This one would be ridiculously easy if I went with a straight-up comedy song. Spinal Tap, Randy Newman, Tom Lehrer, almost anything from the first 8 years of The Simpsons, nerd-du-jour Jonathan Coulton...plenty of options. Hell, if I hadn't already mentioned it last month, I'd just throw up a video of Richard Thompson's 'Read About Love' ("He gave me a book / The cover was plain / Written by a doctor with a German name / It had glossy pictures, serious stuff / I read it seven times, and I knew it well enough") and call it a day. But I figured it would be more interesting - marginally-so, at any rate - to go with a funny song by a songwriter who doesn't normally go quite so obviously for the laughs.
Of course, there are still plenty of choices here, too. Plenty of normally-serious artists have tried to lighten things up over the years, to do something which offsets the relentless po-facedness of their 'normal' output. But unfortunately, most of them suck. This one, though, doesn't. Well, I don't think so, anyway.
The words "produced by Ben Folds" wouldn't normally fill me with confidence. Aside from his work on the surprisingly-excellent, no-really-it-is William Shatner album Has Been from a few years ago, I've never been fond of Folds' strain of self-consciously quirky college rock, and coupled with the trying-too-hard video, this sort of thing would normally set my teeth on edge. And yet...it works. For me, at least. It's not exactly a major piece of work from Palmer, and it sticks out like a sore thumb on the album it comes from - Who Killed Amanda Palmer, a record dominated by thoughtful, sensitively-arranged pieces of musically- and lyrically-literate art-pop - but it made me laugh the first time I heard it, and it still does. A song about rape, abortion and teenage ostracism wouldn't normally be the most obvious subject for an infectiously-catchy bit of comedy-pop, but it works here.
I forget when exactly I first heard this song, but it was actually one of the first Amanda Palmer songs I really listened to - I was vaguely aware of her former band, the Dresden Dolls, but they'd never quite grabbed me, so when she released a solo album, it rather passed me by. But I came across this song on Youtube one day, quite by accident, and it clicked with me, making me curious enough to check out the rest of the album. As I mentioned above, 'Oasis' is miles removed from the rest of the album in terms of content, style and tone - many critics seem to single it out as the weakest track, in fact, and while I don't agree, I can understand why - but it was the one which first introduced me to her music, so I retain something of a soft spot for it. The album would, to be fair, almost certainly be stronger without this song - it's funny, but out-of-place, and it drags down the far more overtly serious songs surrounding it, arguably harming the overall thematic cohesion - but on the whole, I'm still glad it's there.
It takes an aggressively light-hearted approach to a serious topic, and while that's a trick which plenty of people have attempted before, to manage it without trivializing the issue in question is still a neat trick to pull off. I reckon thatshe manages it perfectly, although I can understand why some people disagree strongly - the bottom line, as Palmer herself has pointed out, is that if the same lyric were set to a minor-key dirge, no-one would have batted an eyelid. That there's a disturbingly fine line between the comic and the tragic is hardly a new discovery, but this is about as good an illustration of the principle as any other I can think of.
More importantly, though, it's laugh-out-loud funny, in that gleefully-embracing-the-tasteless way which still so often works for me, however juvenile or crass. And the video is perfect - the high-five at 1:06 cracks me up.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Day 24: A song I want played at my funeral
I'm just going to go ahead and assume that absolutely everyone played this game at some point, so I'll skip over the likes of 'Highway to Hell', 'Another One Bites The Dust', 'Going Underground' and other, similarly-hilarious gems, and just get straight to the song.
On a tear-jerkingly self-indulgent note (and really, if you can't be tear-jerkingly self-indulgent when choosing a song for your own funeral, what's the point?), there's always be Warren Zevon's 'Keep Me In Your Heart', which I wrote about a few weeks ago. But that'd be senselessly cruel - if people are (hopefully) going to be pretty sad already, there's no need to push them over the edge. While I'd be less inclined to go with a "wittily" inappropriate song than I would have been a decade or so ago, I still suspect that the best choice would be something a little more upbeat, more positive. Funerals are a downer to start with, there's no need to pile on the misery. And since I've already written about the Rolling Stones, which according to my own arbitrary and self-imposed rules means I can't write about 'Shine A Light', which would probably have been my first choice...
It's a great song, obviously, but this version is particularly brilliant. I'd hope that I wouldn't need to explain why I love the Ramones so much - they're quite clearly one of the greatest pop groups ever formed - but this cover is a particular highlight of their career, for me. It may not be a blindingly-obvious funeral song (which is, of course, one of the reasons I'm choosing it), but it works better than it might initially appear. Like most of Dylan's songs from this period, the underlying meaning is buried under a slightly-purple lyrical overload, but at its heart, the song is a simple enough iteration of the "it's better to regret what you've done than what you didn't do" principle, and as such, perfectly-suitable for the occasion. Besides, the gloriously-simplistic guitar solo from 1:18 - 1:33 is about as life-affirming a musical moment as I can think of, and its presence would have substantially improved 100% of the funerals I've ever attended.
Yes, the deeply uninspired nature of this entry is part of why I haven't updated the blog in over a fortnight. But it's not most of it. Sorry, it shouldn't happen again any time soon.
On a tear-jerkingly self-indulgent note (and really, if you can't be tear-jerkingly self-indulgent when choosing a song for your own funeral, what's the point?), there's always be Warren Zevon's 'Keep Me In Your Heart', which I wrote about a few weeks ago. But that'd be senselessly cruel - if people are (hopefully) going to be pretty sad already, there's no need to push them over the edge. While I'd be less inclined to go with a "wittily" inappropriate song than I would have been a decade or so ago, I still suspect that the best choice would be something a little more upbeat, more positive. Funerals are a downer to start with, there's no need to pile on the misery. And since I've already written about the Rolling Stones, which according to my own arbitrary and self-imposed rules means I can't write about 'Shine A Light', which would probably have been my first choice...
It's a great song, obviously, but this version is particularly brilliant. I'd hope that I wouldn't need to explain why I love the Ramones so much - they're quite clearly one of the greatest pop groups ever formed - but this cover is a particular highlight of their career, for me. It may not be a blindingly-obvious funeral song (which is, of course, one of the reasons I'm choosing it), but it works better than it might initially appear. Like most of Dylan's songs from this period, the underlying meaning is buried under a slightly-purple lyrical overload, but at its heart, the song is a simple enough iteration of the "it's better to regret what you've done than what you didn't do" principle, and as such, perfectly-suitable for the occasion. Besides, the gloriously-simplistic guitar solo from 1:18 - 1:33 is about as life-affirming a musical moment as I can think of, and its presence would have substantially improved 100% of the funerals I've ever attended.
