Category: Friday Night Rock-Out

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Under Pressure”

People love tag-teams. It’s in our nature. Have you noticed that almost every work of epic literature across the world has not one but two main heroes. The Gilgamesh epic has Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The Iliad has Achilles and Odysseus. The Authurian legends have Arthur and Lancelot. DC has Superman and Batman.

In all of these examples, the two heroes have much in common, but they are also different in some fundamental and defining way. They not only compliment each other, they contrast each other. 

More importantly, they make the story a lot more fun.

I think of this dynamic whenever I hear “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. Together, the band and the singer represented a group of pop titans of the 1980s. But there were huge functional and artistic differences between them. Bowie was probably the greatest musical artist of his generation, known for inventive and experimental works that never failed to surprise or thrill his fans. Queen was a great rock band, constructed around the epic voice of Freddie Mercury and the epic guitar skills of Brian May. The idea of bringing these two forces together might have been disastrous. That is, they might have canceled each other out.

But no. Instead, their talents together to create one of the best rock songs ever recorded. From the amazing bass riff (whose author is disputed) to the colossal bridge near the end, it’s still one of my favorites. 

Enjoy…!

BONUS: Here is a great live performance of the song by Bowie and Annie Lennox.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Connected”

Once again, the title of this series, “Friday Night Rock-Out” is a total misnomer. This week, it’s a Friday Night Rap-Out. Or, more accurately (but more awkwardly), a Friday Night Hip-Hop.

Hip-hop is, of course, the musical genre most closely associated with the African-American, inner-city youth experience. But a lot of great hip-hop comes from big cities outside the U.S. (in this case, Stereo MC’s, from London). 

I think what I like about this song is the way it combines the main element of rap—the propulsive, virtuosic spoken poetry—with the beats and grooves of R&B, especially Cath Coffee’s seering background lyrics. 

So, enjoy…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Corduroy”

Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy”

The grunge era of rock music began around 1991, when bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and (especially) Nirvana began to get massive play on FM radio. I remember how earth-shaking the sound seemed to me, at the time, when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Even playing on the tinny speakers of my old econobox car, the power and passion of the music hit me like a revelation. 

Sadly, of those three original, vanguard bands, the frontmen of two are no longer with us. Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell committed suicide, decades apart, and only Eddie Vedder remains. It might sound strange, but I suspect that if someone had asked me back in 1991 which of those three men (and bands) would still be around in thirty years, I probably would’ve guessed Vedder—and not just because he sang “I’m still alive” so defiantly in the chorus of my original favorite Pearl Jam song, “Alive.” Vedder’s voice and lyrics had just as much power and pathos as Cornell’s or Cobain’s, but it was also tinged with a kind of dogged defiance that resonated with me. Like Vedder, I had a fairly traumatic childhood, and I liked the way he sang about the act of survival as, itself, a kind of redemption. As my old mentor Harry Crews once famously said, “Survival is triumph enough.”

Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy” came out a few years after that first grunge wave crested, but it has since become one of my favorite songs of all time.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Shaft”

I’ve long harbored the secret hope that someone, someday would refer to me reverentially as a bad-mother-hush-your-mouth, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. Oh, well.

This week’s Friday Night Rock-Out (okay, it’s more a Friday-Night Funk/Soul-Out) is dedicated to the late, great Isaac Hayes. Hayes was a musical genius, as well as being a pretty good actor. (He did fine journeyman work in The Rockford Files and Escape from New York. He was also a great voice-actor on South Park.) He will always be remembered, though, for the theme-song of the 1971 Gordon Parks film about the most phallocentric private investigator in the history of American crime fiction.

Yeah, I’m talkin about Shaft. I hope you can dig it.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Even Better Than the Real Thing”

When U2’s Achtung Baby came out in 1991, critics joked that it was the album that saved the band from itself. After the enormous success of 1987’s The Joshua Tree, U2 too fell into an abyss of self-indulgence and ego with their follow-up album-and-movie extravaganza Rattle and Hum, which alienated some of their fans. Fortunately, Achtung Baby marked not only a return to form for the band but a whole new direction, one influenced by techno, funk, and other genres. 

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Most young people today do not realize that the title and chorus on the song is a reference to Coca-Cola’s long-standing slogan: “It’s the real thing.” With his brilliant and demented lyrics, Bono twists the slogan into a critique of modern consumerism. The song is basically a sequel to The Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction,” but with an even more apocalyptic bent.

It also has a great video, notable at the time for its innovative use of a harness in which Bono was strapped while the camera whirled around him. The final effect is both exhilarating and somewhat nauseating, literal sensory overload, in keeping with the theme of the song itself. Not to mention our modern age.

Rock on.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

When “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” came out in 1983, I was a junior in high school. Being a bit of a music snob, not to mention a budding wannabe intellectual, I was pretty well versed in the New Wave music of the era, bands like the Talking Heads and Gary Numan and Devo, not to mention the more avant guard stylings of The Police. (Synchronicity came out that year, and if it’s not a New Wave song, I don’t know what is.) 

