Every Great Song Ever

The Passage: “Man of War” (Enflame, 1983)

There’s a very simple reason I’m posting this song today: last night, after ten years of listening to it, I finally realized what Dick Witts is singing on the refrain. 

I guess it’s funny that, in a time when the lyrics for just about anything can be found on innumerable websites, I never bothered to look it up, because I’ve always been curious what the words were. the way he contorts his voice into a strangled, freaked-out panic certainly makes the line feel important. All I could ever make out, though, was issatrack tomayfashamayaloe. 

I love that vocal delivery, by the way. It makes what was already a pretty great post-punk groove feel apocalyptic, as the lyrics suggest it should feel. So how strange that the bit I could never understand until last night turns out to be the decidedly un-apocalyptic line, “It’s a drag that this man should be alone.” He’s a lone. And it’s a real drag. The understatement and over-delivery are a somehow perfect match.

By the way, I’m glad I never looked the lyrics up. It was much more rewarding when I realized what he was saying myself. 

Bruce Springsteen: “I’m On Fire” (Born In The USA, 1984)

Years ago (as in a decade or more; I was in college at the time), Late Night with Conan O’Brien ran a gag video in the style of those CD and LP compilations they used to advertise in the middle of the night on the networks. (Do they still advertise those? I haven’t watched TV at 2:00 am in a long, long time, but it seems like sets like that are obsolete now.)

The schtick was that it was Max Weinberg’s Greatest Hits, and it was just Max playing the drum tracks from all the Springsteen hits. You can see it here, because everything is on the Internet. It’s funny stuff, and the point is really driven home when max plays “My Home Town,” which involves hitting the hi-hat and nothing else. 

They could have conveyed the same point using “I’m On Fire.” I listened to the song closely several times tonight, and he never varies from the very simple pattern he sets down at the beginning of the song. He doesn’t need to, either. This has long been one of my favorite Springsteen songs, and I think its sparse simplicity is the reason. So many of his best songs lean toward constant overload, where even the quite parts feel crammed with activity, but this one doesn’t. It goes the opposite way.

It has a fraction of the lyrics of something like “Born To Run” or “Meeting Across the River, but it doesn’t need any more than that to convey its protagonist’s probably unhealthy lust for a woman he likely should not be pursuing. The minimal backing plays up the fevered intensity of his longing and gives the unsettling impression that he’s holding back, controlling himself, and things could get bad if he loses that control.

Really, how much more do have to say when your second verse begins like this: “sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull/and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.” That’s about half the verse lyrics in the song right there, in two lines. And there’s Max, slapping away at the rim of his snare, so calmly. This was recorded around the same time as Nebraska, before most of the rest of Born in the USA, and you can hear how this might have functioned as a bridge back to the overloaded sound he took a break from in 1982. 

Nothing in particular made me think of this song—it just came up on the shuffle as I was driving home and the sun was going down, and there was a huge glowing X in the sky made of jet contrails. The weather is so warm.

Liner Note:

I never was fond of the “little girl/daddy” bit in the opening line—I always hated that kind of paternalism—but I guess songwriters are artists, and they paint with the palette they’re given, and paternalism, is definitely a much-swirled daub on the rock and roll lyrics palette.

Bob Marley & The Wailers: “Redemption Song” (Uprising, 1980)

Yesterday, I went grocery shopping at Meijer. For those outside the upper Midwest, Meijer is a superstore, like a Wal-Mart or a Greatland Target. You can go there for your normal groceries and pick up some pillows or workout clothes or an X-Box or some other future garbage you may or may not actually need while you’re there.

When I was there on Sunday, standing in the aisle next to the macaroni and cheese when I heard a familiar acoustic guitar figure on the PA. It was Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

I think about the politics of music in public spaces from time to time. I think about what it means to license a piece of music to market a product, I think about how songs can connect us or create a heightened sense of reality by their use, in media or simply in a pubic or private space.

I don’t have any great problem with licensing, contextless presentation of music in public, or really anything else that keeps money flowing through the music industry and hopefully to the people who made it, or in some cases their survivors. I don’t think music can be cheapened by cheap presentation—it’s incumbent upon us as listeners to keep the value in them.

Hearing “Redemption Song” in that superstore, while filling a basket with food, seemed somehow profane to me, though. “Good Day Sunshine” is one thing, so are “Toxic,” “Stairway To Heaven,” “Take On Me,” “Sing Sing Sing,” and, hell, “Jammin.” I can hear them anywhere and think nothing of it, as I can with thousands of other songs, including many that I love to death.

But this, it felt wrong. I was filing past these rows of brightly designed packages and hear is the last new song released during the lifetime of Bob Marley, just him and his guitar, laying bare the deepest spiritual thoughts of a dying man. Marley had been diagnosed with cancer before he wrote this, and had refused the amputation that likely would have saved his life on religious grounds.

That the same spirituality he is calling on in this song is central to his cause of death has always been one of the hard things about listening to the song for me. But more than that, the words were so dissonant to the experience I was having in this giant, overlit store that I couldn’t reconcile them. Atomic energy is what powers that store, along with coal—it comes from Fermi 1, down in Frenchtown Charter Township. It had a partial meltdown in 1966.

