From Who Reads The Magazine Comics?, back in 1944.
Look At How Sad That Fourth House Is
“This Isn’t Supposed To Happen!”
“I’ll Let YOU Figger Out The Reasons…!”
Nobody ever asks, but I’m pretty sure that my favorite Marvel Comics character is Ben Grimm, AKA The Thing from Fantastic Four. He’s got the tragic scenario, the faux-gruffness, the New York accent and the visual hook, as well as The Catchphrase; he’s pretty much everything I like about Marvel Comics in one package. Quite why Ben Grimm isn’t everyone’s favorite Marvel Comics character is beyond me.
366 Songs 254: Married With Children
From back before Oasis were Oasis, the final track to their first album, and the first sign, perhaps, that Noel Gallagher had more to offer than just Status Quo Meets The Beatles in his bag of tricks. The sense of humor at play in the lyrics (Yes, that refrain really is “Your music’s shite/It keeps me up all night/Up all night”) against the gentle instrumentation made this the first Oasis song to actually win me over way back when, along with a bridge that swooned far too close to the sun of sentimental softness – “And it will be nice to be alone/For a week or two/But I know then I will be right/Right back here with you” – making the whole thing into a song that undercut the band’s own carefully cultivated thug exterior.
No wonder Noel kept it in the setlist for decades afterwards (I love the organ in the final version below):
366 Songs 253: Tattva
It’s always fascinated me that “Tattva” was the song that broke Kula Shaker into the mainstream in the UK, if only because there’s not really a song there; it’s a chant with a guitar riff behind it, alternating with a simple verse with instrumentation lifted from “I Am The Walrus,” with only a guitar solo and bridge to break it out of the repetition (The single had an earlier version of the song on it, with the bridge absent; apparently it was added at the suggestion of producer John Leckie). That bridge is easily my favorite part of the song, as simple as it is; it starts at 2:31, and keeps up the glossy George Harrison retread aspect of the song while somehow adding a (tiny little) bit of extra depth, or at least variety. But, really; there’s nothing to “Tattva,” which makes it especially surprising that this song made the band into a success in the UK. Perhaps we were all ready for a modern George Harrison to listen to in between Oasis’ stabs at being both the modern Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
366 Songs 252: Wake Up Boo!
I hated this song when it first came out; it sounded overproduced, overly twee and everything that I didn’t want in my pop music at the time (It was the height of Britpop, and I wanted my pop to have some surreal idea of authenticity and noise amongst its stylized, idealized sixties retro). Since then, I’ve found some charm to the Boo Radleys in general (The album following Wake Up, C’Mon Kids, is rather great), and found myself wanting to revisit this song in case I was wrong the first time around. And… I was? Maybe? Possibly?
What may have happened is that, even though I still have the same objections to the song, I’m less bothered by twee and overproduction. I mean, sure; everything sounds too shiny and the horns sound fake, and yes, “You can’t blame me/Not for the death of summer” is trying a little too hard, but still: There’s something appealing about the song, despite all that: The harmonies as the backing vocals do their “Wake up/Wake up/Wake up” thing, or the way the song reminds you – very purposefully, I think – of “Good Day Sunshine” off Revolver, perhaps. Perhaps realizing that “Wake Up Boo!” isn’t the worst thing in the world is a sign of old age. I’m due, after all.
366 Songs 251: The Concept
Listening to “The Concept” again, years after I’d heard it last, it strikes me that the line “She’s gonna buy some records by the Status Quo” isn’t just a throwaway reference to the old-fashioned nature of the song’s subject, or a pun about her conservative tastes; the chugging guitars of the song reference the Quo in all their denim glory as much as the Byrds, and as such weirdly predicts the appeal of Oasis, who’d make their debut a couple of years or so after this song was released.
It’s that mix of jangle and thud, of comfort and curiosity, that drives “The Concept” through its first half; an oddly-grounded, oddly-singalongable song that hints at a sadness it refuses to name (“I didn’t want to hurt you/Oh yeah”). But then it gets to 3:14, and the song turns into something more obviously old-fashioned and out of step with contemporary tastes, something that sounds like nothing as much as a lost backing from the second Big Star album, and it’s just… lovely, and – because of the fade at the end – unfinished. The whole song, then, is something that refuses to reveal everything or tell all, but what it does share is something that makes you empathize, worry and want more.
As far as first statements go, it’s hard to beat that kind of impact.
CHUUNK!
Chuunk indeed. Radio silence recently has been down not, for once, to overwork but to the opposite: I’ve been trying to cut back on work last week and this – I’ll actually be entirely offline for Tuesday through Thursday, shockingly (That said, my Time essay should be running on Wednesday, so you won’t miss me at all) – and so, this blog has been suffering. All apologies, as the saying goes.
366 Songs 250: Hush The Warmth
If you have to wake up with a song in your head, you could do a lot worse than this one, from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s Gorky 5 album. I always meant to get into Gorky’s more than I actually did; I never bought one of their albums, and only know – and love – this song because it appeared on a compilation given away free with a copy of the NME years ago. But despite my apathy in exploring the band’s wider catalog, this remains a favorite song of mine, for the innocence it displays, the purity of emotion throughout the whole thing. That it also has a folky sound, a mellow relaxation across its longing, merely underscores the… niceness of the whole thing. Something being “nice” may not be the best selling point for many, I know, but yet for me, it works just fine.
Outlook Unclear; Try Again Later
I said I was crazy busy, right? That’s why I’m not even going to try and dress this up: Look! It’s my new Time essay, this week about political conventions and comic conventions. It’s another one of those that turned out being written multiple times; the first time I wrote it, I ended up going out on an entirely different journey than I’d intended to and, more importantly, than what I’d pitched to the editors. It wasn’t a bad journey, but it wasn’t what I’d promised, and that was a problem. Sometimes, such things happen, and occasionally they’re a good thing – I love the happy accident of writing, I promise – but I always wish that they’d take less time when they do happen…