitting for the bleachers now - touring with U2 made him want to be a rock star, and he was already playing on a bigger canvas than just about anyone else on the pop music scene at the time. And, all things considered, I would have been perfectly happy to continue ignoring him if he had continued producing ubiquitous pop crossover hits and working with pander-bears like Adam Levine and Chris Martin. But you all know what happened next.

And this, for me, is the embarrassing part, at least in hindsight. There's a stereotype of the male white amateur/semi-pro rock critic (which, never forget, I was for a long time) that I sometimes still find myself falling into - rockism, for lack of a better or less loaded term. I couldn't come around to Kanye until he started producing "interesting" music, i.e., conceptually and musically "weird" in a way that "mere" mainstream hip-hop could never, or only very rarely, be. These were purely knee-jerk responses ingrained by decades of listening to and reading and writing about pop music with a very specific set of cultural blinders. Rock and roll was the dominant paradigm in pop music - or, to put it another way, rock was perceived to be the dominant paradigm in pop music - for so long that many could not recognize when the paradigm had passed.

Because it has passed, and the acknowledgement can't help but come as a bitter pill for anyone who ever bought into the myth of rock and roll as a universal, totalizing cultural force - as opposed to a cultural expression of a very specific time and place in history, primarily championed by a very specific demographic. I've spent a lot of time trying to work past these prejudices over the last few years. Teaching a class on aesthetics over the past year has done a lot for me in terms of breaking some of the most reflexive habits of rockist thinking. The majority of my students don't listen to rock, and furthermore do not have good associations with the genre because of the perception that it is the province of pissy upper-middle-class white people. Which is untrue, but . . . in the year 2014 not not true, either.

When I first heard "Love Lockdown" I immediately knew that this was something really interesting and really different. The individual elements that made up the song were familiar - the minimal Kompakt techno throb, the tribal drums breaking in the middle of the song, Kanye's auto-tuned Sprechgesang - but the way he put them together were new. The raw emotionalism was also novel, at least in the context of mainstream hip-hop waking up from its decades-long superthug hangover. People didn't know how to metabolize this at first - I remember 808s & Heartbreaks received a lot of mixed and confused reviews when it came out. But sure enough, in a year or two everyone wanted to sound like Kanye on "Heartless," and futuristic R&B was the vanguard genre in pop music for a good couple years after.

So I became a Kanye fan, and when My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy hit, it was perfectly calculated to tickle all the old-school rock critic soft spots - ambition, conceptual heft, songs poking up near the ten minute mark, even more of 808s self-excoriating lyrical content. Kanye was obviously making a capital-"S" Statement, no longer aiming for Illmatic and Reasonable Doubt, but Exile on Main Street, Dark Side of the Moon, and Sign O' The Times. And we all ate it up, even if Kanye's commercial fortunes had begun to falter with 808s. Yeezus marked an even greater departure - if My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy had represented the logical apotheosis of all the strains of Kanye's music up to that time, Yeezus was the sound of Kanye throwing everything in the shredder and listening to German techno and Chicago drill. It was Low, Metal Machine Music, and Prince's Black Album all rolled into one. Kanye's still playing the game: in interviews he's made explicit comparisons to Springsteen, calling Yeezus his Nebraska, and likening his forthcoming album to Born in the U.S.A. If he follows through on this promise, his critical dominance will continue apace.

With this context, going back to Kanye's early albums - particularly The College Dropout - was something of a revelation. I had heard the singles but hadn't paid them any attention. If I had bothered to listen to the albums themselves I would have seen that all the most interesting facets of later Kanye - not least of which the aforementioned, cliched "ambition" - was there from the beginning. He had a personal narrative from the start, starting with "Through the Wire" and onto "Jesus Walks," that set him apart from just about everyone else. He was doing something different which stands out even in the context of ten years of subsequent Kanye West music.