Yes, the deeply uninspired nature of this entry is part of why I haven't updated the blog in over a fortnight. But it's not most of it. Sorry, it shouldn't happen again any time soon.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Day 23: A song I want to play at my wedding
Confession: I'm already married. To be honest, when the day actually arrived, I didn't worry for a second about the music. It came as a bit of a surprise to me - I'd envisaged complicated interactions with the DJ, demanding specific songs, generally directing the flow of music - but in the event, I quite simply had more important things to worry about. And everything went fine anyway.
I still wish I'd put my foot down a bit more firmly about the first dance, though. As requested by my parents-in-law (who, since they were paying for most of it, were thoroughly entitled to a say), we went with a traditional waltz, which went comically wrong when the DJ unsuspectingly played a Vienna box waltz instead of the more standard number we'd been expecting. Neither my wife nor I know how to dance a proper Viennese box waltz, which resulted in much hilarity. Still, you can't win them all.
If we'd gone for a slow non-waltz song instead, though, I'd have chosen this song.
The lyric is a bit more ambiguous than might be considered ideal for a wedding song ("The time has is nigh / When I must remove your wings / And you must try to fly"), but there's a swooning, elegant beauty to the melody which almost makes up for it. Quite simply, it's one of the most gorgeous songs I've ever heard.
I still wish I'd put my foot down a bit more firmly about the first dance, though. As requested by my parents-in-law (who, since they were paying for most of it, were thoroughly entitled to a say), we went with a traditional waltz, which went comically wrong when the DJ unsuspectingly played a Vienna box waltz instead of the more standard number we'd been expecting. Neither my wife nor I know how to dance a proper Viennese box waltz, which resulted in much hilarity. Still, you can't win them all.
If we'd gone for a slow non-waltz song instead, though, I'd have chosen this song.
The lyric is a bit more ambiguous than might be considered ideal for a wedding song ("The time has is nigh / When I must remove your wings / And you must try to fly"), but there's a swooning, elegant beauty to the melody which almost makes up for it. Quite simply, it's one of the most gorgeous songs I've ever heard.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Day 22: A song I listen to when I'm sad
This could go one of two ways.
What sort of music I listen to when I'm sad really depends on what kind of sad I'm feeling. Sometimes, if I'm just a bit down in the dumps, I want cheering up, so I'll go for something cheerful. There are songs which it's impossible to listen to without smiling - I wrote about one of them back on Day 3 of this project, in fact. But when I'm really cripplingly, my-puppy-just-died-and-my-wife-done-gone-left-me, capital-S Sad, then all I really want to do is wallow in it. And for that, I need a really heartbreaking soundtrack.
To be honest, the album I'm most likely to turn to under such unfortunate circumstances would be the Manic Street Preachers' 1994 masterpiece of pain and self-loathing, The Holy Bible. But I'll be writing about the Manics, and my longstanding - if troubled - relationship with them in a later entry, and I decided when I first started this project that I wasn't going to duplicate any bands across multiple posts. Besides, while it may be my first port of call, THB is far from the only such record in my collection. Sometimes, too, instead of dragging out the spectre of my inner tortured adolescent, I like to indulge in something a little more...well...classy.
It's hardly a fresh observation that a large number of African-American musicians, particularly in the first half of the 20th Century, were able to distill the desperation and pain of generations of abuse into magnificent, heart-rendingly powerful music. And this song is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of that - still one of the most brutal, devastating pieces of protest music ever produced. I must admit to finding something uncomfortable, almost obscene, about my ability to appropriate that agony as a way of indulging my own, rather less significant misery, but that's one of the reasons it's such a remarkable song - while the themes it addresses are very specific to their time and context, the emotions underpinning them still resonate powerfully completely devoid of that context.
Billie Holiday is, quite clearly, one of the greatest singers of the century. Her range may have been limited, her voice untrained and occasionally-thin, but the weight of emotion she could put into the words she sang remains unequalled. Given the sad story of her life, it's impossible not to read a strong autobiographical element into the frail, trembling vulnerability of her vocals - 'Strange Fruit' is the best-known, and possibly the best, example of this, taking the deeply-personal and spinning it into something universal. There's a rawness to her singing which bypasses any melodic weaknesses in the performance, and even after all these years, I still find it hard to hear without crying.
What sort of music I listen to when I'm sad really depends on what kind of sad I'm feeling. Sometimes, if I'm just a bit down in the dumps, I want cheering up, so I'll go for something cheerful. There are songs which it's impossible to listen to without smiling - I wrote about one of them back on Day 3 of this project, in fact. But when I'm really cripplingly, my-puppy-just-died-and-my-wife-done-gone-left-me, capital-S Sad, then all I really want to do is wallow in it. And for that, I need a really heartbreaking soundtrack.
To be honest, the album I'm most likely to turn to under such unfortunate circumstances would be the Manic Street Preachers' 1994 masterpiece of pain and self-loathing, The Holy Bible. But I'll be writing about the Manics, and my longstanding - if troubled - relationship with them in a later entry, and I decided when I first started this project that I wasn't going to duplicate any bands across multiple posts. Besides, while it may be my first port of call, THB is far from the only such record in my collection. Sometimes, too, instead of dragging out the spectre of my inner tortured adolescent, I like to indulge in something a little more...well...classy.
It's hardly a fresh observation that a large number of African-American musicians, particularly in the first half of the 20th Century, were able to distill the desperation and pain of generations of abuse into magnificent, heart-rendingly powerful music. And this song is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of that - still one of the most brutal, devastating pieces of protest music ever produced. I must admit to finding something uncomfortable, almost obscene, about my ability to appropriate that agony as a way of indulging my own, rather less significant misery, but that's one of the reasons it's such a remarkable song - while the themes it addresses are very specific to their time and context, the emotions underpinning them still resonate powerfully completely devoid of that context.
Billie Holiday is, quite clearly, one of the greatest singers of the century. Her range may have been limited, her voice untrained and occasionally-thin, but the weight of emotion she could put into the words she sang remains unequalled. Given the sad story of her life, it's impossible not to read a strong autobiographical element into the frail, trembling vulnerability of her vocals - 'Strange Fruit' is the best-known, and possibly the best, example of this, taking the deeply-personal and spinning it into something universal. There's a rawness to her singing which bypasses any melodic weaknesses in the performance, and even after all these years, I still find it hard to hear without crying.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Day 21: A song I listen to when I'm happy
Happiness is a bugger to write about, it really is. So, I'm not going to. In a startling break from established form, this is going to be a no-waffle post. Honest, it is.
