Some Songs Considered

“Alcoholiday” – Teenage Fanclub
(Words/music: Norman Blake, available on Bandwagonesque, DGC 1991) 

Warmth and drunkenness often go hand-in-hand, so it’s appropriate that a song dealing with that state features a warm tone.  Teenage Fanclub accomplishes this with most of their usual tricks – the ringing opening riff, the sighing harmonies deployed periodically, and a melody that lifts at just the right moments.  These tricks, with the right combination of distortion and precision, give the song a focused haze; where a lesser band might mask its flaws in distortion, Teenage Fanclub tightens up when the tone fuzzes and uses the effect to set mood rather than compensate for technical gaps. 

As with many of Teenage Fanclub’s singles, approaching the song on warmth alone misses part of the picture.  Even if the music evokes the warmth of a good buzz, the lyrics focus on the mental lapses that sometimes come along for the ride.  There’s a general sense that the narrator put his foot in his mouth and said something regrettable, particularly in the “baby I’ve been fucked already” line.  The falling note at the end of the harmonies give the song a slightly sad tinge, making the promises in the first few lines feel a little sadder and perhaps more regrettable.  Appropriately, the last part of the song finds the narrator accepting his blunder and ready to move past it; there’s no pleading or backpedaling, only a brief acceptance of blame and the desire to move beyond this moment. 

More on Teenage Fanclub: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Buddy Holly” – Weezer
(Words/music: Rivers Cuomo, available on Weezer (1994), DGC 1994) 

So the enduring icon from the past changed from Buddy Holly to the Fonz in the video, but the nostalgia stays the same.  On its own, “Buddy Holly” makes early ‘90s fuzz-pop feel timeless.  Even if the distortion doesn’t fit Holly’s era, the song’s bounce and reliance on melody goes back as far as popular music stretches back.  If its dressed in the sounds of the ‘90s, it has an “old soul.” 

It’s this timelessness that keeps the video from feeling anachronistic.  On paper, a ‘90s song set to a ‘70s show about teens in the ‘50s sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Spike Jonze’s video – what I imagine has to be a labor of love considering the Happy Days footage he poured through – has the sort of magic that transcends time.  It comes back to the common thread – the idea of “cool.”  No matter the era or the styles, coolness endures – it’s how Buddy Holly, Arthur Fonzarelli, and Rivers Cuomo each exhude their own sort of charm despite their aesthetic differences.  It’s also the quality that makes this video (and song) timeless.  Even today, many no longer consider Weezer “cool,” yet “Buddy Holly” would still drive a room nuts the same way it did fifteen years ago.  A generation from now, this will be a similar kind of touchstone – one referenced in our children’s popular culture as a symbol of the enduring and ever-evolving idea of cool. 

More on Weezer: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“The New Pollution” – Beck
(Words/music: Beck Hansen, John King, and Michael Simpson, available on Odelay, DGC 1996)

“The New Pollution” isn’t the oddest song on Odelay, as there are moments where Beck and the Dust Brothers go further off the deep end.  In fact, relatively speaking at least, “The New Pollution” passes for a straightforward song on this album.  Buoyed by a guitar riff fit for a spy movie, a saxophone and vintage organ trade off solos.  Beck stays low in his vocal range, making it not quite as soulful as he’d sound on Midnight Vultures, but certainly nudging the track toward “crooning,” at least by his standards.

Of course, “by Beck’s standards” is the key phrase here, as “The New Pollution” certainly has its weird bends.  Beck’s narrative seems straightforward, focusing on a modern woman “alone in the ‘new pollution’,” but it’s his choice of images that feels odd.  Specifically, it’s the way that Beck juxtaposes – “lily white cavity crazes” and “paradise camouflage” among others – that undercuts both the beauty and ugliness of these images.  Then there are the odd lines – “carburetor tied to the moon” immediately stands out – that I won’t even begin to parse.  Even the music has this oddly warped quality to it – whether it’s the drum beat that sounds similar to the “Tomorrow Never Knows” beat suggesting a mind-expanding quality or just the eerily gleeful opening complete with sound effects.  Whatever it is, Beck subverts the relatively straightforward groove by melting some of the edges and letting them drip onto itself. 

More on Beck: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Sugar Kane” – Sonic Youth
(Words/music: Sonic Youth, available on Dirty, DGC 1992) 

At no point in their career could Sonic Youth be described as “timid,” so it’s difficult to compare the band’s different albums in terms of confidence.  Their early records presented an uncompromising band delving deeper and deeper into noise.  A few albums later, noise still filled their songs, but shards of melody (however twisted or jagged they may be) started appearing.  By the time Butch Vig worked with the band on Dirty, Sonic Youth already started to put their spin on more traditional song structures.  Vig helped the band decide when to strengthen the structure underneath the layers of guitar and when to let the song start to bend and buckle under the weight of their noise.  “Focused” might be the more applicable word, but these songs have more of a confident swagger, especially when compared with the band’s earlier output.

“Sugar Kane” sounds particularly self-assured.  The guitar hooks aren’t as big as some of the other bands Vig produced (including Sonic Youth’s labelmates Nirvana), but the main riff is crisper and more defined than before.  Even the bridge has a moment where it feels like a tidied up version of “Schizophrenia” with the odd chords bending behind a drum fill.  Even Thurston Moore’s vocal delivery sounds clearer and more confident.  However, it’s the lead guitar that highlights the difference.   Where it might have hidden itself deeper in the mix, the lead line floats above everything else.  It still has the same twists and turns as before, but it sounds far more melodic than most other Sonic Youth lead parts, even overshadowing Moore’s vocal hook.  In fact, it sounds like a J Mascis lead part – technically complex yet bright and loud.  Like Mascis’s leads, the guitar on “Sugar Kane” deserves the spotlight that it commands.

