The website of Jonathan Bogart, writer and cartoonist.
June 26th, 2009
I’ve been reading Internet arguments about whether or not he molested children, whether or not that invalidates the good of his music, whether or not the pop he was king of for a good decade is a worthwhile form of human endeavor. All of which seems to miss the point.
I listened to Thriller all the way through for the first time on the way home from work. I’m downloading Off The Wall now to do the same.
I was first too young and then too sheltered to know the years of his glory, and too much a teenager to appreciate the years of his decadence and decline. I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood him, and part of me has never wanted to, been repulsed by the cultural totalism he represented. There was no space for silence or reflection or patient inquiry into other lives in the Michael Jackson universe; to listen to a Michael Jackson song was to live, willing or no, in his world. He would have no other gods.
(Paul McCartney sounds so out of place on Thriller, like an eighteenth-century fop who’s wandered onto an aircraft carrier. Quincy and Michael even have to drag out a creaky old doo-wop rhythm for him to stand upright on.)
I imagine this is what the kids who grew up to embrace punk felt about the Beatles and the Stones, or what the kids who grew up to embrace rock & roll felt about Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, that the cultural monoliths of their childhood provided no space for them to establish their own identity, that they had to either reject it or glom on to the monolith, remora-like, and lose themselves. Or I could just be excusing my laziness in not having seriously tackled the Jackson discography before now. I know the hits, and love the ones before 1980.
My understanding of pop doesn’t exclude Michael Jackson, but it’s not predicated on him, and this I think is the faultline between me and my generation. I heard him for the first time, really, as an adult; everyone else grew up with him. I envy their sense of shared community; but I can’t find my way in. The edifice gleams too bright; history has swung shut.
(reposted from my Tumblr blog, which crops it unless you sign up.)
Pop music is not all music (though all music can be read as pop); and when investigating history it is important to remember what the people of the period understood music to be.
I’m joining the digital information revolution of 2007 and opening a Tumblr account, apparently in the belief that I will update it more frequently than this thing.
Scene Three: It Ain’t No Town And It Ain’t No City
The country looms large in the American imagination, even as what “the country” means differs from region to region, from time to time, and from mythology to mythology.
Well, it’s sitting here, sprawled out over the first half and change of the decade, demanding recognition, the Supreme Fact of the 1940s way beyond popular culture or music or even America herself — its cold, brutal reality turning everything in the cultural sphere into so many seltzer bubbles, fizzing briefly into nothingness.
Scene One: The Greatest Cast Of Honest Joes, Thieves, Murderers, And Cutthroats In Radio History
Command Performance “Dick Tracy In B-Flat”
(Meredith Willson, et al.)
Armed Forces Radio Service H-18.162 • 1945
We begin here, very nearly at the midpoint of the decade, at the high water tide of the war (Original Airdate: February 15 1945) with a record that isn’t a record, not by most lights, but we’re feeling expansive.
I’m no Trekkie: I watched the original series occasionally as a kid, and saw enough of the Next Generation to cordially dislike it, and this was one of the most fun times I’ve ever had in a movie theater.
This, I suspect, is what burns up the long-time fans of the franchise. How dare all these new, unlearned mouthbreathers start liking it without having logged the man-hours that true fans have? Anyone can enjoy something flashy and fun and emotionally resonant; only the truly refined palate can wallow in the pleasures of the cheesy, the tedious, and the lecturing (Okay, cheap shot. We’d all like the production values on our favorite things to be better.)
Were plot elements contrived? You bet. Was lots of the action unmotivated? Of course; this is a big summer blockbuster, not a dissertation on human behavior. What mattered was that I believed in the characters, the relationships between them, and their various emotional arcs, and that was as much a function of fantastic acting — just broad enough for Star Trek, but not so broad as to turn into parody — as of an effective script.
Mostly, I was in love with the look of the movie. Abrams overdid the lens flare effect, particularly towards the end, but managed to create a universe where danger sits side by side with the plucky faith in the human spirit that was always the best thing about the original series.
The trailers for the new Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Terminator movies played before Star Trek, and I found myself revolted by the comparison. Terminator: Salvation in particular looks actively repellent, the epitome of what a fifteen-year-old Nine Inch Nails fan would think is totally meaningful, gritty, and awesome; I’m too old for that shit. I always preferred New Genesis to Apokolips anyway. The villain in this was almost a parody of a typical 90s/00s sci-fi villain, and that he was defeated by a combination of good old-fashioned Shatnerian fisticuffs and Nimoyesque profit/loss calculation strikes a blow for all of us who are uninterested in dystopias and will fight the straight and honest fight against them whether in deep space or Abu Ghraib.
Yes, it was more space opera than science fiction. I never cared for science fiction anyway, and I like opera, because I like pop. I’m up for another round whenever they care to dish it out.
1. My Bloody Valentine “Soon”
(Kevin Shields) Glider EP [Sire] • 1990
1999-2001:
In trying to make sense of the pop history I hear on oldies and classic rock stations, I perform web searches (this is pre-Google, folks, we’re talking dawn of time stuff) on the Beatles and the Who and end up at George Starostin’s website, where I eagerly devour his take on rock (begins with the British Invasion, ends with punk) (he’s since expanded his repertoire) and hungry for more, check out his links. Mark Prindle is prominent among them. On Prindle’s website, I for the first time that I can remember encounter the name My Bloody Valentine. I may or may not have known about the horror movie of the same title from a childhood both terrified of and fascinated by the horror aisle in the local video store.
2002:
Searching for chatter about Blur and Radiohead, the twin poles of my then-obsession with Britpop, I stumble across a site called Pitchfork. I am fascinated immediately. The writers are intelligent and well-versed in cultural minutiae, but also young and slangy. Their legendary snobbery is not an issue: I’m a snob myself, and am eager to learn the ins and outs of indie-rock tastemaking and tastebreaking. In rooting around in the Pitchfork website, I find their first Favorite Albums of the 1990s list, and note with some surprise that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is #1. “I should look for that some time,” I think, and for a while the idea of really digging into the music of the 90s hovers there in the back of my head, but I am too interested in new music, and nothing ever comes of it.