There's so much music that I listen to when I'm happy that selecting a single song was stumping me. So, as I usually do in moments of indecision, I asked my wife what to do. She said "do a song that makes you strut, you're always happy when you strut". And she's right, I am - it's laughably-easy to spot when something suitably-rhythmic comes up on my iPod, because my entire gait unconsciously changes - my stride lengthens, my posture loosens, and a slight swing works its way into my shoulders. I probably look absurd, but I don't care. Because I'm happy.
And when it comes to songs to which I can really get my strut on, there's one example which stands out head and gently-swinging shoulders above the rest.
If that rhythm doesn't get you moving at least a little bit, there's every possibility that you are actually dead. Seriously, you should probably get that checked out.
There's so much music that I listen to when I'm happy that selecting a single song was stumping me. So, as I usually do in moments of indecision, I asked my wife what to do. She said "do a song that makes you strut, you're always happy when you strut". And she's right, I am - it's laughably-easy to spot when something suitably-rhythmic comes up on my iPod, because my entire gait unconsciously changes - my stride lengthens, my posture loosens, and a slight swing works its way into my shoulders. I probably look absurd, but I don't care. Because I'm happy.
And when it comes to songs to which I can really get my strut on, there's one example which stands out head and gently-swinging shoulders above the rest.
If that rhythm doesn't get you moving at least a little bit, there's every possibility that you are actually dead. Seriously, you should probably get that checked out.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Day 20: A song I listen to when I'm angry
This is going to be a tricky one, because I don't tend to listen to music when I'm angry. It's possibly the only emotional state which I find actively antithetical to music, in fact - I can (and do) listen to music when a bit tetchy, but that's as close as it gets. When I'm full-on, properly angry, it's the last thing I'd ever think of.
So, I'm going for the nostalgia option, and looking back to when this wasn't the case. As a teenager, I was angry a lot. Most of us were, I suspect. It's a hormone thing. And, as angry teenagers are wont to do, I was terribly fond of storming off to my bedroom, slamming the door, and listening to angry music at an antisocial, deliberately parent-bothering volume. Then I'd get all righteous and indignant when I was, most unreasonably, asked politely to turn it down. Teenagers are like that.
I sort of wish now that I'd been into metal as an adolescent - there may not be a genre in music so perfectly-suited to the expression of raw, inarticulate rage. But it wasn't until quite a bit later that I really got past the surface-level silliness of so much metal, and learned to appreciate it despite - and, in some cases, because of - that silliness. Besides, as I've mentioned before, it was discovering progressive death metal - bands like Opeth, specializing in a noodly flavour of heavy that you can really stroke your chin to - that softened me on metal in the first place, and that's not really the best sort of angry music.
Back in those days, my choices were much more limited - I'm thinking of a time before I'd even discovered Public Enemy, another group who do rage exceptionally well, albeit with rather more sophistication than the majority of metal acts. But back then, between the ages of - let's say - 14 and 17, the hardest, heaviest, angriest music I listened to was usually somewhere on the border between punk and hard rock.
I had plenty to choose from, obviously. The world is hardly short on punk/rock albums filled with anthems of adolescent rage. But - for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who's heard it - more often than not, the album I'd choose to blast would be Therapy?'s Troublegum. It even contains a song which begins with the line "Masturbation saved my life", perhaps the most universally-recognizable sentiment imaginable to anyone who has ever been, or for that matter even known, a teenage boy.
As punk/metal albums go, it's not actually especially heavy - there's loud guitars and furious vocals, but the whole thing is underpinned with a melodic sensibility which keeps things surprisingly accessible. Like a lot of the best punk bands, Therapy? were, and remain, at their heart very much a pop band - just a very ANGRY pop band. And they're all the better for it.
The song I was going to choose would be 'Brainsaw'. That's mainly because it's sung in character as Jesus, if Jesus were the angriest man in the world. And that would give me an excuse, however tenuous, to post this picture, which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen:
It's from a comic written, although sadly not drawn, by legendarily-awful artist Rob Liefeld, and yes, it really does show the Lamb of God jumping down from the cross to beat the living hell out of the pantheon of Greek gods. Why? Because Rob Liefeld, that's why.
But sadly, there isn't a decent version of 'Brainsaw' on Youtube right now, and while I could obviously just upload an .mp3 myself, that's not the way I've been doing things so far, and I don't want to start now. Besides, there are other songs on the album, many of them good, and many of them angry. So, I've gone with the blindingly-obvious choice instead:
"With a face like this, I won't break any hearts / And thinking like that, I won't make any friends"
I can't think of any songs which have ever captured the frustration and rage of adolescence significantly better than this one. It's not deep, it's not big, and it's not clever. But it's catchy as hell, and it's the perfect soundtrack to a proper, bedroom-door-slamming tantrum. And sometimes, that's just what you need.
So, I'm going for the nostalgia option, and looking back to when this wasn't the case. As a teenager, I was angry a lot. Most of us were, I suspect. It's a hormone thing. And, as angry teenagers are wont to do, I was terribly fond of storming off to my bedroom, slamming the door, and listening to angry music at an antisocial, deliberately parent-bothering volume. Then I'd get all righteous and indignant when I was, most unreasonably, asked politely to turn it down. Teenagers are like that.
I sort of wish now that I'd been into metal as an adolescent - there may not be a genre in music so perfectly-suited to the expression of raw, inarticulate rage. But it wasn't until quite a bit later that I really got past the surface-level silliness of so much metal, and learned to appreciate it despite - and, in some cases, because of - that silliness. Besides, as I've mentioned before, it was discovering progressive death metal - bands like Opeth, specializing in a noodly flavour of heavy that you can really stroke your chin to - that softened me on metal in the first place, and that's not really the best sort of angry music.
Back in those days, my choices were much more limited - I'm thinking of a time before I'd even discovered Public Enemy, another group who do rage exceptionally well, albeit with rather more sophistication than the majority of metal acts. But back then, between the ages of - let's say - 14 and 17, the hardest, heaviest, angriest music I listened to was usually somewhere on the border between punk and hard rock.
I had plenty to choose from, obviously. The world is hardly short on punk/rock albums filled with anthems of adolescent rage. But - for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who's heard it - more often than not, the album I'd choose to blast would be Therapy?'s Troublegum. It even contains a song which begins with the line "Masturbation saved my life", perhaps the most universally-recognizable sentiment imaginable to anyone who has ever been, or for that matter even known, a teenage boy.