But all of that goes under the rubric of hindsight - slotting individual albums into the narrative of a larger career trajectory influenced by the standard artistic precedents that every pop critic carries around in their heads. That's a tempting and in some ways still efficient shorthand for understanding artistic evolution in pop music, but also essentially misleading. Even though Kanye himself would appear to invite these comparisons, they're reductive. He almost certainly does it, at least in part, to flatter the imaginations of music writers: he knows full well that getting the critics on your side is the best way to ensure career longevity, even if sales waver. Yeezus was his worst-selling album by a wide margin, and yet it was also arguably his most discussed.

The point is, Kanye doesn't need the hindsight. He emerged fully-formed, and only those who were willing to dismiss him on the basis of his genre - that is, mainstream, commercial, popular hip-hop - could possibly have missed what was going on. And it's not just the personal storytelling on "Through the Wire," or the ballsy religious turn on "Jesus Walks" - both of which I had heard and gave tacit approval, even if it took me a long time to really appreciate them. No, I think the best song on The College Dropout was also the biggest single, and the most baldly commercial song on the album - "Slow Jamz." (It was technically first released as a Twista song in late 2003, but really, Kanye is in complete control from the very beginning.)

It's a masterpiece of production and composition. It's just over five minutes long but packs in more ideas than most albums. It's a song with no less than three featured artists and a prominent vocal sample from Luther Vandross. (It's been so long since I've paid any attention to early Kanye production that the sped-up Vandross sample sounded for the life of me like a woman's voice. Isn't it amazing how at one time that was his primary gimmick, but you don't even notice it anymore?) Jamie Foxx actually carries the bulk of the song. I was about to say that he sings the chorus, but the funny thing about this song is that it's actually all chorus - there's no standard verse-chorus-verse structure. The whole thing is built on the same repeating loop that escalates into the same descending bass figure like clockwork every ten seconds or so. Even though, technically, the chorus is Foxx's "She wants some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross . . ." section, musically, the chorus is the same as the verse structure. Kanye knows the hook, and he knows not to bury the lede - especially at a time when any misstep could have cost him his nascent career.

Foxx's voice is the glue that holds the song together, with Kanye's verse followed by Twista. (Best Kanye line, obviously: "She's got a white-skinned friend looks like Michael Jackson / Got a dark-skinned friend looks like Michael Jackson.") Everything fits together perfectly: the three vocalists create a sense of place as well as a consistent tone. It feels like a party. This is a club track - but just a bit ironically, it actually has a pretty frenetic beat, contrary to the song's stated purpose of providing a "slow jam." Way back in the late 90s and early 00s, the idea of doing pop crossover hits with hip-hop and R&B elements was a bit controversial - that's one way Ja Rule turned himself into the Richard Gere of hardcore hip-hop, after all. (Well, that and getting on the collected bad side of Eminem, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, and just about every other person in hip-hop.) But Ja Rule actually serves as an object lesson in the way rap has changed in the last decade or so, and how Kanye was instrumental in bringing this change about. The moment Graduation outsold Curtis it was clear that there was a new paradigm, and it no longer mattered if a rapper did R&B crossovers, or slow jams for the ladies, or wore a giant teddy bear costume. Pretty soon it wouldn't matter if rappers sang on their records, or sampled 70s prog rock, or made fantastically indulgent videos with their topless white wives riding a motorcycle in front of a greenscreen. Drake still gets some flack for being soft, but that didn't stop him from having a Wu-Tang posse cut on his last LP.

Musically, "Slow Jamz" is one of Kanye's most complex constructions - the only real peers it has in this regard are "All of the Lights" and "Lost in the World," both off My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy. No one in the world of pop music can do this quite like he can. The fact that he someone avoided getting lost in the wilderness of technique and knew when to step back and punk it up is all the more impressive, considering that the follow-up to My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy could easily have been an even more complex, layered, and demanding work - which is was, but in a completely different way than anything that had preceded it or anyone was expecting.

So, yeah - Kanye is pretty impressive. It took me a while to come around to that, and part of the journey for me was figuring out how to listen past my previous dismissals. "Slow Jamz" is one of the most brilliant songs I've ever heard, and I offer no excuse for taking so long to realize something so obvious.