Marley sings about freedom in this song, paraphrasing Marcus Garvey when he talks about emancipation from mental slavery. Ostensibly, these huge stores that go on and on forever are about offering a type of surface-level freedom of choice. You have options, all laid before you on neat shelves. Too many options sometimes, sometimes a paralyzing number.

I think the way we live is essentially our choice at a certain level. But I also think there are certain social realities beyond our control that necessarily dictate or at least channel aspects of our lives. The superstore is part of that.

I don’t have a problem with presenting music in public without context. It’s part of our environment, one we built for ourselves. But some songs really should be left out of it.

Plastic People of the Universe: “Moucha V Rannim Pive” (Hovezi Porazka, 1983)

Václav Havel died on December 18th. This had no direct impact on my life, but I still felt the loss.

Havel may have been the best politician of the 20th Century. By “best politician” I don’t mean the best debater or the one who got his way or convinced the most people to follow him—I mean that he comported himself during his time in politics in a manner that should be the gold standard for politicians.

He was the first post-Communism president of Czechoslovakia, and when Slovakia’s intent to separate from the Czech Republic became clear, Havel was opposed to the idea. He could have behaved like so many other presidents. He could have brought in the army. He could have rolled tanks into Bratislava.

Instead, he didn’t even meddle in the democratic processes that made Slovakia independent. He let it happen, because he knew that even though he didn’t want it to happen it was going to, and that to push back would escalate things. There were no flames or shots fired when Czechoslovakia broke up—Havel resigned so he wouldn’t have to preside over the event. There were no flames or shots fired because Havel was a reasonable man.

Havel was an artist. He wrote plays and books. He was part of the Czech underground during Communism. His plays were banned in his homeland after the Soviet invasion in 1968, and he wasn’t allowed to leave the country to see foreign productions. He didn’t shy from a fight, though—he went to prison multiple times for his public dissent.

One of the acts of dissent that got him in trouble was Charter 77, a document he wrote in collaboration with other dissidents criticizing the government’s human rights abuses. It was written partly in response to the imprisonment of the members of Plastic People of the Universe, Prague’s most prominent rock band. The group was essentially imprisoned for noncomformity—some of their lyrics were the work of banned writer Egon Bondy, their hair was long, they used obscenities in their lyrics, and they played illegal shows.

I think that when a leader comes from this kind of background, it gives him certain perspective that many politicians, coming from backgrounds of privilege, the study of political science, or other usual roads to power great and small, simply lack. The man wrote plays. He understood irony and recognized it in his own life.

Havel never wanted to be a politician. He was hoisted by his own petard into the role. I think this is the ideal kind of leader—the kind of man who doesn’t want power, but does want what’s right.

We haven’t had many of them. Václav Havel was one. His loss is a loss for everyone.

Youssou N’Dour & Etoile de Dakar: “Wadiour” (Volume One, 1982)

Before he was adding his voice to big hit singles by Peter Gabriel and holding down the fort as respected world music royalty, Youssou N’Dour was just one of hundreds of young musicians toiling night after night in the clubs and hotels of Dakar, striving to be heard.

N’Dour and the band he was part of, Etoile de Dakar, were pioneers of mbalax, a style that incorporated local tonal drums into the dance orchestra music that dominated the Senegalese music scene in the 1970s, principally in the guise of Orchestra Baobab. You can hear a bit of that transition to mbalax in this song, though “Wadiour” a little more in debt to Baobab than a lot of Etoile’s other music from the 1980s.

The biggest debt is in the guitar work. That floating wah-wah pattern that defines this song and locks in so well with the horns is one of my favorite lead lines ever. The whole song is built around it—even N’Dour, the voice, seems to sing in reaction to it.

N’Dour’s a guy I haven’t followed much. I like some of his music a lot, especially from early in his career (although Egypt, released a few years ago, is pretty damn great), but he’s also done a lot that didn’t interest me. I think he was better paired with startling talking drum eruptions than Neneh Cherry, I guess. This song, though, is among my favorites, electric, alive, and just a little ragged.

Blue Öyster Cult: “Burnin’ For You” (Fire Of Unknown Origin, 1981)

Blue Öyster Cult (don’t forget the umlaut!) occupy a strange space in the classic rock pantheon. They were very popular, but only had a tiny handful of hits, the three biggest of which were all written or co-written and sung by guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser. I have no idea what the creative dynamics were like in the band, but it almost makes you wonder why he wasn’t their principle singer and songwriter.

I think it has something to do with the way the band operated in general. the band wasn’t formed in the conventional way, with people meeting and deciding to play together. They were brought together by Sandy Pearlman, who became their manager, in 1967 under the name Soft White Underbelly. That name was dropped after a bad review.

The band was redubbed Blue Öyster Cult after a line in Pearlman’s poem “Imaginos”—the Blue Oyster Cult (no umlaut) in the poem is a group of superintelligent aliens who guide the course of humanity. Depending on who you ask, the superfluous umlaut was either the suggestion of keyboardist Allen Lanier or rock critic Richard Meltzer, the latter of whom would go on to write lyrics for several Blue Öyster Cult songs, including “Burnin’ For You.”