As punk/metal albums go, it's not actually especially heavy - there's loud guitars and furious vocals, but the whole thing is underpinned with a melodic sensibility which keeps things surprisingly accessible. Like a lot of the best punk bands, Therapy? were, and remain, at their heart very much a pop band - just a very ANGRY pop band. And they're all the better for it.
The song I was going to choose would be 'Brainsaw'. That's mainly because it's sung in character as Jesus, if Jesus were the angriest man in the world. And that would give me an excuse, however tenuous, to post this picture, which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen:
It's from a comic written, although sadly not drawn, by legendarily-awful artist Rob Liefeld, and yes, it really does show the Lamb of God jumping down from the cross to beat the living hell out of the pantheon of Greek gods. Why? Because Rob Liefeld, that's why.
But sadly, there isn't a decent version of 'Brainsaw' on Youtube right now, and while I could obviously just upload an .mp3 myself, that's not the way I've been doing things so far, and I don't want to start now. Besides, there are other songs on the album, many of them good, and many of them angry. So, I've gone with the blindingly-obvious choice instead:
"With a face like this, I won't break any hearts / And thinking like that, I won't make any friends"
I can't think of any songs which have ever captured the frustration and rage of adolescence significantly better than this one. It's not deep, it's not big, and it's not clever. But it's catchy as hell, and it's the perfect soundtrack to a proper, bedroom-door-slamming tantrum. And sometimes, that's just what you need.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Day 19: A song from my favourite album
My favourite album isn't really an album at all. Not the version of it I like, anyway. There was a double-album release in the mid-'70s, calling itself The Basement Tapes and containing at least some of the performances which make up the original set of Basement recordings, but it's a bastardised, second-rate imitation of the real thing, capturing very little of its ramshackle glory. Sure, some of the most notable compositions Dylan wrote during those pivotal few months in Woodstock are present, but too many others are bafflingly-absent, and the eight Band originals included, recorded separately and with no involvement from Dylan, are completely superfluous at best, distracting at worst.
Most damningly, by focusing solely on the more 'completed'-sounding material (and adding after-the-fact overdubs to clean much of it up for official release), it completely fails to capture the essence of those otherworldly tapes, that slapdash looseness, the jokey covers, the thrown-away jams, the half-formed skeletons of songs which would never be completed. The true worth of the Basement Tapes is far, far stronger than the sum of its frequently half-baked contents. Taken as a whole, these fragments of music take on a stronger life of their own, evoking what Greil Marcus so memorably termed "the old, weird America" in a mysterious voice which no other album I've ever heard has quite managed to replicate.
* * * * * * * * *
I should probably backtrack a little here, just to explain something of what I'm actually talking about for the benefit of any unfortunate souls who've never encountered The Basement Tapes.
By 1967, after spending most of the past five years turning the world of popular music on its head and becoming one of the most famous men in the world, Bob Dylan was in desperate need of an escape. Seizing the opportunity presented by a (relatively-minor) motorcycle crash in 1966, he cancelled all forthcoming concert dates, and disappeared from the public eye entirely for a prolonged period. During his time off, Dylan spent a lot of time just hanging out with various musicians, mostly the members of his former touring companions The Band, in an isolated house in upstate New York (the house was, and remains, known as Big Pink - the bulk of The Band's debut album, Music From Big Pink, was recorded during this period).
They drank a lot, smoked a lot of pot, and most importantly, they played a lot of music - most of it comprising songs written on the spot, covers of standards both old and new, instrumental jams, drunken joke songs, and the like. Some of these performances were recorded, using whatever equipment happened to be on-hand, and it's these widely-bootlegged recordings which make up The Basement Tapes.
Dylan's absence from the public eye corresponded fairly directly to the height of the psychedelic movement, and - not by coincidence - his return to the public eye corresponds even more directly with its end. Indeed, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that he was, to some extent, responsible for the dramatic shift back towards rootsy, folk-and-blues-infused music which began to take hold in late 1968. He was, and remains, openly dismissive of the more indulgent excesses of the psychedelic era, and the often-archaic material recorded at Big Pink constitutes a very conscious, deliberate counterpoint to that excess (many of the songs covered are literally centuries old, and even the Dylan/Band originals hark back very deliberately to the styles and forms of traditional folksong).
A sampler of notable songs extracted from the Big Pink sessions was circulating in music-industry circles by the early summer of '68, and copies ended up in the hands of, among others, George Harrison and Eric Clapton - both of whom duly played them to their respective bandmates and other musical friends.
All of the Beatles have acknowledged that the tape was a massive influence on their change in direction between the psychedelic pomp of Sgt. Pepper and the back-to-basics nature of much of the White Album - and where the Beatles went, the world followed. Clapton's dissolution of Cream and subsequent move back to more traditional material. The Stones' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', and the subsequent classic folk/country/blues triptych of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. Clapton's dissolution of Cream, Hendrix's post-Electric Ladyland change in direction. All seismic cultural landmarks, hugely-significant to the development of rock/pop for much of the next decade, and all directly traceable to the twin influences of Music From Big Pink and The Basement Tapes.
But of course, there's far more to the Tapes than dry academic interest or historical significance. First and foremost, they're an astonishing, unique collection of music - richly-varied, atmospheric, strange, and spontaneous. It's the sort of ad-hoc, rough-hewn primitivism which would, in the hands of most musicians, be barely-listenable, but thanks to Dylan's genius and the peerless chemistry he shared with Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, they become something uniquely-special. They are, without a doubt, my favourite collection of music ever recorded by any group of musicians, and the fact that so much of this remain unreleased is truly baffling, particularly in light of the otherwise-splendid work done by the compilers of Dylan outtakes/rarities for the justly-lauded Bootleg Series.
Even before the release of 1975's bastardised, half-hearted official version, numerous Basement songs had been released in one form or another, either as covers or recorded by the Band themselves. 'Tears of Rage', 'Quinn the Eskimo', 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere', 'This Wheel's On Fire', 'Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)', 'I Shall Be Released' - all among Dylan's finest songs, and all originally recorded in the Basement. But plenty of significant recordings remain the sole preserve of bootleggers, and the sort of fanatical fans who eagerly seek them out (*ahem*). Chief among these was, until recently, the song I was hoping to choose today - 'I'm Not There', which finally saw the light of an official release two years ago, on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' splendid film of the same name. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a copy of the Dylan version of the song on youtube right now, although anyone who's particularly keen to hear it might consider checking out Sonic Youth's excellent cover version, recorded for the same soundtrack.