2003:
I have returned to my historical-overview fetish, and am busily engaged in making a box set of the 500 greatest rock songs from Elvis to I think the White Stripes was my cutoff. With the information that My Bloody Valentine made Pitchfork’s favorite record of the 90s rattling around in my head, I deign to look them up on allmusic and download a couple of tracks. “Come In Alone,” for whatever reason, is the one that sparks something, and I put it on the box set. Sandwiched uncomfortably between “Paradise City” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it is a blast of shadowed, reluctant beauty in the midst of numbing obviousness and self-aggrandizement. I have listened to that set twice, I think. It took up twenty CDs and I would abandon CD-burning within a year.
2004:
I find Loveless cheap during an occasional record-store trawl with my best friend. He picks up Coltrane and weird dub-metal hybrids; I pick up Ike & Tina Turner, Leadbelly, and My Bloody Valentine. We go to his apartment and hang out; I put on Loveless. It is not a hit. We have the volume set low enough that we can talk, and it just sounds tinny and stupid, although the subterranean melodies do pick their way out of the surrounding slush and give me hope.
2005:
I listen to Loveless on headphones, like you’re supposed to. I am at work, in an furnace-like filing room adjacent to a garage, and I sit frozen to the spot until the record finishes. Oh my God. I get it, finally. A few months later, I listen to Ladytron’s mix set Softcore Jukebox. “Soon” is the leadoff track. I am shocked at how poppy and upbeat it sounds when it hasn’t been preceded by an hour of gorgeous noise and tinny drums. I suddenly start to take Ladytron a lot more seriously.
2006:
I list Loveless as one of my five favorite all-time albums on an Internet message board. It has become part of my habitual listening, something I’ll put on when I don’t know what else to put on. I have still not really listened to any other shoegaze.
2007:
I get hold of the Glider EP so that I can hear “Soon” without the fadeout from “What You Want” layered over the first few seconds. It assumes a status in my head as the My Bloody Valentine song, their “Layla” or “Smoke On The Water,” the archetypal single in comparison with which all else pales. (How could I ever have thought that “Come In Alone” …? but I was so much younger then.)
2008:
I start making plans to compile my 100 Great [Something] Songs Of The 1990s list. I think for maybe a fraction of a second before deciding that “Soon” is #1.
2009:
I sit in a church parking lot waiting for “Soon” to end. I’ve been listening to the last few songs on this list in a row, getting ready to write about them. Trees quiver and gel in the rearview mirror in time with the kickdrum bass. The inimitable (meaning I can’t reproduce it vocally, let alone onomatopoeically), beautiful, undistorted melody line comes bouncing and shaking out of the roar and thump, and all I can do is waggle my head in response.
All my life is words. They hedge me about and define me, they are the filter through which I process all experience. When I find something that no words can touch, against the skin of which they slide off like so much quicksilver, that is something precious indeed. “Soon” is an incandescent pink ball of fire, against which all constructed meaning burns away, and all that is left is Sound and Rhythm. There are lyrics to “Soon.” They are unknowable, and I wouldn’t choose to know what they were if Kevin Shields himself were to call me up and offer to tell me.
In the end, my vision of 90s pop is, more than anything else, mine. Its gaze is interior, not exterior. In some iterations of What Pop Means, commercial success matters as much as critical clout, perhaps more, and nothing can be the greatest that is not widely perceived as such. I have some sympathy for that view, but being neither a mass-market journalist nor an ideologue, I don’t have to organize my life by it; I don’t have anything against commercial success, but it informs rather than constrains my sensibility.
In embracing noise here at the end of all things, Sam, am I performing an anti-pop gesture? There are some who’d think so, and applaud it or scold it, or insist that I’m engaging in category confusion. I’d suggest that they have misunderstood noise, pop, and this song pretty profoundly.
Like The Return Of The King, I’ve got too many endings. Thanks for reading. I’ll have something else again soon.
2. The New Radicals “You Get What You Give”
(Gregg Alexander, Rick Nowels) Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too [MCA] • 1998
It’s a little frightening looking back over the past dozen years of my life to realize how much of the time I’ve spent driving a car. And 98% of that time had some form of audio entertainment going, whether music (mostly), audiobooks (more rarely) or podcasts (sharp increase over the past couple years). Car-hours have been especially important when thinking about my exposure to mainstream pop music. Since graduating high school, I have almost never listened to the radio indoors. My education in Sixties pop, classic rock, the Eighties, and current chart music all took place behind the wheel of a car in the late 90s and early oughts. (As did my education in the exquisitely dull good taste of NPR and what might be called popular classical music, i.e., nothing after Brahms. But that’s a different, still incomplete self.)
Increasingly, those half-hour and forty-five-minute commutes (ah, blessed urban sprawl) became the only moments of unalloyed pleasure in a life that felt like it was closing in around me, choking, dry, and foreordained. If I had failed to create a satisfying life as an adult, living paycheck-to-paycheck at jobs I hated and snuffing out any chances at worthwhile relationships through lack of emotional oxygen, I was equally dissatisfied with the perpetual youth that avoiding responsibility was supposed to be the whole point of enabling. I was around actual young people — volunteering at church youth groups, watching my younger siblings grow up and lap me in terms of coherence, success, and stability — and was horrified by the idea that, in the tragic line from Dazed And Confused (I haven’t seen it, I just know the line), I would grow older while they stayed the same age.
Pop music became the only window in the prison of my mind. For three to four minutes at a time, for more years than I care to think about, songs about being young and cool and in love and feeling so much were my release into a larger world than the solipsism of self-pity, which a smartass depressive with a facile intellect can turn anything more ambitious into. High art, whether tragic or sublime, was too easy to incorporate into my self-obsessed narrative of doomed and thwarted ambition brought down by the tragic flaws of laziness and forgetfulness; the unpretentiously pleasure-inducing was all that could take me out of myself and into it, however briefly.
I must have heard “You Get What You Give” about a thousand times before it dawned on me what a great pop song it was. And I mean great pop song, like once-in-a-lifetime stuff, a “God Only Knows” or “Respect” or “I Feel Love” or “Anarchy In The UK” type of thing. It had simply short-circuited all my (still-nascent) critical faculties; I didn’t even know I loved it until I thought about it. I had simply lived with it, breathed it, pulsed with it. It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say that the New Radicals, along with P. G. Wodehouse and my discovery of a universe of healing, gently funny comics outside the suffocating soap-opera kabuki of superheroes (John Stanley, Lewis Trondheim, and Cliff Sterrett: good God, y’all), kept me alive ca. 1999.