---

When I went through my Kanye thing a few months back, I put together a "Best of Kanye" CD-R for listening in the car. This was hard! In just over a decade he has amassed a pretty impressive body of work. I dismissed anything with Adam Levine or Chris Martin, even if they had been popular - sorry, folks. (For what its worth, he doesn't need the crossover gestures anymore - instead of crossing over to pop, pop has essentially crossed over to him.) I didn't find anything on Cruel Summer - a pretty lame disc. But I picked the hits, and the highlights, even though there were a number of close cuts, as you can probably tell. Overall this turned out to be a preternaturally solid disc that stayed in rotation in my automobile for a good few weeks.

Best of West

1. Through the Wire
2. Slow Jamz
3. Jesus Walks
4. Touch the Sky
5. Gold Digger
6. Diamonds from Sierra Leone
7. Can't Tell Me Nothing
8. Stronger
9. Flashing Lights
10. Love Lockdown
11. Heartless
12. Power
13. All of the Lights
14. Runaway
15. Otis (with Jay-Z)
16. Ni**as in Paris (with Jay-Z)
17. New Slaves
18. Bound 2

Everybody's Rocking

Pavement - "Unfair" (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, 1994)



I didn't get into Pavement until a few years after the band broke up. When Pavement were at their height I was as far away from indie rock as possible, and it's only in hindsight that I've been able to go back and reconstruct genealogies for the period. It doesn't help that the only people I knew who listened to Pavement when Pavement were popular were rural California coke dealers, which is the most bust-ass type of coke dealer you can possibly imagine.

So by the time I first heard Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain the album had already been elevated to it's lofty position in the canon, where it has perched comfortably ever since. While Slanted & Enchanted may take pride of place for being first, and in recent years Wowee Zowee may have superseded Crooked Rain in parts of the critical cognoscenti (because, of course, it's the difficult third album, not the accessible commercial breakthrough attempt), I still believe I can say that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is the band's finest moment. It's one of those albums that appears precision engineered to be a classic, without any of the calculation that label implies. It just works from the opening salvo of detuned guitars and drum thwacks, to the way Malkmus' voice trails off at the end of "FIllmore Jive," mid-sentence ("their throats . . . are filled . . . with . . ."), every moment seems completely indispensable while somehow at the same time completely contingent. All the normal slacker cliches apply: they sound lazy, unmotivated, sometimes willfully obscure - but that's a lie the band tells to cover for the fact that everything is firmly in its right place. Every snarl of clumsy feedback and offbeat drum fill sounds exactly the way it needs to sound, chaos very precisely marshaled to maximum effect.

Malkmus had a plan, and that plan was partly to strip-mine R.E.M.'s Reckoning. He admitted as much in a 2001 essay on R.E.M.'s second album for Q magazine, and even without his own words it's not hard to see the family resemblance. Pavement recorded a cover of "Camera" for the "Cut Your Hair" single, as well as a weird track called "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" for 1993's famous No Alternative compilation that is literally about how much Malkmus loves Reckoning:

Flashback to 1983, /
"Chronic Town" was their first EP, /
Later on came "Reckoning," /
Finster's art... /
Titles to match: "So. Central Rain," /
"(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," /
"Harborcoat," /
"Pretty Persuasion," /
"You're born to be a Camera."

You don't have to be a detective to see the traces of Reckoning in Crooked Rain. Listen to "Range Life next to "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville." Listen to "Stop Breathing" next to "Time After Time" - hell, listen to "Fillmore Jive" next to "Camera." It's obviously not a 1-to-1 correspondence throughout the album, but you'd be hard pressed not to see the kinship. In the aforementioned Q essay Malkmus states that he never felt the same connection to the band's material after Reckoning. Perhaps he didn't need to: he got everything he needed from that one album. The shaky, sort-of-not-quite amateurism used to cover up a tight band who could rock in post-punk lockstep when the need arose; the abstruse approach to vocals; even the ominous abstract hand-crafted cover art.