It's a half-finished song, with ambiguous, ad-libbed lyrics and a meandering, dreamy melody played with delicate looseness by the Band. Sonic Youth's version, while inevitably cleaned-up slightly for the studio, captures more of the original's evocative magic than I'd ever have imagined possible, but still, inevitably, falls short of its slapdash perfection. I'm actually quite glad that Dylan never went back to finish this song, as he did with a few of the other pieces recorded during the same period, because I can't imagine any polished, properly-completed version of the song quite living up to the sketch which survives.
In the absence of that song, then, I've cheated slightly, and dug out a couple of the rougher cuts from the full bootleg - jams and covers which, while lacking the sophistication of some of the more obvious highlights named above, illustrate the other side of the collection, the rough-edged looseness and low-fi charm which is such an important part of their timeless appeal. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Most damningly, by focusing solely on the more 'completed'-sounding material (and adding after-the-fact overdubs to clean much of it up for official release), it completely fails to capture the essence of those otherworldly tapes, that slapdash looseness, the jokey covers, the thrown-away jams, the half-formed skeletons of songs which would never be completed. The true worth of the Basement Tapes is far, far stronger than the sum of its frequently half-baked contents. Taken as a whole, these fragments of music take on a stronger life of their own, evoking what Greil Marcus so memorably termed "the old, weird America" in a mysterious voice which no other album I've ever heard has quite managed to replicate.
* * * * * * * * *
I should probably backtrack a little here, just to explain something of what I'm actually talking about for the benefit of any unfortunate souls who've never encountered The Basement Tapes.
By 1967, after spending most of the past five years turning the world of popular music on its head and becoming one of the most famous men in the world, Bob Dylan was in desperate need of an escape. Seizing the opportunity presented by a (relatively-minor) motorcycle crash in 1966, he cancelled all forthcoming concert dates, and disappeared from the public eye entirely for a prolonged period. During his time off, Dylan spent a lot of time just hanging out with various musicians, mostly the members of his former touring companions The Band, in an isolated house in upstate New York (the house was, and remains, known as Big Pink - the bulk of The Band's debut album, Music From Big Pink, was recorded during this period).
They drank a lot, smoked a lot of pot, and most importantly, they played a lot of music - most of it comprising songs written on the spot, covers of standards both old and new, instrumental jams, drunken joke songs, and the like. Some of these performances were recorded, using whatever equipment happened to be on-hand, and it's these widely-bootlegged recordings which make up The Basement Tapes.
Dylan's absence from the public eye corresponded fairly directly to the height of the psychedelic movement, and - not by coincidence - his return to the public eye corresponds even more directly with its end. Indeed, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that he was, to some extent, responsible for the dramatic shift back towards rootsy, folk-and-blues-infused music which began to take hold in late 1968. He was, and remains, openly dismissive of the more indulgent excesses of the psychedelic era, and the often-archaic material recorded at Big Pink constitutes a very conscious, deliberate counterpoint to that excess (many of the songs covered are literally centuries old, and even the Dylan/Band originals hark back very deliberately to the styles and forms of traditional folksong).
A sampler of notable songs extracted from the Big Pink sessions was circulating in music-industry circles by the early summer of '68, and copies ended up in the hands of, among others, George Harrison and Eric Clapton - both of whom duly played them to their respective bandmates and other musical friends.
All of the Beatles have acknowledged that the tape was a massive influence on their change in direction between the psychedelic pomp of Sgt. Pepper and the back-to-basics nature of much of the White Album - and where the Beatles went, the world followed. Clapton's dissolution of Cream and subsequent move back to more traditional material. The Stones' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', and the subsequent classic folk/country/blues triptych of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. Clapton's dissolution of Cream, Hendrix's post-Electric Ladyland change in direction. All seismic cultural landmarks, hugely-significant to the development of rock/pop for much of the next decade, and all directly traceable to the twin influences of Music From Big Pink and The Basement Tapes.
But of course, there's far more to the Tapes than dry academic interest or historical significance. First and foremost, they're an astonishing, unique collection of music - richly-varied, atmospheric, strange, and spontaneous. It's the sort of ad-hoc, rough-hewn primitivism which would, in the hands of most musicians, be barely-listenable, but thanks to Dylan's genius and the peerless chemistry he shared with Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, they become something uniquely-special. They are, without a doubt, my favourite collection of music ever recorded by any group of musicians, and the fact that so much of this remain unreleased is truly baffling, particularly in light of the otherwise-splendid work done by the compilers of Dylan outtakes/rarities for the justly-lauded Bootleg Series.
Even before the release of 1975's bastardised, half-hearted official version, numerous Basement songs had been released in one form or another, either as covers or recorded by the Band themselves. 'Tears of Rage', 'Quinn the Eskimo', 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere', 'This Wheel's On Fire', 'Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)', 'I Shall Be Released' - all among Dylan's finest songs, and all originally recorded in the Basement. But plenty of significant recordings remain the sole preserve of bootleggers, and the sort of fanatical fans who eagerly seek them out (*ahem*). Chief among these was, until recently, the song I was hoping to choose today - 'I'm Not There', which finally saw the light of an official release two years ago, on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' splendid film of the same name. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a copy of the Dylan version of the song on youtube right now, although anyone who's particularly keen to hear it might consider checking out Sonic Youth's excellent cover version, recorded for the same soundtrack.
It's a half-finished song, with ambiguous, ad-libbed lyrics and a meandering, dreamy melody played with delicate looseness by the Band. Sonic Youth's version, while inevitably cleaned-up slightly for the studio, captures more of the original's evocative magic than I'd ever have imagined possible, but still, inevitably, falls short of its slapdash perfection. I'm actually quite glad that Dylan never went back to finish this song, as he did with a few of the other pieces recorded during the same period, because I can't imagine any polished, properly-completed version of the song quite living up to the sketch which survives.
In the absence of that song, then, I've cheated slightly, and dug out a couple of the rougher cuts from the full bootleg - jams and covers which, while lacking the sophistication of some of the more obvious highlights named above, illustrate the other side of the collection, the rough-edged looseness and low-fi charm which is such an important part of their timeless appeal. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Day 18: A song I wish I heard on the radio
As I said yesterday, I don't listen to a huge amount of music radio these days (I still listen to vast swathes of BBC Radio 4's output via podcasts, but that's not especially relevant here. Although I'm now totally wishing I'd chosen the theme from The Archers for yesterday's post). I go through phases where I listen to the radio avidly for months on end, really immerse myself in nothing but the music which is getting a lot of airplay right now...then drop it for just as long, relying instead on magazines, websites and blogs to alert me to any new records in which I might be interested. When it comes to finding new music I love, neither approach seems to be significantly more or less effective than the other.