Let me be clear. “Don’t give up, you’ve got a reason to live, can’t forget we only get what we give” strikes me now, as it did then, as tritely affirmative homiletics, sub-Oprah bullshit of the kind that slides off the meaning-seeking mind like warm butter. (Mini-epiphany of the last few months: reading David Foster Wallace’s “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” and realizing that some people can actually get something out of those contentless maxims, and being simultaneously happy and sorry that for whatever reason I simply can’t operate on that level.) It is not in the lyrics — or not in those lyrics — that the Great Escape lies. It is in the music; and again I want to be clear. I am as cynically unmoved as anyone by the great sweeping, stirring crescendos popularized by U2, Coldplay, the Arcade Fire, and so forth. There is nothing soaring about Gregg Alexander’s tightly-wound mechanical toy of a production: it may pound, but it never builds-and-releases (except perhaps on the line “we’ll kick your ass in,” which anyway works more like a punchline than what the ancients meant by catharsis), and when he goes into falsetto it’s less because the Big Important Melody needs to swoop into the stratosphere than because falsetto is simply another of the classic pop tools in his arsenal — cf. Roy Orbison, the Bee Gees, and Michael Jackson — and he’s showing off.
Showing off is an inherently childish thing, sure. Unsurprisingly, it’s something I’m pretty good at. (If you’ve been impressed by any particular verbal dexterity in any of the foregoing 97 theses, rest assured I meant to do that.) Shutting up and letting the fruits of my labor be their own reward, I’m not so hot at. I do, though, see it as goal, an ideal to aspire to, and perhaps another stick with which to beat myself. Which is why this song is at #2. But more about that next time.
“You Get What You Give” saved my life (metaphorically) in the sense that I found a channel (pop) into which I could divert the irresponsible, gleeful childishness that’s been struggling to sabotage my adulthood. Even Wodehouse comes to an end, and as Wimbledon Green knows to his sorrow, perfect comics are all too rare; but pop is a unquenchable Fountain of Youth, an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (in the sense that Pope meant, not Gondry) which cannot be exhausted. There are always new frontiers: other countries, other decades, other genres. (I’ll get around to listening to post-1980 country someday, I swear.) So bracketed, I have become free to grow up, and in fact I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life before, finally completing my degree while working two jobs (public sector and nonprofit), while bills get paid on time and I only contemplate suicide occasionally, as a bit of relaxation after a long day. (Yes, that’s meant as humor.)
An aside. There is, to my mind, nothing so irrepressibly pop as the one-hit wonder. Everything that pop could possibly be arrayed against militates against the entire concept: Serious Album Artists, Rock Provocateurs, those who aspire to make music in classical modes like jazz or composition, even Business, the true arch-enemy of pop (ooh, how thrilling! it’s always the ones you never suspect, the ones closest at hand). Because businessmen, of course, want a continuous return on initial investment, and one-hit wonders provide only that, a one-time spike and then flatline. One-hit wonders have gotten conspicuously more rare of late, a combination of industry pressure to perform and the increasing irrelevance of the charts; even when a band can be officially tallied as a one-hit wonder, they have a massive following elsewhere. The heady days when the New Radicals, Eiffel 65, or Len could appear and disappear without a trace are more or less gone. Sic transit gloria.
Finally, a reminder. All of the above, including the last two entries, is a narrative. There are others. This is the one I’m telling now. Life itself is not a narrative. It is life. Don’t mistake the two.
3. Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
(Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway) OK Computer [Parlophone] • 1997
But I digress.
The fear of growing up that I listened to pop to stave off in my teenage years did not lessen as I unavoidably grew up. I just found ways of coping, as everyone does. My main method of coping fell under the heading of Irresponsibility. Failing to apply for classes before the deadline … failing classes themselves … failing to hold a job for more than six months … failing to make space in my head for separate categories of life and getting fired after being too consumed with my private life … failing to take care of myself, ending up in the hospital, moving back in with mom and dad … failing to finish even one creative project of the dozens I set for myself over the span of a decade … failing to maintain a single relationship for any appreciable amount of time … failing … failing ….
Did I mention the depression? Yeah, that helped too.
The trouble was that I didn’t enjoy my irresponsibility. I was too serious-minded, too apt to read my life as a Thomas Hardy novel, overdetermined and marching implacably towards unalloyed misery and death. I didn’t even get any decent substance abuse out of it: too obsessed with control to get drunk and too cowardly to get high, I only ever allowed myself to get addicted to the Internet.
And it was on that Internet that I first heard of Radiohead. (Wait for it….) The too-cool-for-school nerds who founded my first internet hangout were all excited about Kid A in the fall of 2000, and I for some reason implicitly trusted their judgment, probably because they were the first people I recognized as smarter than me that I’d ever known in real-time, as opposed to out of books. I asked for — and got — Kid A for Christmas. (That was the last record I ever really wanted that I didn’t just go out and buy myself. It took me a while to figure out this being an adult stuff, I’m telling you.) I was deeply confused, to put it mildly, when I put it on.
This — this was just a bunch of noise. Where were the guitars? It was supposed to be good music, right? Good music had guitars! Electronic glitches and a ghostly, chopped-up voice wasn’t rock! What the … what?
It wasn’t actually that long before I assimilated Kid A (it’s still one of my favorite albums), and then in quick succession Amnesiac and everything else Radiohead had released. (Lightbulbs dawned when I heard “Creep” and “High And Dry” and “Karma Police.” I had heard Radiohead before; I’d just never known it. I hadn’t even known those were all the same band. Hell, I had “High And Dry” on one of those cassettes I’d taped off Guatemalan radio.) There, at last, were the guitars.
