“Stacked Actors” shouldn’t work as a song, I think everytime I listen to it; it’s a car-crash of rock cliches, from the feedback that starts it to the scream before the guitar solo, and including the faux-lounge rock of the verses that sounds as much as anything like UK act Terrorvision’s appalling “Tequila” from the 1990s:
And yet, it does. Is it the intensity of Dave Grohl’s vocals (For some reason, when his voice cracks on “truth” in the “All I want is the truth” at 3:39, that always gets me), or the lyrics that go from sly (“God bless/What a sensitive mess/But things aren’t always what they seem”) to outright bitter (“Stack dead actors/Stacked to the rafters/Line up the bastards/All I want is the truth”) and back to sly again (“We cry when they all dye blonde”)? Is it that the stomp of the chorus, heralded by that burst of feedback, is irresistible in a way that was later harnessed by “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes?
The answer may be all of the above, together with the fact that we want to like this song; there’s something weirdly underdoggish about it, and about the Foo Fighters in general. For triumphant rock, it’s particularly untriumphant and submissive, and there’s something appealing about that. It’s music that rages against a celebrity machine that it’s complicit in, and yet the contradiction oddly works in its favor. I’ve never quite worked out how they managed to pull that trick off, but it’s definitely a good one.