This isn't meant to take anything away from Pavement. As the saying goes (and one I tell my students every quarter, even if I'm always worried they'll misinterpret it) - good artists borrow, great artists steal. But another attribute Pavement shares with REM is that they are both at their core regional bands. Although they eventually outgrew the sound, REM in their IRS years were definitely a Southern concern. Sure, there was the post-punk rhythm section and the New Wave artiness and the Byrds-y jangle, but there were also strong hints of good old Southern rock lurking under the skin of the Georgia band. Reckoning has a few subtle Skynrdisms for those who care to listen. Fables of the Reconstruction is full-on Southern Gothic, all creeping vines and decaying plantation houses - straight-up Faulkner shit on "Life and How to Live It" and "Old Man Kensey." But there were enough other influences and plenty of novel wrinkles to ensure that REM were unique enough to never be pigeonholed as a regional band in quite the same way as, say, the Drive-By Truckers, also hailing from Athens a couple decades later, and unapologetically so. (Yes, that kind of regionalism makes bands great, but can also limit their appeal to a wider audience unwilling to bother deciphering regional codes.) But the Southern roots can't be effaced.

Pavement are in their heart a California band, but they're a California band in the same way that REM is a Georgia band: it's there if you know what to listen for, but if you aren't intimately familiar with California mythology it's easy to pass over or dismiss. I mentioned above that I didn't get into Pavement until a few years after they broke up. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the first album I heard, and even before I knew much else about the band I knew they were from California. I just knew. Listening to the album made me nostalgic for California at a time when I had been away from California for years and it would be many more years before I was able to return in a permanent capacity.

I'm fascinated by the image of California that non-Californians have. California is one of those places that people who aren't from here think about and form opinions on in a way they don't about, say, Kentucky or Montana or Arizona. We have it drilled into our heads from a very young age - pretty much the first moment we enter the public school system - that California isn't just geography, it's aspirational real estate: we are (or so the impeccable logic of my fourth grade history pageant reinforced) the westernmost edge of the westernmost country on the planet, Hy-Brasil for the country and the world. We have every climate and ecosystem on the planet, from scorching desert to snowy mountain peaks and everything in between. Living outside California for eleven years - and in Massachusetts for eight of those - it always amused me that whenever it came up that I hailed from California, the other party would usually chuckle, maybe even wink, before asking me, knowingly, "well, how do you like the cold here?" And I would say, it's not bad, but I grew up in the Lake Tahoe area, Truckee is the fifth snowiest city in the United States, and my elementary school was literally 500 yards away from the Donner Party monument where we honor a group of people who resorted to cannibalism because they were stuck and starving amidst twenty-foot-tall snow drifts on Donner Pass. So yeah, your "Nor'easters" are pretty cute.

"Unfair" is one of my favorite songs because its one of the few California songs I've ever heard that isn't about either LA or San Francisco. Most of the state is invisible to the rest of the world, to whom California is always palm trees, sunshine, and then maybe fog moving in over the Golden Gate. California, when taken as a whole, is actually fairly boring: the bulk of the state is a flat valley resting between coastal mountains on the west and the Sierra Nevada range on the east, and it is in that flat valley that the agricultural engine of California's export economy operates. (Another staple of the California public school education: we all know practically from first grade that California is the sixth largest economy in the world, even if we have no idea what that actually means.) Most of the middle of the state is banal as fuck: flat agricultural land and one-horse towns strung clumped across the plains at intervals convenient for the bathroom breaks of long-haul truckers heading north and south on Highways 5 and 99. Stephen Malkmus isn't just from California, he's from Stockton, one of the most depressingly uninteresting places on the planet, all rusty industry (including, incongruously, a massive inland port connecting the central valley's agricultural output with the Bay Area and larger world), faceless suburbs and dissolving urban spaces. Of course he's going to appear flat and affectless and terminally ironic: there's nothing to do in Stockton but be vaguely amused at the emptiness on display on every corner. ("Because you're empty / And I'm empty.")

I grew up around Lake Tahoe, but we moved to the vicinity of Mount Shasta when I was a bit older. People are often confused to hear that there are hundreds of miles left in California between San Francisco and Oregon. Sure, it's mostly empty space and conservative Republicans, but it's also vitally important because the north provides the water that the south needs for agriculture:

Up to the top of Shasta Gulch, /
And to the bottom of the Tahoe Lakes, /
Manmade deltas and concrete rivers /
The south takes what the north delivers.