My relationship to guitars are a bit like my relationship to geek culture: I got into them more or less because I felt like I was supposed to, and spent years fighting my way out to the space where my taste stands on its own two legs, unembarrassed and unafraid. At the same time that I was leaving the wide-open spaces of pop behind for the narrower confines of guitar rock, I was developing a fascination with superheroes that I was fortunate enough to leave behind once I discovered that I loved pen and ink, not overcolored fascism. There’s a parallel to be drawn between the macho angst of late-90s rock and the hypermale melodrama of post-80s superhero comics: in both cases I was lost in an aesthetic dead end ca. the turn of the century until it dawned on me that the larger medium (comics and pop, respectively) was what I was really interested in. In that regard, Radiohead was exactly the kind of band I needed to wean me off guitars: the Vertigo imprint of rock music, exploring heady themes with the kind of adult sophistication you didn’t expect to find in post-grunge. Not, when you get a broader perspective, actually groundbreaking or even very adult (all that quivering emotion and rage at the injustice of the world), but perhaps the perfect expression of the existential dread shot through with sudden glimpses of expanding horizons that is young adulthood.
“Paranoid Android” became my favorite Radiohead song early on: Jonny Greenwood’s guitar squalls towards the end ensured that, and the angst-rawk-artsy interlude-rawk structure borrowed from Queen’s masterpiece (one of my fondest memories is of participating in a spontaneous a capella rendering of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the back of a tour bus in Italy) ensured that. But what sealed the deal was Brent DiCrescenzo’s infamous “sorry honey” capsule review, the place I first stumbled upon Pitchfork and now relegated to the no-man’s-land of web.archive. If I’ve moved somewhat away from it since those heady days when my greatest pleasure was freaking out to its freakouts, that has more to do with my ambivalent attitude towards the science fiction conceits that OK Computer uses as a springboard than with the song itself.
One of the Internet Dudes I respect most took me to task for calling science fiction inhuman back at #91 on this list. Perhaps it would be better to say that I resent science fiction for questioning what it is to be human. But it would be most honest to say that I simply don’t like it. I’ve tried, honest — I plowed through Asimov and Bradbury and Ender’s Game in high school and hated them all; I’ve read Ellison and Dick and Bester and Clarke and Delany and Le Guin and anthologies by the pound and I just have no sympathy whatever with the aims, the ideas, or the tropes of classic science fiction, and I’ve actually decreased in sympathy the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve nailed down what it is I do like. It took reading all of Douglas Adams to do it, ironically enough; the man destroyed science fiction for me to such an extent that I treasure his wit but can’t even revisit the Hitchhiker series and only ever re-read the Dirk Gently novels.
So Radiohead borrowed a two-word phrase for the title of this song from Adams, but the lyrics read more like the apocalyptic Philip K. Dick, or even Anthony Burgess. But of course they aren’t meant to be read: they exist primarily in Thom Yorke’s strangled croon, paranoid indeed but not (except in the text-to-speech voice that interpolates in the first verse) inhuman at all, in fact hyperhuman, practically D. H. Lawrence in its vivid physicality. And yet there’s a nagging something that reminds me of the interminable hours I spent reading science fiction, trying desperately to give a shit about people who aren’t people in places that aren’t places doing things for no reason other than to prove a point. Maybe it’s the overdetermined nature of that shiny late-90s production, maybe it’s the claustrophobic effect that Yorke alone among his falsetto-crying peers can manage, maybe it’s simply that I can’t for the life of me disassociate music from cover art; there’s a story in here somewhere of a robot getting mad, and it makes me want to die.
In the wrong mood, that is. Usually, I’ll just croon and howl along with Thom and headbang in odd time signatures. I still read four-color comics now and then too.
4. 2Pac “California Love”
(2Pac, Dr. Dre, Roger Troutman, Woody Cunningham, Norman Durham)
single [Death Row] • 1996
In the spring of 1996, I was a high school senior trying not to think about the summer, when I would return to the United States, go off to college, and begin a completely different kind of life, one I wasn’t at all sure I was prepared for, and prepared or not didn’t want.
I’ve had trouble relating to the vast majority of my peer group (that’d be surly nerds with obsessive interests in music, comics, literature, and philosophy) my entire adult life. The main difference, which I finally put my finger on when reading yet another Chris Ware work about a stunted man-child lost in a maze of narcissistic memories, is that my teenage years were not significantly unhappier than my childhood. Which could simply mean that my teenage self was as sheltered and solipsistic as my childhood self was allowed to be; or maybe I was a singularly depressed child. (Bit of both, far as I can tell.) But for the first eighteen years of my life, I dreaded adulthood. I knew how good I had it without responsibilities, worries, and a checkbook to balance. (And every young adult I knew was kind of an asshole, and why would anyone want to grow up to be an asshole?)
So in my usual way of dealing with unpleasant reality, I spent a lot of time glued to the radio, scanning between stations to find new songs to fill up the cassette tapes I listened to on the family Walkman while mowing the half-acre back yard that daily rains kept nice and lush for half the year. I listened to that last cassette, the one compiled May 1996, more after I left Guatemala than before, so its associations are bittersweet for me. It even felt like a ground shift: Babylon Zoo, Spacehog, Live, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Bush were on there, subtly transforming the landscape of pop I’d grown so familiar with into something alien and more grandiose. And there was a couple of minutes of a rap song on it.
My heart was hardening against rap, and had been for the last few years, once I realized how stupid dc Talk’s early records were. There was an almost-imperceptible cultural divide in my senior class: the “cool,” “rich,” and “athletic” kids (this is all in the context of a missionary kids’ school, thus the irony marks) could listen to hip-hop and r&b, while the impoverished nerds only liked guitar music, whether angsty or happy. (There were only eighteen people in my graduating class; solidarity rarely broke down along any clear lines, but musical taste was one of them.) As I had decided in my junior year, with the fine impetuosity of someone easily beaten at basketball, that I was an intellectual and not a physical being (good golly what a dipshit), guitar music was really the only option.