More on Sonic Youth: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Mixed Bizness” – Beck
(Words/music: Beck, available on Midnight Vultures, DGC 1999)

Beck rightfully owns the reputation as a songwriter who can manipulate genres.  Sometimes, I’m skeptical of such a scattershot approach to genre, feeling like it’s eclecticism without a purpose.  In some cases, it feels like pandering to people with different taste at the sake of losing one’s own taste – doing a bunch of things in a mediocre manner rather than becoming skilled at a handful.  Beck’s blurred genres feels like the exact opposite – specifically, his eclecticism reveals his taste and skill as a songwriter.  He manages to utilize fragments from different styles and put them to use to create something that sounds distinctly recognizable.  It’s impossible to mistake a Beck song for anyone else, regardless of the point in his career or the evolution of his sound.  Amazingly, Beck’s used scraps from other genres to cook up a signature dish, and the hoard of imitators (think of the number of bad acoustic guitar/drum machine/half-rapped songs were on the radio in the last decade and a half) only underscores Beck’s uniqueness. 

“Mixed Bizness,” for example, clearly sounds different from the Mellow Gold-era Beck, yet it shares the same spirit as the rest of his catalog.  As with most of his best songs, the joy comes in the details.  Even the stripped down confessional folk on Sea Change felt meticulously arranged.  “Mixed Bizness” shares this same attention to detail, only on a more ridiculous level.  Here, Beck surrounds his basic track with these elastic sounding horns and strange electronic bloops yet never to the point of sensory overload.  He creates this frenzied, almost cartoonish aura the same way he built his slacker persona before or his orchestral folk later on.  In this case, it’s Beck surrounding himself with the sounds that best fit this somewhat goofy, carefree song.  It feels like an overt choice too; Beck’s best songs have a freewheeling quality, and “Mixed Bizness” brings that right to the forefront.

More on Beck: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Lithium” – Nirvana
(Words/music: Kurt Cobain, available on Nevermind, DGC 1991)

If you really want to know, I have two “first albums” because I bought two at the same time.  If given fifteen minutes and a calendar, I could probably pinpoint the exact day I bought them as well.  October 1997, I was a freshman in high school and had been listening to the radio for the better part of a year.  I’d make tapes off the radio, sitting with my boom box in my room with my finger ready on the red record button, ready to commit the next song to one of my Maxell 90 minute tapes (which I have shoeboxes of).  I consumed radio (and MTV, and to a lesser extent VH-1) as much as I could until waiting to hear songs on the radio simply wasn’t enough.  So while on the way home from a family get together and a stop at a Borders’ Books, I bought an old record and a current record.  The “current” album was Oasis’ Be Here Now, a record that’s unfairly maligned even if it’s not as good as the first two, and the “old” record was Nevermind.  Looking back, 1996-1997 wasn’t that far removed from the whole grunge thing, so Nirvana still received regular play on modern rock stations (hell, they still get their fair share these days), so it makes sense that I’d buy an album that had been on my radar for years (I remember where I was when Kurt Cobain died, even if I only had a casual understanding of who he was).

Today I own an embarrassing amount of music (I measure my iTunes by months now), but back then when my money came from birthdays and babysitting my neighbors, new music never came frequently enough.  This, along with the obsessiveness of my teenage years, led to me living with albums for a prolonged period of time, and Nevermind is one that I did a considerable amount of living with.  I probably listened to it on an average of three or four times a week for the first two years I owned it.  I taught myself how to play the drums with the first half of Nevermind, and to this day I instinctively start moving my hands and feet along to certain phrases in the album (not to mention a collection of broken drum sticks from trying to play like Dave Grohl).  I haven’t listened to some of these songs in ages, but I probably know them better than songs I’ve heard multiple times in the last month as they trigger something – emotional memories, muscle memory, who knows – in me when I hear them.  This is probably one of the reasons I rarely listen to Nevermind anymore – it’s so loaded with personal associations of those painfully awkward years that’s it’s hard to hear the songs without my own personal context rising back up.

Listening to “Lithium” now, it strikes me as the perfect example of the “Nirvana sound.”  Sure it has the soft/loud/soft dynamic that everyone points out (and yes, that the Pixies did first and probably better), but there’s so much more that makes this song work.  The slinky guitar line through the verse stands out immediately as it snakes through Dave Grohl’s bright sounding ride cymbal and Krist Novoselic’s minimal yet perfect bass line.  Cobain sings in a clean and (relatively) bright sounding tone (at least compared with some of the other songs on Nevermind).  Then, with a quick click of the distortion pedal, Cobain’s guitar becomes a wave of distortion, Grohl starts bashing at his ride cymbal (the only way to get those deep, violent crash sounds), and Novoselic’s bass becomes instantly more melodic.  Meanwhile, Cobain switches from his bleak poetry to a sea of “yeahs” – content to let his melody alone ride the cresting waves of sound without words.  Some might think it’s a copout to have a lyric-less chorus, but it takes a tremendous amount of faith that the melody will keep things interesting (and it does), but it also continues with the contrast in the dynamics; the verses are subdued and somewhat morose, but when the chorus hits the mood shifts to joyous and sing-songy (almost like, uh, taking lithium as an antidepressant?).  Cobain comes out of the chorus declaring his conflicted moods – he likes it, misses it, loves you, kills you, all while declaring that he’s “not going to crack.”  After his suicide, it’s convenient to declare “Lithium” as a portrayal of Cobain’s own fragile mental state, but it’s really a case in excellent songwriting where the music and the words work together to tell a story and convey emotion.  No wonder a teenager would latch on to this.

More on Nirvana: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm