Pantheon Songs

“Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They might be, oh, just masses of color or they may be cloud forms or great landscapes or vague shadows or geometrical objects floating in space.” — Deems Taylor

“Drawing as much from Pink Floyd and Doctor Who as from Brian Eno, the album slows down the manic pace of techno and fills in the cavernous voids of earlier ambient fare. [...] The Orb injected goofy antics and insane-asylum effects into the stiff technophile genre, influencing the course of ’90s dance music along the way.” — Rolling Stone

Music—like any other art form—is fundamentally subjective, both in terms of how the artist produces it and how we choose to digest it. Some albums shoot for grandiosity, some aim to be grounded in reality. Some pander to the lowest common denominator, others are thematic. Some albums are inspired by static ideas and parsed through a dynamic prism.

Some albums are seen as hopelessly boring. Or even pretentious.

The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, the debut album by The Orb, is an album that attempts to envelop you in the concept of space and atmosphere. The original UK double album release clocks in at just under 110 minutes, which could easily seem like too much to most casual music fans but at the very least this album acts as a terrific virtuoso execution of long-form thematic expression. Ultraworld is like the auditory equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And therein lies the rub: how many people are willing to listen to an album that is twenty years old, has an average track length of nearly ten minutes, and is a concept album about space and atmosphere? Probably not very many, I suppose.

“Over the past few years to the traditional sounds of an English summer, the droning of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a new noise.” — John Waite

Luckily, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld begins with “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the only track on the album that conforms to anything remotely resembling the structure of a single. “Little Fluffy Clouds” centers around the sampling of an interview with Rickie Lee Jones, a sampling that would ultimately result in Jones bringing forth a lawsuit against The Orb’s record label Big Life.^[1]

In 1991 electronic music was primarily all about high beats per minute and loud beats, resulting in a lot of music that moved away from the ambient and cerebral stylings of the ’70′s (Brian Eno, Kraftwerk) and the pop sensibilities of the ’80s (Soft Cell, Gary Numan) in favor of a sound that (mostly) either mimicked the scattershot intensity of a strobe light or tried to ease you out of a K-hole with an energetic brand of aethereal sound. Or both. “Little Fluffy Clouds” falls into the latter category rather than the former while also—like the rest of the album from which it came—existing on its own plane; this song would be at home playing in a London club or through the headphones connected to the head of someone who would rather listen to Pink Floyd than most of what the electronic music genre has to offer.

I bring up Pink Floyd because The Orb—which is essentially Alex Paterson—is greatly influenced by them, from the US release of Ultraworld having an alternate cover showing the Battersea Power Station (the same station that graces the cover of Animals) to the fourth track on the album being titled “Back Side of the Moon.” But beyond the obvious nods to the Roger Waters-helmed Pink Floyd, Ultraworld also borrows from Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd as one cannot help but to think that the album’s core can be seen as one giant exploration that uses “Astronomy Domine” and/or “Interstellar Overdrive” as its starting point.

“Little Fluffy Clouds” begins with a rooster crowing and the sampled BBC audio above, followed by the sampled interview with Rickie Lee Jones. Everything about this song is perfectly calibrated, a complex launch sequence reduced to an understandable summary; a marvel of musical creativity whose end result is something that is so spot-on in its ambient and mellow beauty. Listen to how the word “little” ping-pongs across the speakers during the chorus. Listen to how perfect Jones’s voice is (unbeknownst to her initially) for this song—the way she says “purple and red and yellow and on fire” in a tone that seemingly emits both childlike wonder and a borderline sultriness.

“Little Fluffy Clouds” is an outstanding song on its own accord. It’s easily one of the best electronic songs on the ’90s. Within the context of the theme and arc of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld it is the perfect song to introduce the listener to the grand aspirations of the album’s whole. “Little Fluffy Clouds” is like the first chapter of Moby-Dick or David Copperfield, the Call me Ishmael, the Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…; the beginning of an opus about discovery.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”

“They went on forever. They… When I w-we lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in ‘em, and, uh… they were long… and clear and… There were lots of stars at night. And, uh, when it would rain, it would all turn… it… They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That’s uh, neat ’cause I used to look at them all the time, when I was little. You don’t see that. You might still see them in the desert.”

There are varying degrees of what constitutes great art. Some art is great in an all-encompassing way; its greatness is multi-faceted. Some art’s greatness resides in its static sketches and focused themes; its greatness lies not within its dynamic scope but rather its attention to detail with regards to a few finite things. And so you have The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld which so clearly falls under the “static sketches and focused themes” category of greatness. It is not an album founded on accessibility. I reckon many people would find it to be an absurd album—one that has no problem repeating the same melodies for long stretches of time. But it is a great album. It aims to take you to places that you never been to and it does so quite brilliantly. It, like 2001, is not concerned with dialog/lyrics; its beauty lies fully in the abstract.

And it all starts with a song that revolves around an interview with a singer that most people do not know by way of an album title, or by three track names. If you have never listened to Ultraworld, you should. Sit back and let “Little Fluffy Clouds” be the bridge to one of the best concept albums of all time.

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[1] The other samples in the song are: the above audio from John Waite from an episode of the BBC’s Face the Facts, Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast,” and Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica.”

One of my all-time favorite stories in the history of rock is the one involving Les Claypool auditioning for Metallica. Metallica’s original bass player, Cliff Burton, died suddenly and tragically in 1986 and Claypool showed up for an audition after Metallica lead guitarist and friend Kirk Hammett suggested that he try out.

For those of you don’t know who Les Claypool is, or who are not familiar with the band he would later form, Primus, Claypool is the freakishly talented bass player and singer who did the theme song and music for South Park. (And he’s also kind of freaky-looking too: he looks like the lovechild of Frank Zappa and Trent Reznor, but with the facial elasticity of Red Skelton.) Claypool is to the bass guitar what Hendrix is to the electric guitar; both possess an otherworldly control of their instrument, the difference being that Hendrix’s persona is drenched in mysticism and catharsis while Claypool’s is defined in part by absurdity and novelty. Les is the perfect musician to be affiliated with South Park, as both can very easily be dismissed as absurd on the surface by many, but have genuinely complex centers that are easily recognizable by those who have the patience to wait and look for it. One minute, South Park is about Santa vs. Jesus or fish sticks or Tom Cruise’s sexual preference—the next minute it can produce some of the best satire and social commentary in recent memory.^[1] In the same vain, Primus will record a song called “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” or an album called Sailing the Seas of Cheese and it will probably sound ridiculous. But Les Claypool will make your jaw drop with the way he plays bass.

And so Claypool shows up at the audition for Metallica and asks, in an attempt to lighten the mood, if they want to jam on some Isley Brothers songs. There is no conceivable way that Metallica will take him into their band—at this point, Metallica is probably the hardest band in America alongside Slayer and Megadeth, how could they possibly incorporate this… this guy?! It would be like Glenn Beck interviewing for Anna Wintour’s job at Vogue when she leaves the company.

Claypool’s audition is one of my favorite stories in rock history because it is equal parts absurdity and reality. We are all ingrained with the idea since childhood that the best people, the best talent, should always be sought after and chosen when it come to the hiring process for a job. But then we grow up and we find that that logic is oftentimes selective: the guy or girl with the tattoos on their arm will probably not be promoted to his or her highest slot, regardless of how much they know about the internal workings of the company; nepotism occurs, usually for the worst reasons; etc. And so the absurdity of Claypool’s demeanor and look canceled out the reality of his talent. It happens. Metallica would’ve become a much different band if Claypool was standing on the stage with them during their tour after …And Justice For All was released so you can’t really blame James Hetfield for wanting to take a pass.

After a name change and some lineup changes and a temporary disbanding, followed by a reforming of the band, Claypool, Larry LaLonde (lead guitar), and Tim “Herb” Alexander (drums), became the official Primus lineup for the first few releases. Sailing the Seas of Cheese was their major label debut and it featured “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver,” a song that has not aged one bit in the 20 years since it was released. Its thrash funk-ness is still an absolute joy to behold. Claypool’s bass guitar is still dizzying and mesmerizing, and the way he sings this song with an exaggerated truck stop redneck accent is ironic, yes, but also, oddly, appropriate. (Can you imagine this song being sung normally? It would feel way off if it were sung straight.) I remember the first time I heard this song and just taking for granted that Claypool’s opening bass riffs were an electric guitar that was being modified post-production or being played on a strangely-tuned guitar. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth listen that I realized that Primus was a three-person band and that the bass guitar is the foreground guitar.

I can’t really fault anyone who is not a fan of Primus to want to write off their catalog as novelty, to make the same face as a confused dog when hearing some of their songs, and/or to have the same kind of “you’re amazing; thanks, but no thanks” kind of reaction that Metallica had during Claypool’s audition. But to revisit the aforementioned notion we are taught when we’re younger, that people who have the most amount of talent deserve to be praised and promoted: “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” by itself is an amazing song, and one that will probably be accessible to people who have never heard of or do not like Primus, and then when you factor in its technical merits (the jaw-dropping communion of all three musicians during the solo after Go! is shouted quickly at the midpoint of the track) this is one of the best songs of the early ’90s.

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[1] Hello, episode in which Jimmy berates cheaters and PED users at the Special Olympics while Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds stand near the podium smiling silently. Just to name one episode.

In the mid ’90s, after Kurt Cobain decided to end his life by way of a shotgun and MTV decided to significantly scale back its music video operations in exchange for foisting Chris Hardwick, as well as the loathsome nesting dolls that became The Real World, upon us (per their 1981 agreement with the Devil) and radio became more deregulated (read: more awful), there was a brief stretch of time in which it looked like electronic music would catch fire in a mainstream sense in the U.S. People talked about techno in a kind of serious way. Madonna was rumored to be joining the genre (which she did eventually, with Ray of Light). People talked about Kraftwerk again. Of course it would turn out to be short-lived, the idea that techno/electronic music would become a real mainstream presence but “Block Rockin’ Beats” by The Chemical Brothers gave the idea an air of legitimacy at the time.

I once read (I think in Rolling Stone) someone make the analogy that “Block Rockin’ Beats” was the “Whole Lotta Love” of electronic music during the mid ’90s and to this day I think that that is a fitting observation and comparison. It’s an adept comparison in a literal sense because “Block Rockin’ Beats,” like “Whole Lotta Love,” is the first song on a second album by a band whose debut album was a show-stopping killer. Led Zeppelin I was a helluva debut within the sphere of rock and Exit Planet Dust, The Chemical Brothers debut album, was a helluva debut too—it’s a big beat electronic masterpiece. In a more subtle way, the comparison also fits because many people would be justified in wondering if the debut albums would ultimately be filed away under Lighting-In-A-Bottle-Debut-Albums when they were first released; that their sophomore efforts would succumb to overthinking and overproduction. “Whole Lotta Love” and “Block Rockin’ Beats” blew away those fears and/or questions, as Zeppelin would go on to be an iconic rock band and The Chemical Brothers would go on to be not only one of the most recognizable electronic bands of the last three decades but also one of the best big beat bands of all time.

If you are unfamiliar with the term ‘big beat’ as it relates to electronic/techno parlance, it means exactly what you think it does: big, larger-than-life beats that consume you in a way that, I think, brings this particular electronic genre the closest to rock’s essence. When you listen to Exit Planet Dust or Dig Your Own Hole (the album that “Block Rockin’ Beats” opens) it feels like you are listening to a rock record rather than the kind of exploratory soundscape that most electronic albums can sound like to a fan of rock. (The exploratory nature of many electronic albums is probably why the genre will never be fully embraced by a mainstream public. Not that there’s anything wrong with going that route, I’m just pointing out an opinion. Because if people were attracted to exploratory electronic music then Entroducing….. by DJ Shadow would be a much more recognizable album, in my opinion.) Though “Block Rockin’ Beats” has a primary bass line and a use of siren effects that are decidedly unrock, the rest of the song’s elements—the skipping and oftentimes manic drum beat and cymbal sounds, the guitar distortion-like screeches, the thunderous missile-like bursts of bass—play out like a reimagining of a (mostly) traditionally arranged modern day rock track.

The Chemical Brothers (Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, pictured left and right, respectively, above) formed in 1992 under the name The Dust Brothers, the same name of the producers that the Beastie Boys have worked with since Paul’s Boutique. In 1995, the American Dust Brothers threatened legal action against Manchester, England-born Simons and Rowlands and the two changed their name to The Chemical Brothers (thus, why their debut album is called Exit Planet Dust). This threatened legal action by the original Dust Brothers is funny, on the surface, for two reasons: 1) the original Dust Brothers weren’t musicians that released their own music (they were producers), and 2) for all of the influence that the original Dust Brothers, and the fertile era of ’80s rap, had on Simons and Rowlands, they didn’t follow the same playbook when it came to their music (Simons and Rowlands were deeply affected by Public Enemy but that influence isn’t readily palpable to most people). But I also understand the big picture thinking here: a brand needed to be protected. (Other than industry people, who else knows that the Dust Brothers are really Michael Simpson and John King?) Maybe it was a good thing that Simpson and King threatened Simons and Rowlands, because during the gap between the Beastie releases Ill Communication and Hello Nasty Simons and Rowlands produced two albums that, at that time, if they had kept the Dust Brothers moniker, would have put them on the same name recognition level as their American counterparts.

Electronic music lost the mainstream war in the mid ’90s,^[1] but “Block Rockin’ Beats” helped legitimize it enough to win a few battles here and there (i.e.–The Gap using a Crystal Method song in a commercial). Within a few years boy bands and Eminem and anything that lent itself to be TRL-worthy ruled the music landscape. The Chemical Brothers couldn’t compete with three tweener boys and their “MMMBop” (which, to bring everything back full circle, was a song produced by the Dust Brothers).

Electronic music may never fully become a mainstream force in the U.S. like it is in the U.K., but you can’t reasonably talk about the ’90s and not include The Chemical Brothers in the overall discussion about that decade. The Chemical Brothers released a handful of songs (“Life Is Sweet,” “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” “Let Forever Be,” “Setting Sun”) in the ’90s that are not only some of the very best electronic songs of the decade but are also in the discussion of best songs in general. And then when you factor in “Block Rockin’ Beats” it’s a no-brainer that The Chemical Brothers have a spot in the Pantheon.

“Block Rockin’ Beats” is one of the greatest electronic songs ever made, and probably the greatest big beat song ever made. It might not be enough to convert the rock or hip hop or country diehards but its impact on music, even if its footprint was only temporarily noticeable by a mainstream audience, is not debatable. This is a song that can be enjoyed without glow sticks and strobe lights being present—which, considering how frantic the pace can sometimes get, is quite the accomplishment. Which is what one should expect from the Led Zeppelin of electronic music.

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[1] Yeah, I know, “war” seems like a dumb descriptor to use but the mid ’90s really truly became a temporary wasteland for mainstream music. (Exhibit A: the members of Metallica getting haircuts was a legitimate and buzzworthy thing to talk about.) Rock was becoming watered down, hip hop was still kind of socially polarizing; people my age were looking for something new to take root. And if electronic/techno was going to try to step up then we would let them try to take the reins.

One of the many genres assigned to The Verve (which includes but is not limited to: britpop, dream pop, and psychedelia) is shoegazing.

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Mick Jagger is telling Keith Richards about how he had celebrated Christmas last week. The two are in a recording studio and decide to walk outside and have a smoke to clear their heads. The song that they are currently writing has officially reached headache status; they need a break. It is January, 1965. Mick is telling Keith about the Christmas celebration he hosted at a hotel suite that producer Andrew Loog Oldham had set him up with. Keith listens as Mick talks about the women, booze, and drugs that were on display (and consumed) in the suite. Mick seems to have particularly fond memories of a bird named Mary Washington: “This girl was wild. She was up for anything. She moved here from some place in North Carolina a few years ago. Dad’s a government guy. A big deal kind of guy, apparently. Come to think of it… maybe she was from South Carolina. I don’t know, one of the Carolinas in the States. Or some southern state. Seriously, though, she was amazing. Her dad would have me killed straight away if he knew what we did and if he knew how proficient she was.” Mick lights his cigarette. He has to use his left hand to block off the wind that deems his lighter impotent. “Amazing, she was.”

Keith listens politely but his thoughts keep coming back to the song that has become troublesome to write. He also intermittently wonders if Eric Burdon will ever be able to get more of that weed he had a couple months ago. He wonders what Eric’s up to at this moment. Back to the song: should it be faster, or slower? Should the I don’t knows be left in? He notices a pause in the conversation and realizes that he needs to chime in with something quickly. “Yeah, I know, man. Carolina girls are wild. Wish I had one right now,” he says with a smile and a gesture to Mick that they should head back into the studio.

January in England can be cold.

Andrew Loog Oldham is feeling incomplete. He is fixing himself a roast beef, salami, and provolone sandwich at an ungodly hour of the night—again. He can feel his wife starting to pull away from him. His long hours at the studio is starting to wear on her. “He gets to spend days at a time with The Rolling Stones doing God knows what and here I am, staying at home with his two children! And a dog!” she thinks to herself. Or at least Andrew imagines his wife thinking these kinds of thoughts about him.

“And she’s right, you know,” he says to himself after eating the first bite of his sandwich.

He surveys his kitchen: dark colored cabinets everywhere, mustard yellow appliances, a couple of clean glasses that were not put away for some reason. He puts them away. “I know that I’ll never be the manager of The Rolling Stones forever,” he continues his inner conversation with himself as he opens the cabinet which house all of the glasses. He realizes that he’s never stopped and noticed how many glasses are in here; there are quite a lot.

“The more popular they get, the more Keith and Mick will want to find a new manager. A new manager that will take them in new directions!” (his inner monologue says sarcastically) “Or so they’ll tell themselves. They don’t realize how good they have it with me. Brian certainly doesn’t understand that. I wish they were all like Charlie, actually,” he sighs to himself in exhaustion, feeling a future pang that hasn’t yet happened.

By this point, Andrew is very tired. His eyes are starting to feel like they are heavy with cement. As he walks up the stairs, some random notes from a Chopin arrangement appear in his head and he hums them to himself.

To some people Richard Ashcroft looks a little like Roger Waters, the bassist, frontman, and one of the founding members of Pink Floyd. Or at least this is what a few women that Ashcroft has hooked up with after shows have said to him. He’s never really heard this comparison brought to light by anyone else really.

The lawyers said everything would be fine when we cut the fucking record, he thinks to himself.

Richard Ashcroft is sitting in his hotel room in München. It’s actually a suite, inside one of those new school hotels that have architecture and interior design elements that are extremely pleasing to the eye initially but then seem to become more and more pretentious looking the more you spend time in them. After a couple of days, the suite becomes less and less Wow! I love that painting on that wall! And look at that black chair over there! and more and more That black chair is fucking uncomfortable, and who gave that stroke artist license to pretend he or she is fucking Miro? But then again, maybe these angry feelings and hostility towards the room had more to do with the lawsuit that Ashcroft and the rest of his band are now dealing with. He lights a cigarette and calls his girlfriend who is still in London.

“I can’t fucking believe this is happening, Sheryl.”

“I know, baby. I don’t understand how they have a leg to stand on.”

“You know what the lawyer told us earlier today?”

“What?”

“That it may wind up that Jagger and Richards get the writing credits for the song. You believe that?” He takes a quick drag, he’s starting to feel anxious and angry. A shot of anything would be great right now. “I always knew that rock was a business and all that, but this is fucking ludicrous. Life of a rock star, right?”

Sheryl is silent on the other end of the phone, temporarily unable to come up with the consoling or angry chorus that he is looking for at this moment. He walks to the fridge and takes out a bottle of Ketel One vodka and surveys the picture on the bottle. When he stands up, the light from the fridge slants across his shoes.

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“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
— Mark Twain

“Bitter Sweet Symphony” was the first single off of The Verve’s third album Urban Hymns and it is one of the best songs of the ’90′s. On paper, this song should probably be a disaster, a filler track included on an album because the band wanted to experiment a little bit and they convinced the label to let it make the cut, as it is a song that is nearly six minutes long, uses violins, and has a small array of various blips and brief textural sounds—the types of elements that appear in either songs born out of bloated ideas by a band that has kicked up its level of drug use, or in electronic music. They are typically not elements you find in a well-crafted and catchy pop rock song that charted well on both sides of the pond.

The violins in the song were sampled from an orchestral version of “The Last Time,” recorded in the ’60′s by The Rolling Stones’ first producer Andrew Loog Oldham by way of a side project he had called the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra. The Verve brokered a deal before “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was released that allowed them to use the violin samples but at some point Abkco, the record label that owns much of the Stones’ early catalog, sued the band on the grounds that they used too much of the sample. Fast-forward to the judgment of the lawsuit and the end result was that the writing credits of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was taken away from The Verve and given to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, two people who did not write “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” (Lead singer Richard Ashcroft would later say that it was the best song the two had written in twenty years.)

To harp on the legal aspect of this song, though, is to unfairly postpone talking about the song’s greatness (even though this song is in fact partly defined by the questionable lawsuit brought against it and the band). Every year has its surprise radio hits—either from an artist that most people have never heard of, or a third or fourth single from an established artist on an established album that becomes just as popular (if not more) than the initial single that was released. Sometimes these hits become one-hit wonders or become forgotten pretty quickly because they are fundamentally ephemeral and people will claim to like them afterward for mostly ironic reasons (something like “Informer” by Snow), while others are forgotten but are still remembered fondly when they appear intermittently in our lives by way of a random iPod playlist, Internet radio, or television appearance (something like “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai). I think “Bitter Sweet Symphony” falls safely into the latter category. I thought it was a refreshing breath of fresh air when it hit the US airwaves in 1997 and I think it has aged remarkably in the years since.

The fundamental musical contrast in “Bitter Sweet Symphony”—violins coexisting naturally with drums that hover around a mid-level bombast—make for some of the best music that has been produced in the last fifteen years. Artists are at their best when they successfully experiment with genres and styles. It is, I think, why we have so much vested social currency in them. When they pull it off, their art becomes a landmark or demarcation point or a reference point in our lives especially after years have gone by (you see it now with the anniversary of Nevermind); when they fail it becomes maddening, like watching your kid disobey you in front of your eyes (i.e.–”Why are you eating cookies when I told you you couldn’t?!” “Why did someone allow Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana to record together?!”). The Verve mixed classical music with dream pop, made a nearly six minute song with minimal emphasis on the guitar. They produced a drum- and violin-driven song that is one of the best songs of the ’90′s to come from England alongside “Wonderwall” by Oasis and “Karma Police” by Radiohead. That’s quite an accomplishment.

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[Editor's note: everything in between the asterisks is fictional, and any resemblance to factual occurrence is purely coincidental.]

On April 20, 1992 Slanted and Enchanted, the debut album by Pavement, was released. It was released to little mainstream fanfare. The critics who got a copy of the album beforehand mostly raved about it, and the people who wound up buying the album typically mirror the acclaim that the critics gave it. Long story short: Slanted and Enchanted is an album that has a cult following.^[1]

And like all things that have cult followings, whether it be an album or a movie or a television show, Slanted and Enchanted is loved in part for its anti-success. If you ever heard any songs from this album on the radio in the Spring/Summer of ’92 it was probably on a college station. None of the songs on this album had videos made for MTV. Slanted was a word-of-mouth album that only the cool kids and the rock journalists knew about upon its release, which only adds to its stock price on the cult/underground/indie cool index.

Now, I could easily spend the next 700–1,000 words telling you that Pavement is an ultra-important band because they are not Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Soundgarden, because they never sold a lot of albums (which would then steer my discussion into how much more “real” their music was; that fringe bands who were monetarily unsuccessfual are inherently more significant than their popular and mainstream-friendly counterparts). But I have no interest in doing that, mostly because A) I think that everything Pavement produced after Slanted and Enchanted is inconsistent at best, B) being overlooked doesn’t mean an automatic trip to the pedestal (not everyone deserves the coveted Velvet Underground & Nico banana-shaped trophy), and C) the music should always take precedent. The last point is the most important, obviously.

Any band or album with a cult following can have their music written about in such a way as to assimilate it to our society or pop culture as a whole; it’s the easiest and best way to make up for its lack of broad range and appeal (i.e.–”I know you’ve probably never heard of this before, but this is why it’s important…”). If I were so inclined to I could expand upon the idea that Pavement were The Kinks to Nirvana’s Beatles, or that Slanted and Enchanted is attached to the Clinton-ian cultural shift that helped to topple the Reagan/Bush America that seemed destined to continue well into the ’90′s, and possibly into the 21st century. I’ll go with this instead: Pavement is one of the most important bands of the last twenty years because Slanted and Enchanted is one of the greatest flawed albums of all time. That last sentence might seem like a backhanded compliment but it is most assuredly not. I’ll explain.

A masterpiece by definition is something that connotes flawlessness (or as close to being flawless as possible). It is probably fair to assume that most people assign the “masterpiece” label to art that possesses high-quality production value (Dark Side of the Moon, Star Wars, The Wire) or it possesses a transcendent groundbreaking quality that can supersede its production value (The Velvet Underground & Nico, Bonnie and Clyde, Hill Street Blues). At the risk of sounding cliché I would say that Slanted and Enchanted possesses both qualities: it has a high-quality production value (for an alternative/garage album) and its high-quality lo-fi sound makes it groundbreaking in early ’90′s terms. If The Kingsmen had arrived thirty years later their album would have probably sounded like Slanted and Enchanted. Pavement’s debut album is chock full of songs that have a “Louie Louie” aesthetic: low budget songs that are classics (and fun as fuck to listen to). Countless numbers of bands have gone into the recording studio to make an album that is built upon acceptable contradictions—a polished raw album, punk music with panache, music with underground soul built on mainstream sensibilities, brutally sad songs set to happy music—and these contradictions can create a homemade bomb type of instability as it’s easier for the flaws to become more pronounced. Slanted and Enchanted treads its contradictions with ease. Its flaws—its one- or two-take feel—are perfect and, more importantly, its music still sounds remarkably fresh today (like any great masterpiece, it’s timeless). This is the album almost every high school rock band dreams of making.

The album has such a magnificent hodgepodge of songs and styles—from rowdy absurdity (“Conduit For Sale!” and “Chesley’s Little Wrists”) to properly structured alt-rock songs with odd title names (“No Life Singed Her” and “Trigger Cut/Wounded Kite At :17″) and a couple of songs that are really polished and some of the best overlooked songs of the ’90′s (“Loretta’s Scars” and “Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era”). In all honesty, I could make a case for just about any song on Slanted and Enchanted to be the one to define Pavement on this site; any one of the aforementioned songs (especially “Loretta’s Scars”) could be written about here. But what puts “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” over the top is that it is the first track on the album. It sets the tone for the album as a whole, and when you are creating an alt-rock/indie hodgepodge masterpiece you want something like “Summer Babe” to be the curator at the entrance waiting to give you the tour.

The music of “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”^[2] has all of the high-quality garage elements that I mentioned before: the sound is crisp but not perfect, kind of like it has been recorded in a basement (I imagine an old Budweiser bar-style hanging light perched above the band as they record); the percussion goes from tiptoeing hi-hats to sounding like everything is being punched or kicked; the volume level of Mark Ibold’s bruising bass: on almost any other record the bass here would have its volume levels adjusted but instead it sounds so perfectly noticeable and rambunctious; Stephen Malkmus’s and Scott Kannberg’s guitars are sonically loud enough to be noticed but still have to fight at times with the bass and drums to reach the foreground. Factor in lyrics like “Ice, baby/I saw your girlfriend and she was/Eating fingers like they’re just another meal” and “Every time I sit around I find I’m shot” and you’ve got one of the best alt-rock/indie songs of the decade.

Because of its cult status, Slanted and Enchanted in general, and “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” in particular, can come across as though it is for hipsters only; like you have to either exclusively drink Pabst or microbrews and have ironic conversations about Fraggle Rock to be able to appreciate this song, or album. But make no mistake: this song and the album from which it came is for anyone who loved the early ’90′s and who loves legitimately great indie rock. Sure, some of the songs on the album are a little weird for weird’s sake but they are balanced out by tracks like “Summer Babe”—straight-up rock songs that are perfect for the soundtracks to high school and college.

This is one of the best songs of the ’90′s that most people have probably never heard of before, from one of the best albums of the ’90′s that is mostly unknown by casual and in-touch music fans alike.

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[1] According to Wikipedia, this album had only sold 150,000 copies as of 2007 (so it would be surprising if it has reached the 200,000 sales number yet as of this writing).

[2] Quick background: the “(Winter Version)” suffix was added for the album. The original “Summer Babe” was recorded as a single in 1991. The two versions sound pretty similar but the track was renamed nonetheless.

If I were to do a song association game for Counting Crows in which I asked ten thousand random people to tell me A) the first song of theirs that comes to mind and B) their favorite song from the band, I have no doubt that “Mr. Jones” would be the song that would make up the majority of the responses. “Mr. Jones” is the song that put the band on the map, and it is the song that probably best exemplifies the band on a mass scale as it highlights the band’s greatest strength: their ability to create catchy, full-bodied melodies (they are a seven man band after all) that are founded on Adam Duritz’s vocals, which possess all of the best qualities of a next generation crooner who can at times remind one (in a natural sense, and not from a place of winking impersonation) of a youthful Van Morrison. I will be the first to admit that “Mr. Jones” is a classic song—a song that I can find little fault with—but sometimes I have to go with a song on this site that is not the presumed majority pick. Sometimes, I have to go with the song that is simply more gorgeous, more start-to-finish beautiful, more… well, perfect. Which is why I think that “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” is the song that should be interred into this site when it comes to Counting Crows.^[1] Or to put it another way: “Mr. Jones” is a song that you can love without caring at all about the band; “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” is a song that can make you love the band even if you never heard anything from them before. Tell a Counting Crows fan that you hate “Mr. Jones” and you’ll most likely be met with a shrug. Tell them that you hate “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” and you’ll most likely be met with a reaction ordinarily reserved for hearing a statement like I don’t like babies. “Mr. Jones” is a true-to-form classic but “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” transcends the classic label; it hits you square in your music-appreciating soul. It kind of speaks on another wavelength.

In Cameron Crowe’s masterpiece Almost Famous there is a subtext throughout the movie about the meaning of the word “groupie.” When William Miller (and, by proxy, we the audience) meets Penny Lane and her “band-aids” for the first time he sheepishly refers to them as groupies before he is corrected that they are band-aids. On the surface, the term “band-aid” seems like the type of window dressing that is commonly applied to words that imply sex (“I’m not a prostitute, I’m an escort“). But as the movie goes along the word band-aid is validated when William berates Stillwater for treating Penny like an object/groupie: “‘That groupie?’ She was a band-aid! All she did was love your band. And you used her, all of you! You used her and threw her away! She almost died last night while you were with [condescending tone] Bob Dylan. You guys, you’re always talking about the fans, the fans, the fans; she was your biggest fan, and you threw her away! And if you can’t see that, that’s your biggest problem!”

The scene is genuinely fantastic on so many levels, notably because it marks yet another chapter in William’s coming-of-age storyline that is central to the movie. To use this scene as a metaphor for this post, “Mr. Jones” is a groupie; “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” is a band-aid. The former is the known, the expected, the hit; the latter is the revelation, the treasure—the kind of song that you want to make your own and hope that no one else has discovered it yet.

I have no idea how history will treat Counting Crows—either as a band in full whenever their time comes to an end, or as a band of the ’90′s when that decade increasingly becomes the focus of books and the arts as more time goes by. From a ten thousand mile high view, Counting Crows can easily viewed as a successful band during the ’90′s; August and Everything After is a septuple platinum album that reached #4 on the Billboard charts, Recovering the Satellites a double platinum album that hit #1 on the charts for a week, This Desert Life (the album that has “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” as its second track) a platinum album that reached #8 on the charts. Counting Crows managed to make platinum albums during the heyday of grunge/alternative (1993), the destruction of the landscape of mainstream radio due to deregulation (1996), and the beginning of the nadir of pop music (1999). By these accounts alone, you can call Counting Crows a successful band; they withstood three rather large obstacles quite nicely. That said, my fear is that history will merely clump Counting Crows with bands that it doesn’t deserve to be clumped in with: soulless fuckheads and masters of dentist waiting room music like The Wallflowers and Matchbox Twenty. (And maybe a song like “Mr. Jones” is popular enough to make sure that that fate does not befall the band.) When I look at the output of music that Counting Crows produced during the ’90′s with a finer eye—from a one hundred mile high view if you will—I see a band that is integral in defining the decade, as I think that they did a much better job of creating post-grunge and mainstream college type songs than Dave Matthews Band did and other bands who enjoyed white-hot popularity for a stretch.^[2]

“Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” may not be the first pick that many people would make when it comes to selecting a defining Counting Crows song but I think it’s the best choice. It’s the best choice because the music is so effortlessly relaxing and pretty; because it is over seven and a half minutes of pretty, relaxing music; because it includes two lyrics that have an almost literary profundity to them (“If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts” and “If you’ve never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame”); because Adam Duritz’s voice is perfect for a song about circuses, movies, and crushes; because Charlie Gillingham’s piano is perfect at normal rhythm and when it used as flourishes. Because this is a great song by a band that a lot of people would categorize as being uncool.

Look at the picture of the band on the top of this post again.

That is not a cool picture. Seven guys riding bikes, most of them dressed in pretty unflattering attire: the definition of an uncool picture. But like Lester Bangs tells William in Almost Famous, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.” History may be unkind to Counting Crows by lumping them in with all of the aforementioned vanilla rock all-stars but they deserve better than that, and they deserve better because of this song. If you think that Counting Crows are too uncool for you, listen to “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” anyway and maybe you’ll discover the only true currency that Bangs was talking about (or the difference between a groupie and a band-aid).

And if you already love this song then hopefully you’ll appreciate this love letter that was written for it.

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[1] Note: I have seen this song title spelled as the sic’d “Mrs. Potters Lullaby” too, most notably on Amazon as well as other sites. I’m assuming that that its official spelling is “Potter’s” (the official band site references it as such) so that’s what I am going with here on this post but if anyone can prove that “Potters” is the official spelling please let me know in the comment area below.

[2] Bands such as Live, Third Eye Blind, and (shudder) Hootie & the Blowfish.

File this under Things That Would’ve Caused The World To End If The Internet Was Ubiquitous During A Pre-1996 America: on October 3, 1992 Sinead O’Connor, while performing her second song “War” on Saturday Night Live, held up a picture of Pope John Paul II and then proceeded to rip it up while singing the word “evil” and then threw the scraps of the picture in the direction of the camera facing her. She finished up by saying “Fight the real enemy.”

This moment was the definition of the word polarizing, as it is very hard for middle ground to exist in the wake of such unexpected performance art. You either commended O’Connor for her girl balls (probably because you agreed with the notion that the Church and/or the Vatican fall somewhere on the scale of “kind of sinister” to “thoroughly evil,” or you had to admire its incendiary message in a it’s-the-freedom-of-speech-that-makes-our-country-great kind of way), or you condemned her for being so brazen about the delivery of the message (probably because you thought the Church is infallible, or that the way in which she went about it was fundamentally wrong and that should she be attacked for engaging in such cheap theatrics and one-sided, unfounded rhetoric). This may shock you but it was the voices of the latter group that were heard the most during the aftermath of the performance.^[1]

To be sure, Sinead O’Connor had always been an artist that confounded mainstream American audiences to a degree. She suddenly appeared on MTV in 1988 with her video for the song “Mandinka.” Here was this bald Irish woman with a confusing first name (Is it pronounced Sin-eed?) who wanted to convey to us how mad she was about things, from the IRA to your more run-of-the-mill inequities like war and other social injustices. Because her look was so blunt and in your face it was pretty easy to ignore her message and just assume and project onto her what we thought her anger was about. I was ten years old when I first saw her on MTV and I couldn’t get past the fact that she looked like an angry alien, like someone who would steal a few scenes in one of James Cameron’s or Ridley Scott’s earlier movies. I don’t think I was alone in assimilating her to something otherworldly. Looking back now, Sinead O’Connor merely resembled some of the girls I would later go to high school and college with—those girls who had to grow up much quicker than the rest of us because their parents lashed each other in their divorce, or because they had an abusive parent, or other factors that cause kids to grow up angry that, in a Utopian world, they would be exempt from.

The normal script would have seen O’Connor fall off the figurative edge of the earth, destined to be a local hero and fan favorite in her home country of Ireland and never being able to regain the exposure of MTV and American charts. But in early 1990 she again appeared out of nowhere with the single “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Written by Prince and initially performed by The Family, “Nothing Compares 2 U” as performed by O’Connor was both an amazing single that captured a relatable sense of pain and sadness and an enormous leveler of her image—whatever you thought of Sinead’s image or previous music you pretty much had to tip your hat to this song’s perfection.^[2] Gone were the scowls and lyrics and references to war and slavery. It is one of the best songs of the ’90′s.

Musically, this song is striking in its minimalism^[3] as it only contains O’Connor’s vocals, some background vocal tracks, a couple of keyboards, a violin, and a slow drum beat. While it is very common for sad painful songs to be stripped down musically, they usually employ a guitar of some sort; it usually involves a guy or a girl strumming their lonely guitar and bleeding in the studio. “Nothing Compares 2 U,” on the other hand, is so stripped down that it almost sits in bas-relief to all other pain-derived ballads. Sinead’s version of this song comes across as extremely personal; she absolutely owns the lyrics that Prince wrote. The opening lyrics, “It’s been seven hours and fifteen days/Since u took your love away,” is metric tons kind of heavy and she nails the sadness and the blame and all of the other internal fury that resides in a statement like that. Nails. It. And so because this song is so personal^[4] and because O’Connor so visibly looks like an outsider, “Nothing Compares 2 U” also (however inadvertently) provides a commentary on her public image.

It is not surprising to find out that people who are outwardly angry and given to political or social thought that skews hard in one direction are (typically) trying to mask their most personal emotions, be it emotions dealing with loneliness, love that is not reciprocated, familial issues, etc. O’Connor let a lot of people catch a personal glimpse of her with this song but then she pushed us all away a couple years later on SNL. In trying to start a discourse on abuse and abuse of power she managed to piss a lot of people off. It happens a lot; it’s kind of the natural order of things. What doesn’t happen a lot is a something like “Nothing Compares 2 U” appearing out of thin air.

I have no doubt that there were plenty of people who loved this song (and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, the album from which it came) and then hated it after seeing her destruction of the Pope’s picture on live television. And to some extent I get that thought process as it’s easy to hate the artists/messengers. Collectively, we only allow a short leash with which we like our artists and entertainers to speak freely about political and social problems. (In some cases we allow a longer leash, like with O’Connor’s fellow Irishman, Bono.) But Sinead O’Connor was actually really upfront with us about her anger and discomfort with the world, which made it that much harder for us to see the forest through the trees with regards to her as a mainstream commodity.

To me, the soul of this song is when O’Connor sings,

“I went to the doctor
And guess what he told me?
Guess what he told me?
He said ‘Girl u better try and have fun no matter what u do’
But he’s a fool
‘Cause nothing compares
Nothing compares 2 u”

Not only is this the lyrical core of the song but also the musical core as well, as it represents the only time in the song in which the melody becomes rushed and quicker; it feels almost panicky. It’s a brilliant touch. And I reckon that her heart raced just like that right before she took the picture of the Pope out from behind her back. But none of that matters; we weren’t supposed to humanize her. We were supposed to kill the messenger and we did: O’Connor has died her figurative death since that SNL appearance. This is what happens when polarizing people do polarizing things.

The other byproduct of polarizing people can also be great art, of which this song certainly falls into that category. “Nothing Compares 2 U” is near the top of the best covers ever made list, and best songs of the ’90′s list. And, to me, it cuts through any of the bullshit that people may associate with O’Connor’s image or other music. The SNL performance was the sideshow; this song is the real deal and one that should outlive us all in a perfect world.

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[1] I was 14 years old when this happened. The firestorm that this created was crazy, but it was crazy in a 1992 sense. Back then, it was a big story in the sense that Nightline and the Sunday morning news shows talked about it, and it was written about in Time and Newsweek and newspapers. I’m sure that CNN beat it to a dead horse but CNN, and cable news in general, wasn’t as all-encompassing yet. (CNN in 1992 was still mostly known for their political reporting, Gulf War reporting, and Larry King. They hadn’t yet become the thing that caused MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox News to be created.) And the only thing I remember during the aftermath that the entertainment industry piped in about was 1) interviews with Lorne Michaels, 2) Madonna chiming in with her opinions (because she was the musical guest for the following week on SNL), and 3) Joe Pesci mentioning it in his monologue (he was the host for the following week). That was really it from what I can remember. I’m sure that other celebrities and musicians chimed in with their two cents too but, on the whole, the media pretty much only sought the opinions of the major players involved and of those who would be on the next episode. If this had happened today in the world of Twitter and Cable News 2.0? E! would probably give lip service to what Kim Kardashian had to say/tweet about it. Fox News anchors would take turns vomiting and ejaculating all over themselves. The suicide rate would have jumped up 650%.

[2] The same thing applied to Oasis with “Wonderwall.” Plenty of people hated Oasis but the percentage of people that still clung to their hate with “Wonderwall” was pretty low because, well, “Wonderwall” is a pretty fucking perfect song (before it was overkilled by the radio).

[3] To be sure, O’Connor’s sound wasn’t always lush (her performance of “War” on SNL was bare bones). So the use of the word “minimalism” and its “striking” quality is meant strictly with regards to very popular chart-topping singles.

[4] In the video for the song she cries at one point, which was not an act as O’Connor later told an interviewer that thinking of the strained relationship with her mother caused that to be caught on film and it was decided to leave it in the final cut.

As Lester Bangs once said in Almost Famous, here’s a theory for you to disregard completely: I think at some point in the next ten or fifteen years Superunknown, the 1994 masterpiece from Soundgarden, will enjoy a kind of rebirth resulting in a brief period of time in which a sizable amount of popular bands will cite it as an influence.

I can already see a future interview on TV or online now with a lead singer from some Kings of Leon type band^[1] talking about their newly-released sophomore album, and the lead singer saying something like:

“We really wanted to get back to basics on [new album title].^[2] But we also wanted it to have something raw and new on there as well, kind of like what Soundgarden did with Superunknown. I wanted our new album to have songs on there like ‘Half’ and ‘The Day I Tried To Live’—songs that we’re just kind of unexpected but still fit in really tight on the whole. One of my uncles would play Superunknown all the time and it kinda spoke to me as a kid, and I always wanted to kinda make something that showed my appreciation for that album.”

And, of course, this hypothetical album will sound nothing like Superunknown but that’s not really the point. The point is that the album will have been name-dropped and will be discovered by future kids who are curious about the early ’90′s, but who have little patience for Nirvana’s small catalog or Pearl Jam’s Neil Young-ish desire to veer off the mainstream road or the pretentiousness of Pavement or Mudhoney (or any band, save for Pixies, that was attached to Steve Albini).

As more time goes by I think that the appreciation (or re-appreciation) of Superunknown will grow a little bit at a time—a few blocks here, a few drops there. And it will grow because I believe that most music fans enjoy discovering (and rediscovering) albums that mark the end of a decade’s genre almost as much as the albums that mark the beginning, and Superunknown is arguably the final landmark album of the ’90′s grunge era. It is the Dark Side of the Moon of the ’90′s grunge era in terms of how polished its sound is. (And there’s even some mid level psychedelia on Soundgarden’s album too.)

***************

My 14th birthday was a couple of weeks after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” began its Zeitgeist ascent. In fact, my freshman year of high school was mostly defined by the albums that were released in between August of ’91 until June of ’92.^[3] Nevermind, Ten, Badmotorfinger, Metallica, both Use Your Illusions, Check Your Head, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Achtung Baby. Soundgarden was kind of an afterthought for me during this time. “Rusty Cage” and “Outshined”—the two singles from their album Badmotorfinger—seemed to me like the kind of music that Nirvana was graciously killing with repeated hammer blows to the head. And as much as I admired lead singer Chris Cornell’s vocals from the sidelines it just never really did anything for me.

Fast forward to May of 1994 and hearing “Black Hole Sun” (the third single off of Superunknown) for the first time and I was pretty much blown away by it. I even bought Badmotorfinger shortly afterward just to see if I was blind and too dismissive of Soundgarden during my freshman year. I wasn’t; I still didn’t like the band’s 1991 release but I also realized how unfair it is to compare the two albums because one had “Rusty Cage” on it and the other had “Black Hole Sun” on it. The latter destroys the former in every respect. “Black Hole Sun,” with its opening riffs that sound like lazy heat and humidity personified (but are technically cool and steely), is a veritable garden of texture—both of the sonic and standard rock variety. Like many other great bands Soundgarden’s music is best when it snaps in effortlessly with their lead singer’s voice, in this case Chris Cornell’s drowsy lows to booming highs. To me, “Black Hole Sun” represented the mythical Next Step that grunge/alternative was supposed to take: it was a no-frills rock song with a musically clean aesthetic made by guys who conformed to our collective image of what a grunge/alternative rock band should look like. And with Pearl Jam giving us the polarizing Vitalogy at the end of 1994 it is fair to say that most people would have probably crowned Superunknown the best album of ’94 (in terms of visible mainstream rock albums).

What happened instead was 1994 wound up being the death knell for mainstream grunge/alternative music. Everything would eventually be replaced by Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette, music that fit into as many possible radio formats at once.

When I think about Soundgarden nowadays I think that their legacy takes a hit because of the same two reasons that could probably be applied to Alice in Chains: 1) they never really enjoyed any crossover success with women, 2) they are partially defined by what they are not. The first reason is just kind of unavoidable as most music that even faintly smells of metal (and I would contend that Cornell’s vocals probably have a metallic taste) will turn off most casual female music fans. It happens.^[4] The second reason is a little more interesting.

Even though Soundgarden was delivered into our mainstream world in 1991 by way of Seattle (and the fact that they wore flannel and had long hair), they didn’t have the kind of accessible power that Nirvana had or the looks that Pearl Jam had. They weren’t as dark as Alice in Chains. But they were also too big and recognizable to be a part of the same circles that bands like Seaweed and Helmet were in, exclusive circles that were predicated on being known but only by a small number of people.^[5] Soundgarden existed in a sort of netherworld in the early ’90′s. (This was kind of proven further by the fact that Temple of the Dog, a collaboration between Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron and members of Pearl Jam, including Eddie Vedder, needed almost a full year to be picked up by mainstream radio in spite of the fact that Pearl Jam was already extremely popular and had claimed Magic Johnson status to Nirvana’s Michael Jordan.)

But Superunknown changed everything for the band, and for the rest of ’90′s mainstream alternative music in general. Released six months after In Utero and one month before Kurt Cobain killed himself, Soundgarden was the top band for a while and then they mostly disappeared. (I for one liked the 1996 release Down on the Upside and it did enjoy some mainstream success but the gig was mostly up. People wanted to hear The Verve Pipe instead.) “Black Hole Sun” is for all intents and purposes the swan song of the early ’90′s Seattle scene. I could wax philosophical or angry about the whole thing and say that the meek inherited the radio and ruined a really vibrant run of rock music but that would be pointless. Nothing lasts forever. Shit happens. Everything moves in cycles and all that jazz. The early ’90′s were fun as fuck to be a music fan and I loved every minute of it. And besides, swan songs are fun to admire because they can potentially grow into a phoenix and rise again.

That means you’re up, Brandon Coultons of the future world. It’s up to you to be the phoenix. I look forward to reading your interviews.

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[1] In this hypothetical scenario the lead singer’s name is Brandon Coulton and his band is called The Corduroys.

[2] In this hypothetical scenario the album is called Rectangles.

[3] And by the Chicago Bulls.

[4] Women care about metal as much as men care about Nicholas Sparks.

[5] Fans of these bands (at least at my high school) formed their own little fraternity in which you basically had to prove that you liked them. “I like Helmet so much that I bought Love Agenda by Band of Susans last week…”

One: The Preface

Up until two months ago I had never heard of the album Endtroducing….. by DJ Shadow. As I was finishing up reading the 33 1/3 series on Facing Future by Dan Kois^[1] I was looking at all of the other titles that comprise the 33 1/3 series and noticed the entry about DJ Shadow’s debut album. It dawned on me that I hadn’t bought any electronic albums^[2] in what seemed like a long time (I think Push The Button by The Chemical Brothers was the last one) so I went to Amazon, downloaded it, and listened to some of it on the ride to work the following morning. So, if you are reading this and you’re thinking to yourself “You should’ve picked such-and-such song from The Private Press or The Outisder” or “You should’ve picked such-and-such single that Shadow did back in…” when it comes to this site, I apologize in advance. I realize that I am making a selection here while admitting that I have never heard DJ Shadow’s entire body of work. But, hopefully, this post will still make sense—as well as properly praising DJ Shadow in a historical context.

Two: Digestion

Two things hit me about Entroducing….. after first listen. 1) That the album contains no real continuity between two (or multiple) tracks; there are thirteen individual tracks that begin and end with virtually no intermixing. (There is intermixing here but not to the effect that a beat or melody completely bleeds into the next track. If that makes sense.) This is, to me, unique because, in my admittedly orange belt-level delving into of electronic music, most albums have some amount of intermixing and bleeding of tracks. 2) That “The Number Song” (the third track on the album) fucking blew me away. Repeatedly. It rivals some of the most masterful electronic works that The Chemical Brothers have produced, works such as “Let Forever Be,” “Life Is Sweet,” “Block Rockin’ Beats,” and “Leave Home.”

According to the person/people who edited the Entroducing….. Wikipedia page, “The Number Song” uses the following samples (in no particular order):

1) “Orion” by Metallica
2) “Breakdown” by T La Rock
3) “AJ Scratch” by Kurtis Blow
4) “Quit Jive’in” by Pearly Queen
5) “Baby Don’t Cry” by The Third Guitar
6) “Sexy Coffee Pot” by Tony Alvon and the Belairs
7) “Back to the Hip-Hop” by The Troubleneck Brothers
8) “Bad Luck” by Don Covay and the Lemon Blues Band
9) “Can I Kick It? (Spirit Mix)” by A Tribe Called Quest
10) “Who Got the Number” by Pigmeat Markham and the B.Y.
11) “Fantastic Freaks at the Dixie” by DJ Grand Wizard Theodore and the Fantastic Five
12) “Corruption is the Thing” by Creations Unlimited
13) “Flash It to the Beat” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
14) “Freelance” by Grandmaster Flash
15) “Get Ready” by He 6

A pretty diverse and unique set of samples to cull from. It’s almost Paul’s Boutique-esque, the way it integrates that musical diversity to produce a marvelous and indescribably creative sound.^[3] This, however, would be the technical (and maybe even boring) approach in describing this song: to list the samples used, stand back and then say, “Isn’t that creative?” But this song is so much more than the sum of its parts and its individual genius.

Three: The Epiphany Reminder

Listening to the album I was reminded of why electronic music can be such a powerful and unique genre, and its power derives from the fact that it is one of the few genres wherein an artist can quite literally throw all of their influences and tastes onto a single song and, if it’s done right, it will sound like a direct auditory portal to that artist’s mind. Virtually no other musical genre can get away with doing this. Hell, virtually no other medium of art can get away with doing this. And if you think that I am making a crazy, broad generalization with the previous two sentences I ask you to consider these two points.

Why Virtually No Other Musical Genre Can Get Away With An Artist Quite Literally Throwing All Of Their Influences Into A Single Song — It is not uncommon for rock artists to have a very wide range of musical influences. Just as a random example, Win Butler of Arcade Fire said that, among other artists, Depeche Mode and Neil Young were inspirations for their latest album The Suburbs, which makes plenty of sense especially in the case of Depeche Mode as the height of their popularity coincided with Butler’s high school years. But on The Suburbs itself you don’t hear any exact duplicates of Depeche Mode or Neil Young melodies, or shout-outs to either by quoting their lyrics. A rock song that featured these things would sound kitschy to the point of transcending cheap. (Though, in rare instances, it can be pulled off to great effect.) Electronic music, on the other hand, can do these things effortlessly. If an artist is influenced by Depeche Mode or Neil Young, it would be entirely normal for them to use the melody from “Enjoy the Silence” as their own, to use the vocal tracks from “Words (Between the Lines of Age)” in the background. In many ways the voice of the electronic artist is the aforementioned portal into their brain and not their larynx.

Why Virtually No Other Medium Can Get Away With An Artist Quite Literally Throwing All Of Their Influences Onto A Piece Of Art — An example from cinema: Quentin Tarantino. The dude loves movies so much that his own movies invariably reach a point of masturbatory saturation, as if they cease to be movies at times and simply become a wish list of images (and songs) that Tarantino would love to cram together and pass it off as an ode to the original art. To be sure, it sometimes works like with Pulp Fiction and both Kill Bills but even when he is mastering his creativity he still has a tendency to overdue the literal love songs he’s trying to write for his influences on the screen.

Four: The Significance

Like all great electronic music that came before it and that has been made since, “The Number Song” is an example of a mosaic created out of sampled beats; a ready-made built out of a willingness to plumb through tens of thousands of songs just to use the fifteen listed above.^[4] But there is also more to it than just that: “The Number Song” is a leveler and compressor on a large scale. It not only spans, in under five minutes no less, forty years of music but its essence plays on the most basic and fundamental quality of music—the countdown, the universal language that is One-Two-Three-Four.

The universality of One-Two-Three-Four starts as a learning block (think of all of those Sesame Street type songs that early childhood is partially defined by) and it forks itself out to the very foundation of music, whether it be as a mnemonic device that singers use for time scale of their song or as a red meat offering that singers use to get the audience more involved and hyped up during the song. “The Number Song” plays off of this to wonderful effect as it weaves in samples of old school rap countdowns (and even a countdown sampled from what sounds like children’s programming) all while riding the primary rhythm of Metallica’s “Orion.” DJ Shadow’s use of “Orion” intermixed with danceable beats is nothing short of genius; it not only proves Shadow to be a master craftsman and historian of modern music but it also provides a terrific landscape to the overall composition.

But the real show-stopping moment of the song, in my opinion, is at the 2:05 mark when the track shifts effortlessly and momentarily—and so fucking smoothly—to those golden horns of Pearly Queen’s “Quit Jive’in.” That transition is so silky and unexpected that it alone is probably all you need to know about the deft touches that DJ Shadow is capable of, if you were inclined to look for one thing that expresses an unrivaled sense of creativity. Consciously or unconsciously, great art aspires to be the first bookmark that people turn to when they think of, or want to comb through, a year, a decade, an era. Entroducing….., certainly within the realm of electronic music but also in music in general, is 1996. Not the 1996 that was defined by “MMMBop” or the unraveling of Stone Temple Pilots and R.E.M. and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden or the continued selling out of Metallica or the propped-up elephant of a joke that became Lollapalooza in the late ’90′s. No, the 1996 that you maybe weren’t aware of at all as it was happening. The 1996 that you discover years later and you find something really timeless and extraordinary in it.

The electronic music genre is filled to the gills with immensely intelligent artists and producers; men and women with an encyclopedic knowledge of music and the nuance of music. To the casual music fan and to the mainstream radio playlists they are the outcasts, the fringe, the faceless people cloaked in trendy clothes and surrounded by yards of stereo equipment and wiring and enveloped by the atmosphere of a club. And to a degree I guess this stereotype is an acceptable one to buy into, but every now and then a song or an album from this genre announces itself and all you can do is just marvel at the depths of its creativity. “The Number Song” (and Entroducing…..) is one of those marvels that demand attention.

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[1] Self-promotion alert: the review that I wrote of that book can be found here.

[2] What I mean by “electronic albums” is an album from what I call the Electronic genre of music. The Electronic genre is, to me, the genre that includes the following sub-genres: DJ, techno, house, rave, big beat, and old school electronic music like Kraftwerk. Basically, music that relies on a lot of sampling, relies on synthesizers and/or robotic type voices, and/or relies on guest vocalists (i.e.–The Chemical Brothers). But this is just me. Some people may prefer to categorize DJ Shadow as “DJ Music”; I prefer to categorize him as “Electronic Music.”

