The 1990s gave us two great, new genres in popular music. The first was Grunge, and the second was Big Beat. I’ve written a lot about the first but hardly anything on the second, even though it represented some of my favorite electronic bands like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers.
So, as a small acknowledgement of this fact, I’m doing this week’s Friday Night Rock-Out on Fatboy Slim. Specifically, his remix of “Brimful of Asha” by Cornershop. I’ll admit that I’ve never heard the original release, but the remix is pure genius.
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.
I just watched a great inteview by Rick Beato of Ed Roland, the lead singer and mastermind of Collective Soul. I enjoyed the interview so much that I decided to re-post an essay I wrote on my old blog some years ago for my on-going “Battle of the Bands” series. Enjoy…!
The 1990s were a strange time. It was the decade between the two George Bushes—after the Gulf War but before 9/11—but it was also the first decade of the Internet and cell phones. The first truly digital special effects began to appear in films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. The Soviet Union had fallen, only to be replaced by a globalized Russian mafia. Genocide was being committed in both Africa and Europe, all televised via the 24/7 global news cycle.
In short, this was the time when technology and social chaos really started to put the zap on our collective brain. And no bands were better at capturing this zeitgeist of psychological disintegration better than these two—Collective Soul and Garbage–although each did so in its own way.
Strangely, my concept of the “The 90s” didn’t really form until almost mid-decade. This was about the time that the amazingly vital Grunge movement began to fade from the scene. In its wake came a more diverse and accessible series of alternative rock bands. At the forefront was a five-man ensemble called Collective Soul, which had its first big hit in 1994 with “Shine.” While not their best song, “Shine” is an ambitious and even inspirational bit of rock that displays the band’s two great strengths: hard-edged, soaring vocals from frontman Ed Roland, and a vicious main riff from lead guitarist Ross Childress.
But the really cool thing about “Shine” was that despite having a very modern alterna-dude vibe it felt extremely retro. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, “Collective Soul breaks old ground. Its songs are comfortable where Southern-rock overlaps folk-rock, with solidly serviceable riffs in the usual places.”
Collective Soul was not trying to be Nirvana. It was trying to be Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Just one year after Shine, a band from Madison, Wisconsin named Garbage released their first album, Garbage (a.k.a. Garbage I). When I first heard the band, I was struck by lead singer Shirley Manson and her fabulously expressive voice—at times monotonal, at other times growling. This pale goth girl from Scotland had somehow tailored her vocals to exactly fit the manic-depressive zeitgeist of the 90s.
Indeed, I would argue that the band’s premier song, “Stupid Girl,” is the definitive song of the period (yes, even more so than Nirvana’s brilliant “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). In the song’s now-famous lyric, the narrator accuses an unnamed girl of being…well…stupid. In fact, the aspects of her stupidity are those evidenced by practically every person under 40 in modern urban America: vanity, self-absorption, consumerism, nihilism.
And fakery. Especially fakery. “[I] can’t believe you fake it…” as Manson sings portentously to the stupid girl in question. What is she faking? Being human.
Garbage I firmly established Garbage as the pre-eminent art-rock act of the decade, much as Collective Soul had ensconced itself as the pre-eminent hard-rock act. Collective Soul quickly cemented its position with their follow-up album (also eponymously titled), which included some of its greatest hits: “December,” “Where The River Flows,” and “Gel.” “December” went on to become the band’s second biggest hit (after “Shine”) and it remains my favorite, with Roland’s soulful lyrics counterpointed perfectly by Childress’s diamond-edged guitar work. I tell you, the Allman Brothers couldn’t have done better.
The song was so successful, in fact, that it engendered an almost immediate backlash which continues to this day. As far as I can tell, detractors of the song (and of Collective Soul in general) are upset by the fact that it not very Grungy. But wasn’t that the point? Grunge was a great period in American music, obviously. But in the end, it was just Punk’s Second Act. Like Punk, Grunge ran out of gas rather quickly. This is not surprising. Rage can only sustain an artist for so long; at some point, you have to write a song that works on multiple levels, and I think Collective Soul achieved that.
As for Garbage, the band was able to build on its initial success with the album Version 2.0 (which was produced under the delicious working title of Sad Alcoholic Clowns). The album has some good songs—I especially like the trippy and propulsive “Temptation Waits”—but none quite achieved the sublime level of “Stupid Girl.”
Ultimately, both bands were able to sustain themselves through the rest of the decade and beyond. Collective Soul suffered a near-fatal rift when Childress left the band in 2001. Even so, it has fared better than Garbage since the Millennium, producing some really fine albums especially 2004’s Youth. From that album come two of my favorite songs, “Better Now” and “There’s a Way”, which pick me right up whenever I am feeling lazy or down.
And yet, whenever I think of the 1990s, I remember “Stupid Girl,” with its techno-crazed background noises and jangly guitar riffs, all overlaid by Manson’s dirge-like vocals. To this day, “Stupid Girl” warns us like a klaxon just outside the entrance to hell: Don’t fake it…
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.
In the past decade or so, it’s become fashionable to talk about creativity as the result of freedom, relaxation, and “flow”—that ineffable point where the artist connects with the sources of inspiration deep within the human soul. I, for one, believe in this idea. Art is really about connecting with the spiritual subconscious, and all of us have the ability to channel this source (although very few of us are willing to put in the work that is also required to develop it).
But not enough has been written about the role of conflict in creativity. Specifically, the role of rivalry, competition, and—yes—jealousy, at its most venomous and sincere. The history of art is, in some ways, a history of rivalries. Picasso and Matisse. Faulkner and Hemingway. The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Rivals have a way of inspiring each other, of spurring each other on in ways that “healthier” forms of motivation just can’t reach. The greatest rivalries of all are, perhaps, those that exist within a rock-and-roll band. Would Lennon have been as good without McCartney breathing down his neck? Richards without Jagger? Henley without Frey?
Such internal rivalries are more intense because they also bring the family dynamic to bear. A rock band is like a family, and the members are like siblings. They love each other, but they hate each other, too. Worst of all, they know each other’s weaknesses. Which buttons to push.
Surely one of the greatest rock rivalries of all time is that between Roger Daltrey, the mesmerizing lead-singer for The Who, and that band’s lead guitarist and resident genius, Pete Townshend. As in any rivalry, one competitor eventually gets the upper-hand—in the judgment of history, at least—and that is also the case with Daltrey and Townshend. Daltrey has long been acknowledged as a brilliant singer, but it’s Townshend who gets the real credit for The Who’s iconic status. After all, Townshend is the writer of the pair, the creator of all the band’s great hits, including the classic rock opera Tommy.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.