But, like everyone else, I was totally unprepared for “Sweet Dreams”. It wasn’t just the disconcerting, off-kilter, literally ass-backwards beat of the song. It was Annie Lennox’s soaring, operatic delivery of those out-there, nakedly perverse lyrics (“some of them want to abuse you; some of them want to be abused”). Most of all, it was the music video, which came spilling out of TVs everywhere and didn’t stop for about six months. 

Looking back on it now in our absurdly trans-phobic era, it’s hard to imagine how utterly trans the video was. Transexual. Transgressive. Trans-everything. The sight of the beautiful Annie Lennox decked out in a (tailored) man’s suit, with her orange hair and vaguely Hitlerian mannerism, was like an A-Bomb going off in the brain of middle America. It might have all been too much, except for one thing: It’s a hell of a good song.

Rock on.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Black Hole Sun”

Okay, it’s a been a few days since the solar eclipse, but I’m still gonna go for the low-hanging fruit; this week’s Friday Night Rock-Out is Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”

When this song came out in 1994, it was the first time I really became aware of Soundgarden as a band (and, more directly, Chris Cornell’s awesomely powerful voice). It didn’t hurt that the song came with a trippy, nightmarish music video that, like the song itself, seemed to capture the country’s mid-90s dread that everything was quite literally flying apart. (Not like now at all.)

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Sanctify Yourself”

Some might think it ironic that Scottish rock group Simple Minds are best known for a single, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” that was first heard on the soundtrack from a movie about teenage angst. Ironic, that is, because Simple Minds have always seemed like an unusually adult, intelligent, and emotionally complicated rock band, especially among the ocean of dumb pop bands that sprouted up in the 1980s. (I’m looking at you, Wham!)

Then again, maybe it’s not ironic. The Breakfast Club is, after all, a very thoughtful and complicated film about becoming an adult. Simple Minds now seem like a perfect fit. 

More to the point, their songs tend to be about a defiant intelligence and love in the face of a cold and mercenary world. Simple Minds are, in fact, one of the most optimistic and bright —without being daft—bands to emerge from the post-punk rock scene, and also one of the best.

My favorite song of theirs is actually not the one from The Breakfast Club. Rather, it’s “Sanctify Yourself,” which boasts all of the band’s strengths: a propulsive New Wave synth, great drumming, evocative lyrics, and Jim Kerr’s velvety-yet-powerful baritone.

Rock on.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Once in a Lifetime”

Back in the 2010s, I worked at a tech company specializing in web development. It had a vast, open-office space filled with techies—mostly millenials—working on laptops. I got to be friends with many of these young people, and I was almost always impressed by how smart, friendly, open-minded, and politically active they were.

However, one thing I noticed about them was that they had almost no sense of cultural history. Movies older than ten years seemed to not exist for them (except Star Wars, maybe). Same with books. And I was horrified that they seemed to have a very narrow experience of musical history, even in the realms of rock and pop music.

Once in a while I would play a CD (yeah, an actual CD) on my computer speakers and one of the millennials would ask me what this or that song was. More than once, my head almost exploded. One occasion I was playing The Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” and a kid sitting nearby wrinkled his brow and said “I think I’ve read about this song, but I’ve never actually heard it.”

“Once in a Lifetime” had a huge impact on the culture back in 1981 when it came out, and for many years thereafter. People used to dance to it in clubs. Comedians (professional and high-school based) impersonated David Byrne’s famously weird, off-kilter dance syncopations. (I still do.) 

But even when I first heard the song, The Talking Heads were already an “old” band. Classic, even. Everybody had fallen in love with their first hit “Psycho Killer” way back in 1977, when the power of punk rock was pulsing through the veins of the music world. The Talking Heads weren’t punk, of course—they were usually labeled as “New Wave,” although that didn’t seem quite right, either—but they did have a very punk sensibility. That is, they had an extremely skewed, cynical, and subtly enraged view of modern western culture that was very punk in its feel. 

“Once in a Lifetime” is a hate-letter to capitalism in the Reagan era, but it’s more than that. It’s a funky dirge to the modern human condition. It’s also a hell of a good song to dance to.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “What is Love”

Once again, I’m stretching the definition of “rock” on this one. But the other night my wife and I were watching Disney+’s excellent new TV adaptation of “Percy Jackson and The Olympians” and the episode featured a great dance hit from 1990’s. It’s “What is Love” by German singer Haddaway. In fact, it’s one of those producer-manufactured songs, the brainchild of music wizards Dee Dee Halligan and Junior Torello, who hired Haddaway to sing it. Further evidence of its “manufactured” quality is the fact that the wonderful female vocals in the background are uncredited (apparently they were taken from a sample library).

To me, this song is proof that art doesn’t have to be “pure” to be wonderful. It doesn’t have to be the concept from a lone genius. A pair of producers wrote and designed this song, and then Haddaway put his own interpretation on it (at odds with the producer’s original vision). The result is history.

Rock on…