But the thumping electric-piano break, the processed-to-noise horns, the vocodered vocal hooks, and the glossy, glamorous sheen of this song that I’d recorded almost by chance was too much to resist. I didn’t know who’d recorded it, as I came in almost halfway through, but it didn’t matter. (They were all the same, anyway.) “Kyaaliforia … knows how to paartee,” sang a robot black man, and I could believe it. It was only a stopover between Serious Rock Anthems on that cassette, but it was a window into an alternate universe, one in which the crudely sexualized, thinly-produced rap party anthems of four or five years ago (I’m thinking mostly of Wreckx-N-Effect, I guess) were replaced by a heavy blanket of sound that covered all possibilities for happiness. Sex, sure, maybe, but mainly just driving around under the palm trees with your buddies, everything so blinding that you have to wear shades, the heat of the sun offest by the breeze blowing in from off the ocean. California is the eternal Promised Land in the mythology of the American unconscious, and these anonymous rappers had found a way to re-energize that myth for the electronics-and-angst 90s.
About six months later, I heard about this guy named Tupac Shakur. I was going to community college in central Phoenix for a semester before transferring to the real university that had accepted me, and everyone in my ENG 101 class was various shades of brown, and a few weeks into the semester it seemed everyone but me was shattered by the news of Shakur’s death. New tattoos sprang up overnight; one girl submitted an essay that was nothing but an analysis of his lyrics; every desk had 2PAC RIP carved into its surface within a week. My younger brothers reported that high schools and middle schools were even more distraught. I — this isn’t easy to admit — I sneered.
It’s no defense to say that I was for the first time beginning to pursue Serious Literary Themes in my writing, which had previously been dominated by rip-offs of Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings. But Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. M. Forster had become my new heroes over the past couple of years (thanks, respectively, to the backs of Penguin Wodehouse editions, The Great Gatsby on an English teacher’s Great Books list, and the Merchant-Ivory Howards End), and I was attempting a novel that combined my still-fresh memories of Guatemala with the Big Ideas of serious fiction. Like every young would-be novelist, I was a fucking snob. (Scratch young and would-be from that sentence, and it’s still pretty true.) And the unconscious racism that comes with being a young white dude who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and whose exposure to other cultures/classes/ethnicities has been at best limited held me hostage. The outpouring of grief would have been ridiculous to me no matter who it was. (I’d felt the same two years earlier about Kurt Cobain, and would feel the same a year later about Princess Diana.) But the fact that it was a rapper, and one I’d never heard of to boot (the essence of cultural snobbery right there) only strengthened my resolve to be unlike these people. I wouldn’t even inform myself. I would never listen to a Tupac Shakur song. That’d teach ’em.
(Teach them to what? To invest a large portion of their identity in a celebrity? To feel grief at the death of a fellow human being? To elevate rap lyrics to the status of literature? I can only report on my state of mind at the time, not on the logical basis for it. There was none.)
I don’t remember when it was that I first found out that Tupac was the guy who did “California Love.” I do remember having learned it at one time, and going “oh yeah,” when I came across it again a couple of years ago. And then feeling really, really stupid. (I still haven’t really gotten into Biggie. I mean, I’ve listened, but that’s it.)
“California Love” is the greatest pop song rap produced in the 1990s. This is, I’d imagine, pretty inarguable. It has so wholly swallowed up its source materials that Joe Cocker and Zapp are become mere voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way of the One Single To Rule Them All. Dr. Dre was already immortal thanks to his single-handed invention of gangsta rap and the West Coast aesthetic; with this production, he ascended to Godhood. And 2Pac?
We’re down to the final five now, and as these things normally go, each of these last tracks is going to Say Something about my vision of (or, less grandiosely, my taste in) 90s pop. Which isn’t to say that the other ninety-five were chosen more or less at random.
(Although let’s be honest, they kind of were, inasmuch as my limited experience of and interest in 90s music can be considered a randomizing factor. There’s probably something I could get into here about my relative lack of interest in the immediate past and much greater interest in the distant past being a form of self-loathing or at least an inability to face the world as it is, rather than through the romanticized lens that old records present it as having once been, but I lack the stomach to pick apart my entire consciousness so completely. I’ll leave it to the armchair psychiatrists who will someday Google onto this page and find themselves unable to keep from venting their repulsion.)
The list up to now, in a very perfunctory and sort of disappointing way, has been meant to present the overall picture of what I like about 90s pop, as well as what I mean when I say 90s pop. I clearly don’t mean Only Chart Hits — cf. Uncle Tupelo, Guided By Voices, Bikini Kill, Denim — and I also don’t mean the “brainless teenybopper dance crap” that a lot of rock fans mean by the word, though I’m not opposed to it; cf. Mariah Carey, Shanice, Aaliyah, Len. I don’t even mean pop as opposed to experimental music — cf. Arthur Russell, Disco Inferno, Aphex Twin, Neutral Milk Hotel. I do mean song-oriented, relatively concise, and in some way physical music: even the slowest and off-kilter songs on this list find a sort of groove eventually.
In my continuing effort to make sense of it all, I am both encouraged and somewhat repelled by what I usually think of as the “British view” of pop, which is that the Pop Era begins in the mid-1950s, concurrent with both the rise of rock & roll and the first British music charts. Encouraged because that definition allows you to see how pop has changed over the decades without letting go of its primary impulse to entertain, surprise, and move its audience (emotionally or physically, or at its best, both). Repelled because it draws a false distinction between pre-rock and post-rock music that doesn’t hold up to a moment’s scrutiny, and is in fact quite minor compared to the difference between, say, pre-hip-hop pop and post-hip-hop pop. (One of my favorite British music writers recently asked if swing could even be understood as pop, which just shows a terribly limited understanding of swing. What do you think raves were in the 40s?)
My primary tool of understanding, though, has not been anyone else’s systemization, or even their lack of it. It has been my iPod. In that slim black-and-silver box, smaller than a cigarette case, the decades and the centuries heat up, curl, and fuse together. It is all one quicksilver mass, and everything — everything — boils down to rhythms, chord changes, and production techniques.
The crackle and hiss of digital transfers from low-fidelity 78s is mirrored in the fuzz and feedback of indie rock, finding a rigorous honesty and integrity in noise. The weird stiff, jerky rhythms of music that mimicked the vernacular before everyone learned how to syncopate are matched by the untutored, self-created rhythms of art-school kids with hair over their eyes who spout primitivist rhetoric but listen to Art Blakey and Max Roach on the sly. And the violent pulse of unreconstructed America that made it onto the earliest records that would later be called folk (creating a welcome confusion among fans of “Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)” and “Puff The Magic Dragon”), in which horrific events are related in an eerily flat, affectless tone, is resurrected in the slacker drawl that mumbles “every time I turn around I find I’m shot.”
