Pantheon Songs

Yelling, screaming, and theatrics will always be a part of religion. Religion, like any other sector, always needs its loudmouths and grotesqueries because it is a sure-fire way to get new followers, if it means one new follower at a time or five hundred new followers at a time. But the soul of religion—its honest-to-God soul—lies in the calm and the peaceful, the understated. The realest and purest beauty of religion resides in those who have little to say or write; the ones whose thoughts and art speaks for itself and forgoes the task of needing a self-appointed consultant to speak on its behalf. But this post is not about religion—at least, not about things that deal with gods and lessons and morality. This post is about how there is a religion to everything, and how “I Am a Pilgrim” by The Byrds best illustrates this notion.

David Foster Wallace once said that there is no such thing as atheism; everyone worships something. Whether or not music can be worshiped as a single thing that is separate from money is debatable, but there is definitely a religion aspect associated with it in every possible sense (i.e.–appreciation, deification, sainthood, emulation, hagiography, etc.). Like religion, music needs its loudmouths and grotesqueries to get people to its tabernacle, as these things help drive sales and image and marketing. Rock and hip hop needs its middle fingers and “fuck tha police”s and misogyny and destroyed hotel rooms and mythical groupie stories. Country music needs its awkward and politically incorrect social evangelism and its alcoholism and racist undertones. Pop music needs its objectification and sexualized teenagers and vapid commentary. I am not saying that these needs are inherently good, or should always be viewed as acceptable. I am saying that they are all required, in some way, to get the message out there—to ensure that the gospel of music reaches ears on a larger scale. And just like religion, the grotesqueries of music (the misogyny, the racism, the sexualization of youth) allow us to properly adjust and criticize its context in a right/wrong kind of way. Luther Campbell may have made a lot of money, but he will almost always be seen as a clown in any meaningful context. This is the give and take inherent in freedom of speech (and religion). Which leaves us with a lens to focus on the rest of the music landscape—the places inhabited by people who do not rely on spectacle and controversy. (Please do not misinterpret the previous sentence to mean that I am going to transition to the notions of purity and morals and Doing Things The Right Way, or that I am suggesting that the loudmouths never have a point and that the quieter artists should be praised by default based on some delusion that a publicly docile demeanor equals integrity. All artists, just like the rest of us, are flawed in some way. There’s no need for the sepia toned or Precious Moments treatments.)

Within this landscape you will find Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the album by The Byrds that was released in 1968, and on this album you will find “I Am a Pilgrim”—a cover of a traditional song whose lyrics are firmly rooted in a religious purview (as if the title doesn’t already give that away). This song begins with a fiddle played by guest musician John Hartford that introduces itself right off the bat, perhaps a little too loudly for those who don’t like fiddles so much, but it moves at a slow pace and it is accented nicely by the mellow gait of the other string instruments: a bass, a banjo, and an acoustic guitar. Even when Hartford speeds up the fiddle it never comes across as jagged or shrill, or anything suggestive of a hoe-down or cartoon-ish drunken dancing involving people wearing overalls.

The music of “I Am a Pilgrim” is a terrific mixture of modernity and antiquity, of trying to polish something old so as to make it new again; it is the product of Gram Parson’s desire to plumb through the earthy catalog of American country music and update it in a newer studio with better equipment. It’s four kids flying in to Nashville from Los Angeles and leaving having produced something that had never really been done by a rock band (even though they would later be heckled by the crowd at the Ryman Auditorium). This is a song that can act as a bridge back to history, to Roy Acuff and Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubbs and the other pioneers of American country music if you have never given much thought to any of them.

The music is one thing, the vocals are quite another.

Chris Hillman’s vocals on this song are some of the best in any rock or country song I have ever heard. The volume of his voice is perfectly calibrated. His voice is mellow and light but backed up with intangibles that somehow make it sound authoritative. The yellers, screamers, and theatrically-minded singers wear their hearts on their sleeve; the rest attempt to create a direct auditory portal to their soul. Hillman’s voice on this track sounds like a combination of the kind of soft crooning and solemn, eyes-closed-while-singing seriousness that almost every white male singer has tried to emulate since The Beatles released “Yesterday.” His voice paints a picture of recording takes in a darkened studio with a couple candles burning—something requiring an ambiance befitting a religious experience such as this, even if it never happened that way at all.

So with all due respect to “Eight Miles High,” “Ballad of Easy Rider,” “Turn! Turn! Turn (to Everything There is a Season)” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “I Am a Pilgrim” is the greatest song that The Byrds ever produced. It is a song that can transcend what it means to love a piece of music, and in the process it advances the idea that music can be a religious experience. To be sure, whenever someone loves a piece of art—really really loves it—it can be described as something on par with religious experience. But to hear Chris Hillman sing “I am a pilgrim/And a stranger/Traveling through this wearisome land/I’ve got a home in that yonder good Lord/And it’s not/Not made by hand” it can become a figurative and/or literal manifestation of musical religion.

Amen.

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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.

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

“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.]

There are songs that are classics and then there are classics that connect directly into your sense of romanticism and nostalgia—the timeless songs that will affect you until the day you die, provided that something like dementia does not take a hold of you. “Take Five” by The Dave Brubeck Quartet affects me in this way. “Take Five” was recorded and released 18 years before I was born, which makes it a perfect bridge to a time that I have no personal attachment to.