But the bulk of the new music I discover from the radio tends, on the whole, to be chart pop. As I'd hope would be clear by now, I have absolutely nothing against commercial pop - quite the contrary, in fact. Lots of it is spectacularly wonderful, and the past ten years have been something of a golden era for radio-friendly unit shifters - compared with the pop radio of my middle teens, in the dishearteningly-bland days of the mid '90s, the sheer range of technological innovation, stylistic imagination and straight-up CHOON-tastic melodies which have been hitting the charts and getting widespread radio/TV attention over the past ten years has been remarkable.
A decade ago, the sort of production techniques which have become commonplace through the likes of the Neptunes and Timbaland were the stuff of cutting-edge electronic/dance music: today, they're radio fodder. Going back to yesterday's entry, just listen to some of Lady Gaga's output - a mere decade ago, you'd not have heard anything even vaguely similar to some of those beats on mainstream radio. Yes, she's just following in Madonna's footsteps - but one of the ways she's doing that is by working with the most exciting, innovative producers in the world. Same old same old, but made new and different through judicious application of technology. The world is moving faster than ever, and if you're not especially interested in keeping up - which, to be fair, many of us aren't - then you're bound to end up lost.
I've had friends suggest that the last ten years have been a wasteland so far as great music is concerned - I couldn't disagree more, but I see why they might feel that way. If your tastes veer towards the traditional, it's been a rough decade - it's not that there haven't been plenty of spectacularly-wonderful records released, but if you're not actively-engaged in the scene, you've got to look a lot harder to find them. The positive sides of an increasingly fractured, diverse music scene are myriad - it's easier than ever for an aspiring artist to produce their own work, and get it heard by a large audience without ever going near a major record label - but the downside is that if you favour a particular sound or genre, you've got to look a bit harder to find the best examples of it.
On which note, for all my love for contemporary pop, metal, electronica and hip-hop, I've still got a traditionalist, reactionary-luddite streak a mile wide. As one might reasonably have inferred from my selection of 'Johnny B. Goode' as my favourite song ever, however hard I try to pretend otherwise, my heart will probably always lie with good old-fashioned, boring, outdated rock'n'roll. With a bit of country and folk thrown in, just for the sake of variety. I'd go mad if that was all I ever listened to, but it's probably the genre I return to more often than any other, and my love for it knows few bounds.
So, on that front, the last decade has sucked. Not for the quality of music being produced - quite the contrary, it's been an amazing decade for almost any genre you care to name, trad rock very much included - but it's not been getting a lot of radio play. Ever since The Strokes made their bafflingly-inexplicable rise to fame in the early years of the decade, mainstream guitar-based rock music has been driven by the sort of angular, chiming post-punk produced by a hydra-like collective of bands called The Somethings. The definite article has been the most in-demand fashion accessory of the decade for young white men with guitars, and while I've got absolutely nothing against the sort of music they produce - some of my best friends, and all that - it just doesn't really float my boat. I liked Joy Division plenty the first time round, and don't really need to hear it again. Give me something different, any day....by which, of course, I mean something even more outdated and retrograde. Shut up, I never pretended I was being reasonable or objective. Unoriginality and pastiche are fine, so long as they're the right sort of unoriginality and pastiche.
Which brings me, belatedly, to today's song.
I mentioned this one way back in, I think, my third '30 Days...' post - as I said then, if I didn't know better, I could fairly easily have mistaken this for a classic Rolling Stones number from the early '70s. The Truckers aren't just a nostalgia act, of course - while their sound is fairly traditional, their lyrics are both distinctive and superb, and they're one of the best live acts of the past ten years. Since they first drew major international notice with 2001's Southern Rock Opera - a hard-rockin' concept album loosely-based on the real-life rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd - they've put out five consistently-superb records, blending classic hard rock'n'roll with Stax-derived soul and Chess-style country with a sharp, modern edge. They're an unusually-democratic outfit, to boot, with at least three top-notch songwriters and singers all taking turns in the spotlight, although main frontman Patterson Hood still tends to write the bulk of their recorded output. While his work is excellent, though. he's not my favourite Trucker - since the departure of former member Jason Isbell, that title would probably have to go to Mike Cooley.
'Marry Me' is one of his songs, and it's about as good an old-style rock song as you could hope for. The impeccably-arranged three-guitar howl, a tight rhythm section, set to witty, knowing lyrics ("My daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologized / Rock 'n' Roll means well but it can't help telling young boys lies" is about as good an opening couplet as I've heard this decade). Time-worn ingredients, perhaps, but they still work - and, in the hands of a band who really know what they're doing, they've still got a freshness which blows away any notions of lazy nostalgia. And it's the sort of thing I wish I heard on the radio more often.
But the bulk of the new music I discover from the radio tends, on the whole, to be chart pop. As I'd hope would be clear by now, I have absolutely nothing against commercial pop - quite the contrary, in fact. Lots of it is spectacularly wonderful, and the past ten years have been something of a golden era for radio-friendly unit shifters - compared with the pop radio of my middle teens, in the dishearteningly-bland days of the mid '90s, the sheer range of technological innovation, stylistic imagination and straight-up CHOON-tastic melodies which have been hitting the charts and getting widespread radio/TV attention over the past ten years has been remarkable.
A decade ago, the sort of production techniques which have become commonplace through the likes of the Neptunes and Timbaland were the stuff of cutting-edge electronic/dance music: today, they're radio fodder. Going back to yesterday's entry, just listen to some of Lady Gaga's output - a mere decade ago, you'd not have heard anything even vaguely similar to some of those beats on mainstream radio. Yes, she's just following in Madonna's footsteps - but one of the ways she's doing that is by working with the most exciting, innovative producers in the world. Same old same old, but made new and different through judicious application of technology. The world is moving faster than ever, and if you're not especially interested in keeping up - which, to be fair, many of us aren't - then you're bound to end up lost.
I've had friends suggest that the last ten years have been a wasteland so far as great music is concerned - I couldn't disagree more, but I see why they might feel that way. If your tastes veer towards the traditional, it's been a rough decade - it's not that there haven't been plenty of spectacularly-wonderful records released, but if you're not actively-engaged in the scene, you've got to look a lot harder to find them. The positive sides of an increasingly fractured, diverse music scene are myriad - it's easier than ever for an aspiring artist to produce their own work, and get it heard by a large audience without ever going near a major record label - but the downside is that if you favour a particular sound or genre, you've got to look a bit harder to find the best examples of it.