Pavement, as I mentioned earlier, are increasingly the locus around which the current generation’s understanding of indie rock is being organized. This is both a good thing and a terrible thing, because Pavement are obviously really, really good, but they’re also really, really specific and can’t really stand being imitated without the whole enterprise falling apart.
Indie rock is of course a movement with its roots in the 60s (Velvet Underground, Stooges, Modern Lovers, Talking Heads, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr, okay you’re caught up), in a countercultural moment when it seemed as though rock & roll might turn out to be the same thing as Dada, as Satanism, or as transgressive sexualities: perennial unsettlers of the conventional and bourgeois. Rock & roll, of course, has become as conventional and bourgeois as anything else (pop + time = something else to rebel against), and the many who ache for it to be as thrilling and rude and transgressive — and important, because it was once thrilling and rude and transgressive on such a large stage — as it was Back When are doomed to disappointment. There’s a new pop kid in town, and his name is Hip-Hop.
Which doesn’t mean that rock is dead, or at least not yet. One of the curious effects of the White Man finding himself unable to co-opt hip-hop has been that he’s still gotta listen to something, and rock mutates to fit the times. The slacker-rock of Pavement can be understood as a rock interpretation of the hazy, dry-cloud atmosphere of a lot of early-90s hip-hop, an interracial golden age of getting high and not giving a shit. It can also be heard as a culmination of the various approaches indie rock tried over the years: bone-dry production from the Velvet Underground, noisy guitars from Sonic Youth, tricky rhythms from the Feelies, the hooded-eye, don’t-care pose from Dinosaur Jr. All of whom wrestled with attempting to find a place for guitars and bass and drums in a world where macho posturing had been exposed for the lie it is and the blues had fallen into the strange twilight world they now inhabit, where white kids are made to feel inauthentic about playing them but black kids don’t want them, so gray-haired guys in Hawaiian shirts are it. How do you play rock without playing the blues? has more or less been the central question of indie since 1966. This is Pavement’s answer.
“Summer Babe” is a burst of warm-hearted color, with prickly post-beat lyrics about anything, nothing, and highly specific imagery with irrecoverable meanings. It’s the band’s first proper single (a very pop thing to be), abandoning the smartass carnival-noise fuckery of their early EPs for a straight-ahead, lovelorn riff and melodic cycle that comes to a head on the third verse, with the line “Not here babe,” followed by a cry that has been transcribed variously as “don’t go,” “torture,” or “you took it all,” and which sounds to me like “Tokyo.” Then the memorable “chorus” wheels in, repeats, breaks down, Steven Malkmus croons the title, and the song gently rocks to a finish. The effect is that of an ordinary pop song put together from spare parts and in the wrong order, held together with tape and caulking, and sounding abstract or opaque not as a fuck you to the uncomprehending listener but because those are the only words he has.
I never feel that I’m explaining myself very well. I guess I’ll leave it at that.
I’ve noted before that I hate when a piece of music is colonized by a film or TV show in the shared pop-culture imagination, so that no one can bring up, say, “Atlantis” without having to sit through a point-counterpoint on GoodFellas. But the opposite can happen too: the pilot episode of Reaper tried to stock up on cheap, unearned cred by using “Devils Haircut” in an opening scene. The snippet of Beck was the best thing about the show, at least as far as I was concerned; I haven’t watched an episode since.
But my choosing to open with this not-even-anecdote raises the question: what’s so great about the song — or maybe about Beck — that a forumlaic supernatural comedy on the CW would find clinging to its coattails valuable?
Saying something like “Beck is the most important musical figure to emerge in the 1990s” doesn’t really help: I mean, it’s true, but why? Here’s my best shot: Beck is valuable not because he’s an an innovator in any deep sense — everything he did had been done before — but because he’s a synthesist operating at a very high level. In that way, he’s comparable to Bob Dylan, who synthesized American folk traditions with rock & roll, or to Lennon/McCartney, who synthesized rock & roll with the skilled craftsmanship of classical pre-rock pop. Beck teased out the hip-hop strain embedded deep within the DNA of blues, country, folk, and rock, and brought that strain — talking blues, patter songs, off-kilter rhythms, bone-dry repetition — into the modern world of samples, electronics, distortion, and lambent meaning.
Not that he did any of this intentionally: one of the great things about such synthesists is that frequently they don’t even perceive the boundaries they’re crossing. Beck’s Los Angeles art-hippie upbringing reads like a dream of the 70s, and anyone with a more concrete grasp on the rest of the world would, it seems, have been unable to throw themselves so wholly into making every kind of music at once, rapping as though it wasn’t different from singing, singing as though it wasn’t any different from thinking, writing lyrics that say nothing in a literal sense but create worlds of associations, patterns, and dreamtime shifts that echo the way music itself operates.
“Devils Haircut” is the opening song to Beck’s most critically-acclaimed album — and Odelay is that rare album, an instant classic which has never sustained a meaningful backlash — and it’s a sort of showcase for the album itself, throwing garage rock riffs, funk breaks, 60s soul bass lines, modernist feedback, early electronic soundmaking, post-punk solos, a black man’s voice, and warm vinyl crackle into a blender and then slacker-drawling postindustrial SoCal mythopoeia over top of it all. Sometimes nonsense may say best what’s to be said. Everyone in our shellshock-and-concrete, rootless modern world knows what the briefcase blues are, even if no one can really explain it.
9. White Town “Your Woman”
(Jyoti Mishra) Abort, Retry, Fail? EP [Chrysalis] • 1997
Version 1: The Triumph Of Poptimist Democracy Over Indie Orthodoxy.
Jyoti Mishra began his pop career in the late 80s with a shambolic indie band called White Town, playing twee, chuggy songs in the C86 tradition, with lo-fi production and lyrics which alternated between the emotionally self-indulgent and the politically radical. Guitars and confrontational miserabilism have a long and respected tradition in British indie; but Mishra wasn’t a particularly notable practitioner of the increasingly rigid and strictly defined limits of leftwing indie, and his embrace of the electronic dance forms of his youth was the move that enabled him to make the most effective pop of his career, with a thumping beat that sounds as good in the club as in the headphones.
