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366 Songs 232: The Shock Of The Lightning

This song is, in so many ways, Oasis-By-Numbers; the lyrics that reference well-known pop cultural artifacts in the middle of meaningless platitudes (“Love is a time machine/Up on the silver screen/Love is a litany/A magical mystery”) before going on to exhort something of the listener (“Come in/Come out/Come in/Come out tonight”), sneered against a wall of noise made up of every instrument seemingly being turned up to 11 and just played without any artifice or self-awareness. And yet, it works because of that, not despite of it. There’s no there there in this song, no hidden meaning or secret that you only discover after repeated listens – You either get this or you don’t. It’s thug music pretending to be hippie music, and that always been what Oasis is, deep down. It’s not even a “you’re either on the bus or you’re off it” thing; if you’re not on Oasis’ bus, they’ll probably accidentally run you over because they genuinely don’t give a fuck, and not even in the poserish “We don’t give a fuck” sense; it’s because they’re too dumb to think to do it. The work of idiot savants, “The Shock of The Lightning” even has a drum solo that, against all logic, may just be the best part of the song (Jump to 3:02 if you don’t believe me).

A song this bad becomes good, or at least appealing, true. But still: It really doesn’t deserve this amazingly good Julian House-directed video, which gets psychedelia far more than the band ever did.

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366 Songs 231: Shangri-La

That I apparently haven’t written about this song yet seems a massive oversight to me, considering this may be one of my favorite pop songs ever written/performed, mixing a wonderful arrangement – The brass section! The jangly guitars! – some lyrics that speak to the disaffection of a nation bred into apathy (“But he’s too scared to complain/Cause he’s conditioned that way”), and a structure that just builds into the spectacularly amped up, angry section that begins at 2:50 that kicks the whole thing into a higher level. “And all the houses on the street have got a name/Cause all the houses on the street all look the same,” while the music repeats, a commentary on the similarity of suburbia, and the horns drag everything down… And then everything turns into a lazy, sloppy singalong, punctuated by cymbal crashes and we return to where we started, emboldened, tired and underscoring some wonderfully sad idea that you can never really escape where you come from.

That this isn’t a song that everyone knows and adores continually makes me a little sad; this is what pop music can do, if it really tries.

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Well, I Didn’t See That Coming

Sometimes, you think “Hey, I’m caught up on deadlines!” and look forward to your day. And those are the days when an editor will ask you to write a quick crash course in a ridiculously complicated lawsuit, and you spend hours researching and writing a thousand words on it. Seriously, this is like the length of one of my Time pieces.

On the plus side, I feel like it’s a reasonably good piece. On the minus side, now I still have work to do. Thanks, Friday.

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366 Songs 230: I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have

(Note: I know the above video cuts off the end, but it’s the only YouTube I could find of the original song!)

There’s something wonderfully drunken about this song; more than likely, it wasn’t alcohol that messed Bobby Gillespie up before he recorded the vocals to this song, but nonetheless, this song always sounds like the complaints and pleas of a man gloriously drunk, dumped and trying to talk his way out’ve the trouble he’s surrounded himself with, and I love it for that.

I also love it for the arrangement, with the horns, the grumpy wah-wah guitar and, really low in the mix but definitely there, the piano. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned, sad song, and even if it ended up getting remixed to hell to become “Loaded” and start a minor musical revolution in the UK, this is still the version I love best.

Well, okay. Maybe I prefer this version, but that’s only because I’m a sucker for women doing acoustic songs, for some reason.

Ah, Idha. The world needs more of you…

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“A Missing Image or Text, That Implies Something”

I love this list of the “20 irrefutable theories of book cover design” from the Guardian:

11. Unheimlich theory
This theory takes a familiar image or symbol and makes it strange or unsettling. One cover of Lolita uses the image of a girl’s bedroom wall to represent a girl’s legs and underwear.

12. Absent presence theory
A gap is left on the cover, a missing image or text, that implies something. By having this space, the reader is forced to fill the gap with their imagination in order to understand the meaning.

13. Ju Jitsu theory
The opponent, the cover, forces a view or conception upon the defender, the reader, such as the bloody, violent implications on the cover of Anthony McGowan’s love story Stag Hunt.