[3] If you have never heard Paul’s Boutique before, the sophomore album by Beastie Boys, just buy it now and let it consume you. Honestly, even if the cheapest price you can find for this album is $25 just buy it. If you have any love for music at all (or any love for discovering new-to-you music) this album is required listening. Seriously. Class dismissed.

[4] This song probably contains more than the fifteen listed above. Wikipedia is rarely definitive when it comes to these things but I am sure that the sampling listing above is probably pretty close in detailing what all was used in the track.

Layne Staley died on April 5, 2002. Actually, that date is just the best guess of the coroner associated with Staley’s suicide. Staley’s body was found on April 19 in his apartment amongst a collection of pipes and other drug paraphernalia such as a bag of cocaine and cans of spray paint. Nobody had seen or heard from him in a few weeks; the primary reason why people went to his apartment to begin with was that his bank account had been stagnant for two weeks. He weighed 86 pounds, had a needle still stuck in his arm, and most likely died due to overdose by way of a speedball (the mixture of heroin and cocaine).

Mike Starr died on March 8 of this year. He is the last person to have seen Staley alive, and he lived with the regret of having not called 911 after seeing Staley until he killed himself 24 days ago.

Death and Rock go hand-in-hand in so many ways, either as an exclamation point to a reckless legacy (Jim Morrison, Keith Moon), as an unalloyed international tragedy (John Lennon), as a metaphor for transcendent depression (Kurt Cobain), as a means of revision (Bradley Nowell), or as an unfair collector and robber of rare talent (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin). Death and Rock make for good roommates because, let’s face it, rock stars tend to enjoy things—drugs, of the hard and recreational kind, and booze—that take a toll on their bodies, and minds. To be a rock star there has to be some part of your essence that allows itself to fall into the traps of an addictive mechanism. To some degree, you always have to be willing to subvert yourself to the power of More—anything ranging from More Shows or More Money (or More Drugs) to More Girls or More Time.

When it came to Layne Staley and Mike Starr, their mechanism of addiction was the one we are most familiar with when it comes to rock stars: drugs. Not that we should have been surprised by this, especially in the case of Staley as he was blunt about his addiction and that the fact that it was probably going to consume him. Dirt, the sophomore album by Alice in Chains, tells you everything you need to know right there on the cover: a naked woman literally buried alive in the middle of nowhere; a prisoner inside of your own body to the point that your body couldn’t actually move—quite the metaphor for heroin addiction. Its message was so blunt that it was lost on me when the album was released during my sophomore year in high school.

It wasn’t so much that Staley’s suicide was a surprise (though the gruesome facts of his weight and that he might have been dead for two whole weeks before discovery was particularly jarring to me) more than it surprised me that the death of Alice in Chains had occurred years before the band broke up and their lead singer and bassist met their demises.

The history of rock is littered with bands and artists for which their fans will decry that the band’s/artist’s lack of mainstream success was thwarted either because A) their sound was “ahead of their time” or B) that they were the victims of any number of cosmic joke-like circumstances that prevented them from being embraced by more casual fans. Alice in Chains didn’t technically fit into either of these molds but they are definitely entangled, from a legacy perspective, inside of a bizarre paradox; bizarre because they were legitimately popular: the aforementioned Dirt sold 4 million copies, and Jar of Flies is the only EP to ever debut at #1 on the Billboard charts.^[1] This paradox becomes even more fleshed out when you factor in these things: that they were a “grunge” band yet lead guitarist Jerry Cantrell seemed to have a metal aesthetic; Staley was from the Northwest yet at times his vocals sounded as though he was either from southern California a la Scott Weiland^[2] or possibly even from Texas; for all of their popularity and ability to make killer singles they lacked the ability to make great start-to-finish albums. This last point seems to harm their legacy the most.

So, if the legacy of Alice in Chains has been tattered a bit over the years (sans the suicides of two of its members) why does their legacy matter? Will Alice in Chains be just another band that is defined by the deaths of its band members in the years to come? The short answer to the latter is: probably, yes. As a fan of their music this realization is hard to digest but the flip side of it is that at the end of the day Alice in Chains will probably evolve into a remembered experience rather than being just a band. For people my age there is a very good possibility that this band will be what Yes is to people who were high schoolers and college-age kids in the late ’70′s and early ’80′s. A band that gained entrance to the spotlight for a spell and then was forgotten afterward for a myriad of reasons. As for whether or not their legacy matters I think it does because the metamorphosis of Alice in Chains from notable band to forgotten one says a lot about the ephemeral nature of the Internet Age.

In the spring of 2002 I was over at a friend’s house drinking copious amounts of beer and attempting to play a game called washers.^[3] In his garage was some beastly jukebox CD player that randomly chose songs from the 30 or 40 discs inside of it. Most of the music was stuff I didn’t dig at all but as a rule I try to never talk about other people’s music unless they directly ask me about it first.^[4] At some point a song came on and my friend asked me if I heard it before and I said no; he then said that it was his favorite song at that moment. (Honestly, I don’t remember the name of the song that played that night but it was some cock rock song by Nickelback or some variant thereof.) After it was over he asked me what I thought of the song and I tried to skirt the question. He persisted, and I finally said “That lead singer should never make a fucking cent because he’s blatantly ripping off Layne Staley.” Only seven years had passed since the release of Alice in Chain’s final studio album and this drunken Spring night and yet my friend—who is only a year younger than me—not only didn’t recognize Staley’s name but couldn’t recall Alice in Chains, or any of their songs. Within seven years, Layne Staley went from being as popular and well-known as Cobain, Vedder, and Corgan to outright forgotten. Welcome to the Internet Age, where the dotted lines connecting influences and events disappear with ease.

I fully realize this post reads like it’s from a petulant ass who’s going around pissing on other people’s gardens because they aren’t growing the flowers that I like but, to me, within the confines of my own head, it seems ridiculous that Alice in Chains has fallen by the wayside buried in the desert of the rock landscape. It bothers me because this is the band that produced “Would?” This is the band that, were it not for Nirvana, would easily claim the top spot for best Unplugged performance by a rock band. This was a band that was quite smart:

“I was thinking a lot about Andrew Wood [lead singer of Mother Love Bone who died of a heroin overdose in 1990] at the time. We always had a great time when we did hang out [...] There was never really a serious moment or conversation, it was all fun. Andy was a hilarious guy, full of life and it was really sad to lose him. But I always hate people who judge the decisions others make. So it was also directed towards people who pass judgments.” — liner notes written by Jerry Cantrell about “Would?”

Alice in Chains fucking mattered to me. They produced some of the best songs of the early ’90′s. Layne Staley’s voice sounded like a welcome relief, a good mixture of raw, cool, angry, and snarly. And now all that’s left in the garden is the imitators; the bands whose members won’t die of an overdose, the bands who produce shit like “Photograph.” To me that garden and those bands is bullshit, and I will not apologize for pissing on them. In fact, I will listen to “Would?” while I do it.

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[1] If you are reading this and are too young to know what an EP is: EP stands for Extended Play. EP’s refer to records that played at a speed other than 78 rpm (which is the standard speed that LPs—regular albums—play on). In the cassette tape and CD era EP essentially meant the musical equivalent of a short story or novella—an album that typically had no more than 6 or 7 songs on it. (Or if it did have more than 6 or 7 songs on it, it probably included remixes or included songs that were going to be released on the follow-up LP/album. An example of this would be the Root Down EP by Beastie Boys.) The Jar of Flies EP had 7 songs on it, all of them original tracks.

[2] I never understood the conventional wisdom of the mid-’90′s that stated that Stone Temple Pilots was trying to rip off Pearl Jam, or that Weiland was trying to rip off Eddie Vedder. If there was any band that Weiland and Stone Temple Pilots were trying to emulate it seemed like it was Alice in Chains more so than any other band.

[3] If you’ve never played it or heard of washers before it’s horseshoes but with steel washers substituting the horseshoe and a PVC pipe replacing the stake. You have to toss the washers into the PVC pipe to get the most amount of points, though you do get a point if the washer lands against the pipe too. The enjoyment of this game rises when combined with an increasing rate of alcohol consumption (just like with bowling).

[4] There are exceptions, of course. If I hear Green Day or Santana or Elvis Costello or Britney Spears at your house I will have no choice but to tell you that these artists are shit and let the chips fall where they may.