On which note, for all my love for contemporary pop, metal, electronica and hip-hop, I've still got a traditionalist, reactionary-luddite streak a mile wide. As one might reasonably have inferred from my selection of 'Johnny B. Goode' as my favourite song ever, however hard I try to pretend otherwise, my heart will probably always lie with good old-fashioned, boring, outdated rock'n'roll. With a bit of country and folk thrown in, just for the sake of variety. I'd go mad if that was all I ever listened to, but it's probably the genre I return to more often than any other, and my love for it knows few bounds.
So, on that front, the last decade has sucked. Not for the quality of music being produced - quite the contrary, it's been an amazing decade for almost any genre you care to name, trad rock very much included - but it's not been getting a lot of radio play. Ever since The Strokes made their bafflingly-inexplicable rise to fame in the early years of the decade, mainstream guitar-based rock music has been driven by the sort of angular, chiming post-punk produced by a hydra-like collective of bands called The Somethings. The definite article has been the most in-demand fashion accessory of the decade for young white men with guitars, and while I've got absolutely nothing against the sort of music they produce - some of my best friends, and all that - it just doesn't really float my boat. I liked Joy Division plenty the first time round, and don't really need to hear it again. Give me something different, any day....by which, of course, I mean something even more outdated and retrograde. Shut up, I never pretended I was being reasonable or objective. Unoriginality and pastiche are fine, so long as they're the right sort of unoriginality and pastiche.
Which brings me, belatedly, to today's song.
I mentioned this one way back in, I think, my third '30 Days...' post - as I said then, if I didn't know better, I could fairly easily have mistaken this for a classic Rolling Stones number from the early '70s. The Truckers aren't just a nostalgia act, of course - while their sound is fairly traditional, their lyrics are both distinctive and superb, and they're one of the best live acts of the past ten years. Since they first drew major international notice with 2001's Southern Rock Opera - a hard-rockin' concept album loosely-based on the real-life rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd - they've put out five consistently-superb records, blending classic hard rock'n'roll with Stax-derived soul and Chess-style country with a sharp, modern edge. They're an unusually-democratic outfit, to boot, with at least three top-notch songwriters and singers all taking turns in the spotlight, although main frontman Patterson Hood still tends to write the bulk of their recorded output. While his work is excellent, though. he's not my favourite Trucker - since the departure of former member Jason Isbell, that title would probably have to go to Mike Cooley.
'Marry Me' is one of his songs, and it's about as good an old-style rock song as you could hope for. The impeccably-arranged three-guitar howl, a tight rhythm section, set to witty, knowing lyrics ("My daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologized / Rock 'n' Roll means well but it can't help telling young boys lies" is about as good an opening couplet as I've heard this decade). Time-worn ingredients, perhaps, but they still work - and, in the hands of a band who really know what they're doing, they've still got a freshness which blows away any notions of lazy nostalgia. And it's the sort of thing I wish I heard on the radio more often.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Day 17: A song I hear often on the radio
I don't currently listen to a lot of radio. But when I do, this song is all over it.
Admittedly, it loses something without the video. And it's not actually one of her best songs (in fact, I'd say it's the first significant wobble in what had, up to this point, been about as flawless a series of pop singles as has been produced this decade), although it has grown on me since I first got the album. But sweet merciful jebus, what a magnificent video. It's completely ridiculous, of course - overblown, self-indulgent and utterly, gloriously vacuous. But that's why it works. It's so gleefully self-aware, puncturing its own pomposity at every turn, that it's hard to resist. It cracks me up every time.
I have nothing else to say about this today. I'm pretty sure there's a long post in me about Lady Gaga and why I rate her so highly as a performance artist (which, in this case, is a bit like being a performing artist, only more so), but it's not coming out today, so it'll have to wait for another occasion. In the meantime, watch the video. If you've already seen it (and if you haven't, where have you been?), watch it again.
LET'S MAKE A SANDWICH.
Oh, come on. Let's.
Admittedly, it loses something without the video. And it's not actually one of her best songs (in fact, I'd say it's the first significant wobble in what had, up to this point, been about as flawless a series of pop singles as has been produced this decade), although it has grown on me since I first got the album. But sweet merciful jebus, what a magnificent video. It's completely ridiculous, of course - overblown, self-indulgent and utterly, gloriously vacuous. But that's why it works. It's so gleefully self-aware, puncturing its own pomposity at every turn, that it's hard to resist. It cracks me up every time.
I have nothing else to say about this today. I'm pretty sure there's a long post in me about Lady Gaga and why I rate her so highly as a performance artist (which, in this case, is a bit like being a performing artist, only more so), but it's not coming out today, so it'll have to wait for another occasion. In the meantime, watch the video. If you've already seen it (and if you haven't, where have you been?), watch it again.
LET'S MAKE A SANDWICH.
Oh, come on. Let's.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Day 16: A song that I used to love but now hate
I've previously mentioned the cassette tapes which my father's friend Martin used to send us when we lived in Africa. I can still remember what was on each and every one of those tapes, and could probably recite word-for-word several of the albums, even though I haven't listened to some of them in well over a decade. I'm quite certain that just about everyone could tell similar stories about how their early tastes in music were heavily-shaped by what their parents listened to, and this was like that only much more so, because those tapes - and a few local African bands - were literally the only music I heard. To my 6-year old ears, this was all music had to offer, and I was quite happy to make the most of it. In the absence of music radio, Top Of The Pops or the like, it took a long time before I really developed any sense of what I liked, as a separate entity from what my parents listened to. Consequently, those albums loom very, very large in my early memory.
None of the above is, I suspect, anything like as special or unique as I used to think it was. But still, it's my story, so it matters to me. Which brings me, neatly as ever, to today's song.
Before you get the wrong idea, I should stress that I'm still genuinely, unironically fond of quite a bit of Dire Straits. Yes, it all went a bit horribly-wrong there towards the end, and Mark Knopfler's solo career is as perfect a demonstration as you'll ever find of the truism that musical virtuosity isn't any sort of guarantee of interesting music. But unfashionable as they are, I still maintain that there's a lot more good than bad on three out of their first four albums (the less said about the almost-unbelievably-awful second side of Making Movies, the better). There's an understated, bluesy charm to their first record which might surprise anyone who's only familiar with their mid-'8os stuff, 'Sultans of Swing' is still an inescapably, undeniably wonderful song, and like all good North-Easterners, I can't listen to 'Going Home: Theme from Local Hero' without thinking of wandering past St James' Park in Newcastle on a match day, and remembering those few brief years in the mid-'90s when Newcastle United were genuinely worthy of their fans' incomparably-passionate devotion.