If you're not from California you can't understand how important water is to state politics. Sure, you've seen Chinatown, but you probably didn't understand that the plot's fixation on water rights wasn't a quaint historical curio, but a mirror for ongoing and very pressing struggles over water distribution that split the state to this day. If you've never lived here you can't understand how much mental real estate this conflict occupies in the state's collective psyche. And since I've lived in Northern California - which, remember, represents only a small percentage of the state's population - the idea that the south steals the north's God-given water resources has been hardwired into my brain. That's one of the core grievances behind the desire to split off from California and form the State of Jefferson: the populous and wealthy south would have to pay a fair-market price for the water that Sacramento sucks from the Shasta basin. The proposed State of Jefferson flag even has two X's on it to indicate the ways in which Northern California has been double-crossed by Sacramento and Salem. (Incidentally: the "State of Jefferson" barn pictured on the Wikipedia page is a barn I used to pass on the highway every day on my way to high school. It's a weird place.)

If you're not from California, you probably don't know how funny "I'm not your neighbor you Bakersfield trash" actually is. And if you're not from California you probably don't get why Malkmus referring to Stockton as "Central Northern Cal" is hilarious. (That's a joke only someone from Northern California would make because to LA, everything north of Valencia is "Northern California," and people who actually live in Northern California are constantly annoyed by the fact that the rest of the state refuses to acknowledge our existence. Stockton is pretty much in the center of the state but it isn't Northern California by any stretch unless you lop the top the top third off the state.) There are references to California peppered throughout the album, and throughout the rest of the Pavement catalog (most prominently "Two States" off Slanted and Enchanted, which is also about water rights.), but "Unfair" is their California opus. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is a California album - an album about California as (in REM's words) the end of the continent, of the nineties as the end of the century, and of the end of rock and roll. Not long after Pavement's heyday - after the group definitively rejected the possibilities of stardom revealed by the success of "Cut Your Hair," and retreated to their positions as (rightly or wrongly) standard-bearers for the ambition-challenged, rock began to recede from its position at the forefront of the cultural conversation. The mythology we built around the idea of rock & roll was just as profoundly misguided as the mythology erected around California as the apotheosis of American exceptionalism.

I keep coming back to Malkmus' words from the end of the album, "Fillmore Jive": "See those rockers with their long curly locks, / Goodnight to the rock and roll era / 'Cause they don't need you anymore." If teaching a class based around music writing and eliciting the musical tastes and preferences of late teen- and twenty-something on my campus has taught me anything, it's that the "rock and roll era," if there ever was such a thing, has passed. Rock isn't dead, but it's slowly assuming a cultural position similar to jazz and contemporary classical: something mainly produced by and for cultural and economic elites, without much purchase on the popular imagination in all but its most blatantly populist forms. For listeners who grew up with the implicit understanding that rock was the default genre of popular music, it's a strange sensation to realize that there are kids in your classroom - functioning adults, really - who don't know who U2 are. Not that I'm particularly a fan of U2, but it puts the supposed ubiquity of rock stardom into perspective. With the mythology gone, rock is simply another cultural signifier (which it always was, even if your parents may have taught you otherwise), and it signifies something increasingly remote from the lives of a large percentage of American youth. It's no longer the counter-culture, it's the establishment in every way that matters.

And that's OK: California's a great place to live, but it's hard to reconcile the self-aggrandizing legend with the riven reality. Rock and roll is great, but it's no longer the center of the universe. That era's done, for better or for worse. And there's something freeing about that.

Everybody's Rocking

Nine Inch Nails - "The Hand That Feeds" (With Teeth, 2005)



The 2000s were an awful time to be alive. Sure, things started out so promising, but a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium - America was attacked and we were sucked into a maelstrom of paranoia, repression, and warfare that has yet to abate thirteen years on, and which only exacerbated already negative economic trends that eventually blossomed into the ongoing rolling economic crises experienced across the globe since 2008.