That work with outside songwriters was another thing that made Blue Öyster Cult odd—in the 70s, the idea of the self-contained band became very important. Bands were expected to write everything themselves in addition to performing it. Here was a pivotal American hard rock band that didn’t do all its own writing, was guided by an impresario and didn’t have a front man to focus on.

They made some great albums—it’s funny to think of Meltzer, one of the most well-known critics of his day, being so involved with the band, in part because all the references to aliens, literature, “psychic warfare,” astronomy, ghosts, and the power of rock and roll in the band’s music are exactly the kind of thing critics came to deride in the post-punk era.

Not that all that derision was necessarily warranted (and hell, they were a pretty big influence on a lot of punk bands as well as metal bands), but it is where the conversation went. 1981’s Fire Of Unknown Origin is stuffed with all that subject matter. The fire of the title appears to be a UFO that abducts the singer’s girlfriend, for instance.

“Burnin’ For You” is a much more conventional lust song, though. I have always loved the harmonized guitar part that opens the song, followed by that lead part and strange drum pattern. It’s sort of a power pop song with a heavy emphasis on the power. Roeser’s lead guitar throughout the song is great—I love the way it threads through the final verse.

I picked up a bunch of their albums recently, and while I wouldn’t say any of them are perfect, the band was worth a revisit for sure. They had a certain fun with hard rock that it seems like so few other bands ever did. I don’t exactly how aware they were of how over-the-top a lot of their work was, but I suspect they knew pretty well and decided to roll with it.

Cold Cassette 9

R.E.M.: “Finest Worksong” (Document, 1987)

By now you know: R.E.M. announced their breakup yesterday. In my opinion, it wasn’t the worst news to come out of Georgia yesterday, but this blog isn’t about politics, so let’s talk about this band.

As uninterrupted 30-year runs go, very few bands can lay claim to having one as rich and rewarding as R.E.M.’s. Even if you think, as I largely do, that their post-Bill Berry output never quite matched the work of the original quartet version of the band, it’s hard to deny that hey were creative and interesting to the end. They never stopped trying.

Back when they chose the name R.E.M. for their band, I doubt these guys knew just how appropriate the name would be. They made a lot of different types of music over their career, but to my ears, there is a thread that runs through it all. Even their most demonstrative music seems to live in this place where the dream state can intrude at any time.

Put another way, in both music and lyrics, the band filtered reality and memory in such a way that it felt hyper-real and surreal at the same time. It’s a hard intangible to describe, but they had it.

I like a lot of their post-IRS output (Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi especially; I also seem to like Reveal a lot more than most people), but for me, the five albums they made for that label possess a consistency and mystique that they never duplicated. I can’t really think of another band that duplicated it either.

The first R.E.M. record I bought was Document. I think I was 15 or 16 when I bought it. I listened to classic rock and had only a small handful of records made during my own lifetime at the time, and most of those were by weird little bands that didn’t feel like they had any bearing on the larger conversation of contemporary music. Buying Document felt like a step toward engaging with where things were at the time, though I should note that the album was already 7 or 8 years old at the time and “The One I Love” was embedded in the classic rock playlist.

Maybe that’s a testament to how far ahead of the alt-rock curve R.E.M., maybe it’s more reflective of my own ignorance at the time; regardless, Document sounded modern and vital to me. My favorite songs on it were “The One I Love,” “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” “Oddfellows Local 151” and “Finest Worksong.”

I’m going to talk about the last one here, but before I do, I wanted to mention that for me, the key to why I love “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” isn’t the parenthetical “(And I Feel Fine).” It’s the “As We Know It.” The way I see it, the end of the world “as we know it” could go two ways: it could get worse or it could get better. It’s easy to forget that the world as we know it now hasn’t got everything all figured out. Change can be painful, but it’s almost always necessary.

But to “Finest Worksong.” The first time I put on Document I didn’t expect something so strident to come roaring out of the speakers. I had R.E.M. pegged as the jangly rock band everyone always said they were. I knew about six or seven of their songs at the time and apart from “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Drive,” they all seemed to basically fit that label. Hearing Document in full was my first confirmation that jangle was just a part of the story.

Document is the band’s most overtly political record. Reagan/Thatcher fatigue covers the whole thing like a scab. “Finest Worksong” appropriately sounds like a call to arms. Buried in the cryptic exhortations to do something with the moment are hints of emerging American class divides. In that sense, the song travels well to the present day, where those same divides are wider than ever.

These things do proceed in cycles, so most well-written commentary gets a second life at some point, but what I can’t help noticing is that this particular cycle seems to grow more extreme each time it comes around. “Finest Worksong” makes even more sense in 2011 than it did in 1987.

Is that one of the reasons the band had trouble making new music that sounded quite so relevant toward the end of its career? Their own old music was standing in the way. It’s hard to stay on top. that’s why most bands don’t last thirty years, and those that do don’t often sound as good as R.E.M. when the end finally comes.