But ye gods, does Brothers In Arms sound shit. Not the entire record - if you can get past the horrifyingly-thin production (aargh, those drums! Those horrible, tinny, overly-reverbed drums!), then 'Money For Nothing' is an endearingly-dumb bit of simplistic pop/rock (albeit marred by a completely gratuitous Sting, for which there really should be some sort of Parental Advisory sticker), and the title track is a masterpiece of sombre, po-faced Adult Contemporary. Near-painfully sincere and polite, perhaps, but a decent tune for all that - so good, in fact, that Metallica paid it the ultimate compliment in 2007 by brutally eviscerating it with a cover version so mind-bendingly awful that one might almost assume that they did it on purpose. If nothing else, though, it really hammers home just how much better the original is, and isn't that the best thing about all truly bad covers?
The rest, though? Eurgh. Like any number of albums from the mid-'80s, the record has a distinctly 1950s feel to it - unfortunately, coming as it did at the dawn of the CD age, it was produced and mastered by tone-deaf gibbons, presumably gigglingly-high on a lethal combination of Brand New Digital Technology, their own giddy genius, and cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine.
Every note on the album is recorded so crisply, so cleanly, and so utterly without an ounce of soul or humanity, that contemporary listeners could have been forgiven for giving up on these new shiny discs in disgust, and going back to their 8-tracks. It would have been unfair and wrong, of course - I don't want to sound like a lunatic analogue purist - but still hard to entirely blame them. Instead, though, the buggers embraced the album in unprecedented numbers, resulting in a wave of sound-a-like overproduced monstrosities from just about every other then-big name in popular music, setting back mainstream digital recording by a good half-decade, co-inventing Stadium Rock, and - just for good measure - killing Dire Straits. Admittedly, as band-killers go, being elevated to Best-Selling Group In The World is arguably preferable to most of the alternatives. After all, it's hard to imagine that degree of success not going to just about anybody's heads, let alone a group who'd started out as a virtuoso pub-rock band in the punk era, which made them just about as uncool as it's possible for professional musicians to be. But still...it got pretty ugly.
Just listen to 'Walk of Life'. The song itself is innocuous enough - a bit on the twee side, but not too hideously offensive, and if you imagine it being played by Buddy Holly, for example, the cheesy upbeat-ness becomes a lot more tolerable. The production, though. Oh my bleeding ears, the production. Those crisp, bone-dry vocals. Those plastic-sounding guitars. Those FUCKING DRUMS. It's not as obviously-dated as some of the synth-and-drum-machine embarrassments from the same era, perhaps, but disposable pop is meant to date badly. That's part of its charm. This, on the other hand, was presumably intended to last, and is therefore bad on a rather more profound level - CDs wouldn't sound this awful again until at least the compression-mad days of the early 2000s and on.
But as a kid, I absolutely loved it.
None of the above is, I suspect, anything like as special or unique as I used to think it was. But still, it's my story, so it matters to me. Which brings me, neatly as ever, to today's song.
Before you get the wrong idea, I should stress that I'm still genuinely, unironically fond of quite a bit of Dire Straits. Yes, it all went a bit horribly-wrong there towards the end, and Mark Knopfler's solo career is as perfect a demonstration as you'll ever find of the truism that musical virtuosity isn't any sort of guarantee of interesting music. But unfashionable as they are, I still maintain that there's a lot more good than bad on three out of their first four albums (the less said about the almost-unbelievably-awful second side of Making Movies, the better). There's an understated, bluesy charm to their first record which might surprise anyone who's only familiar with their mid-'8os stuff, 'Sultans of Swing' is still an inescapably, undeniably wonderful song, and like all good North-Easterners, I can't listen to 'Going Home: Theme from Local Hero' without thinking of wandering past St James' Park in Newcastle on a match day, and remembering those few brief years in the mid-'90s when Newcastle United were genuinely worthy of their fans' incomparably-passionate devotion.
But ye gods, does Brothers In Arms sound shit. Not the entire record - if you can get past the horrifyingly-thin production (aargh, those drums! Those horrible, tinny, overly-reverbed drums!), then 'Money For Nothing' is an endearingly-dumb bit of simplistic pop/rock (albeit marred by a completely gratuitous Sting, for which there really should be some sort of Parental Advisory sticker), and the title track is a masterpiece of sombre, po-faced Adult Contemporary. Near-painfully sincere and polite, perhaps, but a decent tune for all that - so good, in fact, that Metallica paid it the ultimate compliment in 2007 by brutally eviscerating it with a cover version so mind-bendingly awful that one might almost assume that they did it on purpose. If nothing else, though, it really hammers home just how much better the original is, and isn't that the best thing about all truly bad covers?
The rest, though? Eurgh. Like any number of albums from the mid-'80s, the record has a distinctly 1950s feel to it - unfortunately, coming as it did at the dawn of the CD age, it was produced and mastered by tone-deaf gibbons, presumably gigglingly-high on a lethal combination of Brand New Digital Technology, their own giddy genius, and cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine.
Every note on the album is recorded so crisply, so cleanly, and so utterly without an ounce of soul or humanity, that contemporary listeners could have been forgiven for giving up on these new shiny discs in disgust, and going back to their 8-tracks. It would have been unfair and wrong, of course - I don't want to sound like a lunatic analogue purist - but still hard to entirely blame them. Instead, though, the buggers embraced the album in unprecedented numbers, resulting in a wave of sound-a-like overproduced monstrosities from just about every other then-big name in popular music, setting back mainstream digital recording by a good half-decade, co-inventing Stadium Rock, and - just for good measure - killing Dire Straits. Admittedly, as band-killers go, being elevated to Best-Selling Group In The World is arguably preferable to most of the alternatives. After all, it's hard to imagine that degree of success not going to just about anybody's heads, let alone a group who'd started out as a virtuoso pub-rock band in the punk era, which made them just about as uncool as it's possible for professional musicians to be. But still...it got pretty ugly.
Just listen to 'Walk of Life'. The song itself is innocuous enough - a bit on the twee side, but not too hideously offensive, and if you imagine it being played by Buddy Holly, for example, the cheesy upbeat-ness becomes a lot more tolerable. The production, though. Oh my bleeding ears, the production. Those crisp, bone-dry vocals. Those plastic-sounding guitars. Those FUCKING DRUMS. It's not as obviously-dated as some of the synth-and-drum-machine embarrassments from the same era, perhaps, but disposable pop is meant to date badly. That's part of its charm. This, on the other hand, was presumably intended to last, and is therefore bad on a rather more profound level - CDs wouldn't sound this awful again until at least the compression-mad days of the early 2000s and on.
But as a kid, I absolutely loved it.
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