As someone who experienced all this bullshit firsthand, I can attest to the fact that the decade's musicians did a surpassingly piss-poor job of responding to said bullshit. Protest music has always had an iffy reputation. Looking back at the great era of sixties protest songs, how many of them hold up as anything other than didactic bromides designed to advertise the ethical superiority of the singer? With the best of intentions musicians who try to make some kind of political "statement" often find themselves sinking into a deep quicksand of self-righteous, condescending superiority, or worse, simply replacing vague platitudes for meaningful engagement. (See: Exhibit One.) The best political music is usually angry, less focused on establishing the artist's perspicacity than in communicating the strident urgency of the moment - think punk in the late 1970s, hip-hop in the late 1980s, or, hell, even Rage Against the Machine on occasion in the 1990s. I'm sure anyone reading this can remember any number of political songs from the last decade, but how many of them were actually any good? Think hard before you answer.

No one expected that the decade's best protest anthem would come from Trent Reznor. I say "best" with no fear of contradiction, not simply because the competition is so piss-poor, but because it's a damn fine song. And what's more, after 1999's The Fragile it would have been impossible to predict that Reznor could have come back as strong and as assured as he did in 2005. To be more precise: it would not have surprised most people at all if Reznor had died in the aftermath of The Fragile, and the odds of his rebounding from that album and tour not simply alive, but healthy, fit, and focused were downright troubling.

Don't misunderstand me: The Fragile is still my favorite Nine Inch Nails album, hands down. The Downward Spiral has never been my favorite, and while Pretty Hate Machine is preternaturally strong, I was late to the party and my memories of that album are mostly second-hand. But The Fragile - I bought that album the day it was released and listened to the whole thing - both discs - probably a dozen times the first week I had it. I even remember making a special detour on a road trip just to buy the advance single for "The Day The World Went Away" the day of its release - only to be, er, a bit confused. (The song was a terrible first single, it didn't make a lick of sense until the album dropped, and the B-side "Starfuckers, Inc." is one of the most embarassing songs in the Nine Inch Nails catalog - and this from the guy who once wrote, "The devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car.") But as much as I still love The Fragile, I also recognize that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it is one of the most solipsistic, ego-driven, navel-gazing documents ever recorded. It makes The Wall look like the Polyphonic Spree. If you can't buy into the fact . . . enjoy the fact that the record is a supreme monument to destructive self-absorption, you're going to find it insufferable. But if you can dig it, it's in a class by itself in terms of its full-throated commitment to the sensations of (arrested) adolescent egotism and self-loathing - and deep down isn't that what rock is all about, really?

It's easier to imagine Reznor being found dead in a hotel with six different kinds of narcotics in his system sometime around 2002 than it is to envision what actually happened, which is that he had a really rough patch after The Fragile but cleaned up, became a gym rat, got some serious focus and decided to go on a prolific streak that culminated in his winning a fucking Academy Award and marrying (!!!) his girlfriend and starting a new band with her. He has two children. What the fuck.

So it's not just that Reznor's mid-decade comeback was improbable - the success of "The Hand That Feeds" flew in the face of a much of the band's history. It's not as if Reznor had never been political before. I've always thought "Head Like A Hole" made a nice bookend with "The Hand That Feeds," and the surface similarities between the two tracks certainly create a nice symmetry underscoring the idea that With Teeth represented a rebirth for Reznor in many respects. But previous to this track his politics had been largely inchoate, vaguely defined, unfocused. There are political allusions in "Marsh of the Pigs" and a few other tracks, but Reznor as a political being was mostly a force of pure id, lashing out at faceless figures whose only purpose appears to be that of limiting the expression of free will - that is, a teenager lashing out against the omnipotent authority of "The Man." The interesting thing about "The Hand That Feeds," at least for me, is the way it immediately alerts the listener to the fact that Reznor is no longer interested in just talking about himself ad nauseam, but is genuinely trying to engage with a larger world outside the confines of his own head.