It speaks to the former graphic designer in me, as well as the lover of seeing trends and movements that may not really be there yet, drawing on threads to bring them together. Plus, you know, “Unheimlich theory” is just a great name for anything.

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366 Songs 229: Candy Everybody Wants

Oh, 1990s alternative music. What did you do to me?

I really liked this song, when it was released (which was… 1992, apparently); I can remember listening to it over and over again, alternating it with the R.E.M. that I was getting into at the time, and wondering whether I had a crush on Natalie Merchant* or not, and feeling guilty about the possibility that I did. Listening to it again now, for the first time in many, many years, I am struck by the way the production reminds me of Paul Simon’s Graceland album from six years prior, with the weirdly suffocating jangly guitars and soulless horn section (Especially surprising, considering it’s James Brown’s backing horns providing them, with Maceo Parker involved as well). There’s an unappealing sanctimoniousness about the lyrics, too: “If lust and hate are the candy/If blood and love tastes so sweet/Then we give ’em what they want” is, in some strange way, entirely offputting an opening to the song, some kind of superior judgment that makes Merchant and friends seem alien and uncaring.

Amusingly, listening to this again today, I realized that the version that lived in my head was the live version with Michael Stipe doing co-vocals:

There’s something loose and joyful in his performance that the song just feels entirely different. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

(* Watching the video today, for the first time ever, Merchant reminds me of Parker Posey; if they ever do a Natalie Merchant biopic, clearly they need to cast Posey in the lead.)

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Meanwhile…

And, of course, how remiss would I be to not link this week’s piece I’ve cooked up for Time’s Entertainment blog? That would be here, as I try and work out whether or not the terrible new Bourne Legacy movie is about to usher in an age of blockbuster movies where story isn’t even a consideration.

Yes, I disliked Bourne Legacy that much. Really.

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366 Songs 228: I Want You

I think I’ve always ended up focusing too much on Dylan’s vocals every time I’ve listened to his music in the past; they’re so distinctive – especially when you come to them after years of hearing people make fun of their whiny, wheezy quality, the weird lilt of melodic tunelessness that he brings to everything – that they tend to overpower everything else, admittedly, but when this song came on my iPod when I wasn’t really paying attention earlier today, I finally heard the music under Dylan’s voice, and had this moment of… surprise, I guess, when I finally saw the Byrds/Dylan connection that everyone talks about for myself.

For all of the well-deserved, hard-earned praise and applause that is thrown at the feet of Dylan’s songwriting genius, I found myself weirdly hypnotized by the way that his backing in this song sounds to me like “I Feel A Whole Lot Better” by the Byrds; it’s the performance as much as the melody, a wonderfully jangly pop jaunt to the whole thing behind the harmonica and the singing. The pop-ness of Dylan has always been somewhat absent to me until now, and discovering it by accident today just made me like the song all the more; previously, it had always been Dylan’s lyrics I’ve admired the most in his own performances (And the lyrics for this don’t disappoint: “The silver saxophones say I should refuse you/The cracked bells and washed-out horns/Blow into my face with scorn/But it’s not that way/I wasn’t born to lose you” indeed), but now I want to go back and revisit the entire early back catalog and find some way to turn all of the vocals off and find out what’s going on in the background.

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366 Songs 227: Bodega!

Comedy songs get a bad rap. No, wait, that’s not entirely true; comedy songs probably get the rap they deserve considering the amount of terrible comedy songs there are in the world. But not all comedy songs are terrible, is my point, and for every Weird Al parody of the hit song of the day that replaces one of the word with “fat” or whatever, there’s also a funny and well-constructed and -performed songs that are worth listening to. From that world, there’s Nellie McKay and “Bodega!” from her last (I think? I admit, I haven’t been paying the most attention to her career in recent years) album, Home Sweet Mobile Home. It’s clearly a comedy song – Anything that includes the passage “When love fills the air/And he asks me/’When will you be mine?’/I sigh, ‘My Valentine/Proposed to me in a bodega'” is clearly not entirely serious – but there’s a fun to it that’s infectious, and a tongue-in-cheek intelligence at play in the parodic elements, detourning expectations of what to expect in the song as it merrily rolls along. While it’s true that not every comedy record is the Rutles, Nellie’s a good enough substitute for me, thanks very much.