Version 2: The Triumph Of The Personal Over The Political.
For a while in the 1980s, Mishra was a full-fledged Marxist — more specifically, a Trotskyite — and while he later abandoned the rigors of left-wing ideology for a more idiosyncratic blend of feminist, psychoanalytic, political, aesthetic, and economic theories (White Town’s first album included a fourteen-page polemic with academic citations), he never stopped being dissatisfied with the status quo. Casting that dissatisfaction in romantic terms gave “Your Woman” the kind of subterranean shock effect that sneaks political truth onto the dancefloor. I could never be your woman, any more than I could be your colonial, your proletariat, or your patriarchal construct.
Version 3: The Triumph Of Ambiguity Over Identity.
Mishra is an Indian-born heterosexual man singing as a woman (or a gay man) in the whitest form of music there is, indie dance. The permutations of possibile interpreations are, if not quite endless, at least much larger than the average pop song permits. His own intention, he says, was to make a song that could be read in any number of ways, including as a disaffected Marxist, as a straight man singing to a gay woman, as a gay man singing to a straight man, or as a woman singing to … Jyoti Mishra. The lack of key identifiers (neither the narrative voice nor the “you” are ever fully gendered), as well as of more subtle racial signifiers lets each listener choose what it is they hear. Or, like perhaps most listeners, you can choose not to choose, and revel in pure multivalency.
Version 4: The Triumph Of History Over The Tyranny Of The Present.
Googling around, I found that more than a handful of listeners were convinced that the iconic trumpet sample which opens the song and returns as a motif in the chorus was nicked from Star Wars, either from the Mos Eisley cantina scene or as a sped-up version of Darth Vader’s theme. Some people are very, very stupid. The sample actually comes from bandleader Lew Stone’s 1932 cover of Bing Crosby’s “My Woman” (to which “Your Woman” can be heard as a theoretical answer record), with a vocal by Al Bowlly and trumpet by Nat Gonella. And it is the crackly, nagging three-note riff that gives the song its peculiarly haunting quality: without it, “Your Woman” would be just another mopey bedroom-electro song. But with it, all the stored-up energy of ancient, forgotten 78s sitting and waiting in the counting-room of history, long ignored and worse than derided, unknown, bursts through, and time itself is dislocated.
Version 5: The Triumph Of Triumph.
But nagging riffs and thumping beats are not enough. Those are the stuff of one-hit wonders: what makes a song last is the mood it creates. The greatest songs are those which evoke a frame of mind so precisely and comprehensively that nothing else will do. In this sense, “Your Woman” is an “I Will Survive” for the literate and undemonstrative, a reclaiming of the self from a grasping, devouring Other. We will not be played that way. We will never be your woman.
8. Björk “Hyperballad”
(Björk) Post [Elektra] • 1995
I’m a Yoko Ono fan. Not because I’m an enormous feminist, or because I have any intense interest in banshee caterwauling, or even (all that much) because I enjoy going against the received wisdom of 98% of music nerddom; but because every now and then, in the spaces between the shrieking harpy epics and the unhelpful sloganeering about Woman, she reminds me of Björk.
It’s unfortunate that Björk is only really thought of in two ways in the popular imagination: as The Woman Who Wore A Swan To Some Awards Show Or Other That One Time, or as the one-time indie-dance pixie who’s gone increasingly off the rails into unlistenable screeching, unwatchable films, and art music tedium. Both of those images capture something of the truth (I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed a post-millennial Björk album), but there’s more there than the summary judgment of an inattentive populace can really hear.
Or maybe I’m just too far up the ass of the experimental-music party to understand the Man On The Street’s point of view. (Counterpoint: Fuck the man on the street. We’re talking music nerdery here.) I am, after all, someone who listens to and enjoys György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, and Rhys Chatham; I am, in other words, part of the elitist, condescending elbow-patched arugula-eating problem. Real people can see through all that bullshit, including Björk and her weird-ass art-song tendencies.
Conversely, that statement tells me more about a certain U of I professor of finance than it does about Björk; so let’s stop talking about what people say about her and start talking about her.
Björk’s signal contribution to global pop was to hold it down and forcibly inject it with a viral transfusion of contemporary art music, much as Laurie Anderson had done in the 80s and John Cale had done in the 60s. The strange thing is that in the mid-90s art music was only a couple of feet away from the dancefloor anyway; the most-revered art-music figure in the world at the moment was Aphex Twin, and electronic manipulation had been standard in academic circles for a generation. So you might as well say that Björk introduced pop to art music — her extravagant theatricalism, her ear for sonic pleasure (as distinct from sonic originality), and her inimitable sense of pop dynamics, of build and release, for a brief shining moment made her the most interesting and important pop star/art-music composer in the world.
“Hyperballad” is actually one of her less profoundly explosive pieces; like the title says, it’s a ballad taken to logical extremes, which means that although it does eventually erupt into percussive splendor, it’s glacially paced and requires patience on the part of the listener. For some, that required patience extends to the ornate metaphor of the lyrics, in which dreams of loss serve to reinforce present happiness (a strange topic for a ballad, which are usually concerned with heartbreak neat, no ice). There are Sibelian strings, glitchy electronic beats, and (finally, transfiguratively) pounding dancefloor ecstasy.
In some ways this is the North-Hemisphere twin to Shakira’s “Ojos Así” — both Björk and Shakira are global pop stars who incorporate a lot more thought and compositional variety into their music than they’re generally given credit for, but only one of them has honor in her own country.
Ah hah, hush that fuss. I know there are people who hear this song as Outkast’s sell-out moment, when they abandoned their loosely-structured P-funk alien gangster hardcore hip-hop and went for the screaming teenybopper audience that haunts the nightmares of every strict constructionist music fan, as the early tremor that presages “B. O. B.,” “Mrs. Jackson,” and (shudder) “Hey Ya.” But as you’re sick of hearing me say by now, whenever pop is defined in opposition to anything, I’m on the side of pop.