This is quite a clever track. Whereas many Bush-era political songs focused on either the man himself or vague homilies about the wages of war, Reznor did something a lot more difficult: he addressed not simply the politicians who lied their way into office and into two wars, but the political system that put them there and kept them there without levying any consequences for their malevolence. The lyrics in the first verse could be addressing Bush himself, or they could just as easily be aimed at the rank & file Republican voters who (sort of) swept him into office twice, or it could even be aimed more broadly at the larger plurality of Americans of any party who were fooled into following lockstep behind the military-patriotic-national-security complex that enacted a silent coup in the months following September 11th:

You're keeping in step
In the line.
Got your chin held high and you feel just fine
Cause you do
What you're told
But inside your heart it is black and it's hollow and it's cold.

Just who is Reznor talking two? He's not laying the blame at the feet of any one actor, any single person or group who deserves the credit for the debacle of the Bush years. In the chorus, he asks the listener,

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?

He's talking here about the ways in which faith can be used as a tool by unscrupulous operators to manipulate the masses (an easy enough theme of the period), but also the ways in which faith becomes a most convenient pretext for self-delusion. It's common knowledge that Bush's most fervent base was the evangelical right, a highly motivated interest group who the Bush team was happy to placate with nine years' worth of subtle and not-so-subtle dog whistles in the direction of exceedingly conservative social policy. But it's also true that any examination of the record will show that for all the bluster of the right during the Bush years, Bush himself really was not the fire-breathing culture-warrior his most rabid followers believed him to be. Sure, he surrounded himself with people who could talk the talk, but when push came to shove Bush himself really was hesitant put his weight behind intervening in too many divisive social policy issues. (Do you remember his comical Solomonian pre-9/11 compromise on stem cell research regulations?) Sure, he put two conservative (although not as conservative as he probably believed at the time) judges on the Supreme Court and stacked the federal bench, but even there it's easy to overestimate the effect of his appointments in the context of a historical moment that was on the verge of a hard leftward shift, at least in terms of social (if sadly not foreign, economic, or military) policy.

This is very similar, incidentally, to the ways in which Obama's most fervent supporters believe, deeply and truly, that he is a fire-breathing crusader for social justice, just beneath the milquetoast trappings of a compromise-hungry adherent to Clinton's disastrous "Third Way" DLC-approved conservative Democratic ideology. The one truly revolutionary facet of his presidency - the color of his skin - has proven capable of obscuring every other obvious sign that he is not and has never been the true-blue leftie agitator in whom his fans desperately wanted to believe. How deep do you believe? Are you brave enough to see just how badly our guy failed to live up to our make-believe expectations?

The next verse draws the song more tightly into focus as an Iraq and Afghanistan-era protest song:

What if this whole crusade's
A charade?
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood
On which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine.

Two disastrous wars in two far-off Muslim countries - often referred too either accusingly or triumphantly as "a crusade" - were conceptualized by their detractors as wars of blood for oil (oil which has, of course, failed to ever arrive). But instead of simply casting blame on the usual suspects, Reznor is careful to lay the blame precisely where it belongs: "we," those of us (all of us) who profit either enthusiastically or tacitly from the flexing of American military might and coercive foreign policy across the planet. We're all culpable here.

Complicity is key. It's not enough simply to be opposed to bad policy and unjust wars, how money of us actually manage to get up off our knees and do something about it? It's a simple observation but no less powerful for its familiarity. It's not just the Republican functionaries or "values voters" or Reagan Democrats with "black and hollow" hearts, or the moneyed interests who keep the whole machine running smoothly for their own benefit and no-one else's, and it's certainly not just the specter of Mr. George W. Bush himself - it's the whole damned system that allows the situation to fester indefinitely: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Musically, "The Hand That Feeds" is a textbook example of how a comeback single needs to sound. It's muscular and confident, every bit the attention-grabbing earworm that "The Day The World Went Away" was not. The album from which the song was plucked was similarly strong (and strangely slept-on in the years since), positively concise by Reznor's self-indulgent standards, filled with punchy hits and uncharacteristic straightforward hard-rock riffs. In scope and accessibility, With Teeth is the anti-Fragile, all killer no filler. It also marks a slight return to Reznor's dance-y origins, after having spent years distancing his subsequent material from the industrial dance sound of Pretty Hate Machine. "The Hand That Feeds" rumbles and it crunches, but most importantly it runs with sufficient momentum to knock down a tree. It's just a great song.