Music – Ash Clifton, Writer

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…

Today I Learned a Word: “Luthier”

By Art Bromage from Seattle – Anthony Jackson in Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

A few nights ago I awoke, as I am wont to do, for no reason at all and found myself unable to get back to sleep. For some reason, the song “For the Love of Money” was echoing in my head. You know the one. It goes “Money money money money money money money…MUUUN-NAY!”

It is, of course, by the great R&B band The O’Jays, but I couldn’t recall that fact at that moment, trapped as I was in a sleep-deprived stupor. So I did what any red-blooded nerd would do: I grabbed my tablet and Googled it. This led me to the Wikipedia page for the song, where I learned that the famous bass guitar riff was played by a session musician named Anthony Jackson.

Then, from his Wikipedia page, I learned that Jackson is something of legend in guitar circles, described as “a master of the instrument” by AllMusic. Like many musical masters (including Eddie Van Halen), Jackson has designed his own guitars, and employed a famous luthier named Carl Thomson to craft a special instrument that he, Jackson, had conceived. Called a “contrabass guitar,” it’s a bass with six strings, which seems bizarre. (Even a music idiot like me knows that a bass only has four strings.) But, like all bass guitars, the contrabass is tuned much lower than rhythm guitars.

So, thanks to that one bout of insomnia (and thanks to Wikipedia), I learned that some bass guitars have six strings, and that a craftsman who builds guitars is called a luthier.

So, there’s that. Will I ever use this bit of information? Maybe, maybe not. But I feel better for having learned it. That’s just me, I guess—a nerd who likes being a nerd.

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…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Red Skies”

The Fixx was one of those cool 1980s bands that seemed to have their finger on the pulse of (then) modern American culture, never mind the fact that they were a bunch of Brits. I saw them one Halloween night at the University of Florida Bandshell, where the student government used to host all kinds of music. The Fixx seemed really wiped out that night (Gainesville was, no doubt, a little venue that they management had squeezed in between bigger gigs). Still, they rocked.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Baba O’Riley”

Back in the 1980s, there was no worse gaffe that a nerdy, trying-to-be-cool high school boy could commit than referring to The Who’s greatest song as “Teenage Wasteland.” (Yeah, I did it.) Never mind the fact that “Teenage Wasteland” is the chorus of the song, and it’s most powerful lyric. That’s not the name of the song, dammit.

It is, of course, “Baba O’Riley,” and while we may have gotten the name wrong, we knew it was just about the coolest song ever. That is, it was the coolest song ever until Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” came along. And in the decades since, I have come to realize how similar those two musical masterpieces are. Both are operatic, not just in the rock arias executed by their similarly powerful lead singers (Roger Daltrey and Freddie Mercury, respectively) but by the amount of sonic ground each covers. Each is divided into discernable “acts” with a different theme and style, and by the time each is finished, the listener feels a combination of elation and overwhelm. You have, quite literary, heard more than you can handle.

One thing that might be lost on modern listeners is how innovative “Baba O’Riley” was when it came out in 1971 (and, indeed, how innovative it remains today). I first heard it about a decade after its release, and even then I found myself wondering how the hell the electronic ostinato was performed. That is, how the hell had they gotten a synthesizer back in 1971, and who was playing, and how the hell did they play it so fast? The answers were, as I learned a few years ago, that the sequence was 1.) created on a Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ, 2.) by Pete Townsend himself, and 3.) that he didn’t play it, he programmed it.

But what I really love about the song is Roger Daltrey’s voice, and the power of his delivery. When Freddie Mercury appeared on the world stage, people sort of forgot how incredible a singer Daltrey is (I think he’s tied with Mercury as the best rock singer ever). Who cares that the lyrics don’t make sense—they have a poetic power all their own.

“Let’s get together before we get much older…” Oh, yes. Definitely.

Oh, and I also love the gypsy fiddle rave at the song’s end.

Enjoy…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Bitter Sweet Symphony”

When The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” hit the airwaves (yes, we still had radio back then) in 1997, it became an instant classic, and no one knew why. A rock song with an orchestra and virtually no electric guitar, it sounded utterly different from anything else in the rock world at that time. In fact, it was based on a sample from a Rolling Stones from 1965. I would argue that part of the song’s hypnotic appeal has roots in a much, much older genre: the march.

A march is a piece of music with a very clean rhythm and slow time-signature, intended for people (often marching bands) to…well…march to. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is a kind of post-modern, existentialist march, a gesture of defiance against a cold, dehumanizing world. This march-like quality was brilliantly exploited by director Walter Stern in the song’s video, which is one of the best music videos ever made.

Enjoy, and rock-on…