In point of fact, “Rosa Parks” is the halfway point between the overstuffed, shaggy, and fitfully intelligible material Dre and Boi made their name on, and the increasingly direct, engaging, and elegant music they’ve made since blowing up. With a killer, even prophetic hook (“We the type of people make the club get crunk”), a BPM that encourages dancing more than getting high, and a busy arrangement that finds room for a nonsense Andre vocal (“lackalackalacka lackalacka”), an all-but-inaudible Curtis Mayfield sample, and a honking harmonica breakdown, it’s the perfect marriage of pop simplicity and the idea orgy that made (and continues to make) Outkast Outkast.
A word on the title. The late Mrs. Parks sued Outkast for misuse of her name in a song which had apparently nothing to do with her; lawyers got greedy, record labels got involved, and it all came more or less to nothing. But it highlights a breach which tends to be invisible to white people (just as white class identifiers can puzzle black folk) — the first black generation gap, usually described in terms of the Civil Rights generation vs. the hip-hop generation. In a way, it’s a measure of progress that black Americans can finally afford to not maintain solidarity; the very struggle over what it means to be black means that the question is, for the first time ever, open — that is, not imposed from the outside. (Which ain’t sayin’ racism is over, kid; I ain’t that dumb.) Anyway, Dre and Boi used Rosa Parks’ name in order to symbolize a historic turning point: they will now begin leaving all their peers in the dust. Which, yes, that’s what they proceeded to do, but still, man, that’s kind of a reductive thing to do to the woman.
Because it’s not like they can boast of an ignorance of history. The fellas’ increasing obsession with black musical history, reaching past the funk breaks which basically constituted hip-hop, can be seen as starting here, too. Idlewild, the movie and the album, are heavily flawed, but there’s a peculiar energy to it that can be found nowhere else in modern hip-hop, the way country blues, second-line marches, and the holy 40s triptych of swing, boogie-woogie, and jive are overhauled and rebuilt for the twenty-first century. The harmonica solo here is only a glimmer of that time-traveling future, but it performs the same function: field-holler stomps, Little Walter in Chicago, and the spirit of Mr. DeFord Bailey (both the first harmonica-playing recording star and the first performer on the Grand Ole Opry, and he was black) shimmer into being while Organized Noize (right?) lays down the kind of juke stomp that makes you want to fuss and fight and, er, carry on. Bump and shlump, baby, bump and shlump.
6. Blur “For Tomorrow”
(Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, Dave Rowntree) Modern Life Is Rubbish [Food] • 1993
Few impulse purchases have had such a lasting impact on me as the moment when I picked up a used copy of The Best Of Blur in the summer of 2000 on the strength of the cartoony cover art and the fact that I recognized them as the ones who did “Song 2,” which I thought of as just about the perfect hard-rock song at the time. (While reading around in preparation for writing this, I came across the following description of what appealed to me about it: “The song is practically over once it’s begun, something that just never happened with lethargic grunge.” It took the jump-up-and-down dynamics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and removed the boring old angst; it was awesome.)
Let’s set the scene. It’s 2000; I have been slowly getting into music history for about a year, thanks to Napster, end-of-millennium best-of lists, and copious free time. I have found something of a spiritual home in the 1960s British Invasion: the Beatles yes of course, but also the Stones, the Zombies, the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, the Troggs, the Moody Blues, the Creation, the Hollies, the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, etc. etc. This music, and classic rock in the Jimi-Zep-Floyd mold, and also a bit 80s synthpop, is filling a need in me that the stuff I hear on the radio increasingly isn’t. (Because I’m listening to the wrong stations; but that’s another essay.)
I don’t actually remember the experience of listening to The Best Of Blur for the first time. I know where I probably was; I know what I was probably doing; I just listened to it so often that it became part of my mental furniture, ready to pack up and move along with me to the next stage in life at a moment’s notice. Every time I listen to a Blur album, there’s (still) a twinge of “hang on now” when the goosey club track “Girls And Boys” isn’t followed by the Kinksian knees-up “Charmless Man,” or the Eurosophisticate sigh of “To The End” isn’t succeeded by the modernist electro-buzz of “On Your Own.”
But the effect was electric. There were people making music in my own time that compared with the pop rush, guitar buzz, and (let’s be honest) exotic Englishness of the Sixties music I loved! A magical few years would follow, when vista after vista would open up to me, punk and new wave and glam and soul and country-rock and post-punk and shoegaze and somehow Blur would always still be waiting for me there, waving a friendly hand and saying, “see, this is where we nicked it from.” I burned CD after CD, trying to express through the medium of compilation what I felt to be true, the truth to which Blur introduced me: that pop has no one master, that it’s really all just music, that hooks and harmonies and rhythms and wit are all one ever needs. How did Blondie and the Jam and 4 Non Blondes and Radiohead sound next to Blur? Great; how did the Clash and Wilco and Joan Jett and Madness sound? Still great. In fact, just about the only people who didn’t sound great next to Blur were Oasis.
“For Tomorrow” became my default Blur track, for reasons I can’t really remember. (Parklife, predictably, became my favorite Blur album, but Modern Life Is Rubbish was my first.) I’m pretty sure “For Tomorrow” got me into soul music, thanks to the horns. More explicitly, I understood horns as an awesome sound in themselves for the first time on “For Tomorrow,” which enabled me to hear past the lack of (what I recognized as) guitar on classic soul records. It still strikes me as unanalyzable, like the most basic element of pop. I know it isn’t; in fact, I know the record’s got flaws, because I can think of some. But I can’t hear them.
Last thing, and then I’ll shut up. This very nearly wasn’t the Blur song on the list. One of the things I did last December to prepare for compiling this thing was to sit down and listen to all of the 90s songs from The Pitchfork 500. I saw “For Tomorrow,” furrowed my brow and muttered, “which one’s that one again?” and then when I heard it almost physically recoiled. No. No. Too deeply ingrained; too personal; too too. It was like having the poetry you scribbled in the back of your notebook read aloud to the class; poetry you’d forgotten you’d written, and were now ashamed of, not because it was bad poetry (necessarily), but because you were no longer that person.
I was going to be firm. I was going to put “This Is A Low,” or maybe “To The End” on here. But then I listened again, and sigh. La la, la la la, la la la la la la lalala.