Whenever I listen to this song the logical side of me hears the auditory manifestation of the word cool. Joe Dodge’s drums and cymbals at the beginning that bleed into Brubeck’s piano and Bob Bates’ bass is, by itself, an intoxicating melody that can transport one into a nirvana of mellow and smooth. Mortal men would spend three lifetimes trying to come up with something to rival the first twenty seconds of “Take Five”—and they would all fail. And then Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone enters at the twenty-first second and just like that the song has become an otherworldly kind of cool, something that transcends nirvana. My logical side marvels at all of this: the mathematical precision that allows for everything to sound so damn cool and smooth (which reminds me of the David Foster Wallace quote about bees having to move fast to stay still), as well as the way it shifts into a drum-driven song and temporarily ditches Desmond’s indelible sax and it somehow never misses a beat. It still sounds clean and superb in spite of this shift that would raise a thousand red flags on paper. Listening to “Take Five” is like looking at a classic painting in that it can become more of an experience rather than a passive connection.

As I mentioned earlier, this song also plays into an emotional side that joins up with a romanticism and nostalgia that I have no direct attachment to. I grew up in the Midwest (for those of you who are reading this in L.A. or NYC, the Midwest is the large land area that prevents you from flying to the opposite coast in under two hours) and lived here my whole life save for a few months spent living in Georgia. And just as there is a default setting that resides in many East and West Coast people that sees the Midwest as a hopelessly boring and tragic stretch of flat land filled with farmer types (and other stereotypes), I grew up with a default setting that finds the West Coast to be vapid and prone to food fads and the East Coast to be horribly biased w/r/t sports and prone to an unfounded social elitism (and other stereotypes). Please do not misunderstand me: I have no problems with stereotypes being assigned to me and the region that I live in so long as it is a two-way street and I am allowed assign stereotypes to other regions. Regional stereotypes are a given in any country. As unsexy as it is I rather like the flat land, and corn and soy fields, and farm houses that define where I live. If anything it makes me appreciate, among other things, the river and the corncob-shaped towers and art museum lions and Burnham-built buildings of Chicago all the more—all of the things that stand out in bas relief in my wonderful state.

But even with my default Midwestern attitude towards the East and West Coasts in general (and L.A and NYC in particular), I would be lying if I said that the romanticism and nostalgia of either city has never taken root in my mind. There is something about the idea of living in L.A. or NYC in the ’50′s and ’60′s that seems mesmerizing. The New York apartment with dark furniture, a scene right out of an Edward Hopper painting (minus the loneliness of the people inside, of course); an L.A. house with Old Hollywood interior design sensibilities and the airy openness of oversized windows. Within the context of a nostalgic daydream it all seems so intoxicating, not in a “we should try to bring back the America of the ’50′s and ’60′s” kind of way but strictly in a purely nostalgic way complete with all of the requisite clichés.^[1]

Which leads me back to “Take Five,” a jazz song written by musicians in California that rivals most of the best jazz that ever came out of Harlem. This song evokes for me images of NYC dinner or book parties from the ’50′s and ’60′s; I can picture this song playing at an apartment while John Updike and Hugh Hefner are talking to a JFK adviser. I can picture this playing in the background at a producer’s house in Hollywood, while aspiring starlets (and the producers who are winking at them) try to casually mingle with everyone while their wide eyes betray the mellowness they are trying to evoke.

Great art—timeless art—is also a leveler of class. “Take Five,” even though its sound has a built-in marketing mechanism that allows it to be assimilated to words like refinement and wealth, actually has a blue collar soul. For every urbane dinner party scenario I imagine when listening to it I also picture this song being played on a turntable from Montgomery Ward in working class living rooms across America. Desmond’s alto sax is refinement par excellence; Dodge’s drum solo is blue collar personified, the motive power behind the refinement.

“Take Five” is one of the most significant and influential songs in American music history, regardless of where you grew up or what your nostalgia is tethered to.

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[1] I feel as though I have to make this distinction clear in the event that someone comes to the conclusion that my nostalgia is inherently naive, that my nostalgia is rooted in the same conservative ideals that deserve to be rightfully mocked. I was aware that the ’50′s and ’60′s weren’t good to women and minorities long before Mad Men premiered.

The generally accepted narrative of American rock music of the late ’80′s and early ’90′s is that Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’ Roses and Nevermind by Nirvana are the two albums that not only define the block of years 1987 through 1991, but also changed the landscape of radio and MTV during that time and for a few years afterward. Both albums made explosive, out-of-nowhere entrances into pop culture. Both albums, even if it was in temporary bursts, completely changed how music was digested on a mainstream level. What I mean by that last sentence is that there are plenty of instances in rock history where great albums—albums that would later be considered classics by those who listened to them after their initial release—elude broad appeal and national recognition. Astral Weeks probably never made it in to the Billboard 200, and if it did it was not there long and probably only hovered around the #180 mark briefly. The Velvet Underground & Nico was a buried treasure for decades until enough artists and critics convinced people to take up their gear and make an excavation visit to the V section at the local record shop. Appetite and Nevermind suffered no such fate.

None of this is to say that it is the fault of a clueless or dumb audience (or whatever other descriptors people like to throw around when the audience is declared to be held in contempt)^[1] as to why certain albums escape mainstream popularity. There are plenty of factors in play as to why Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or X’s Los Angeles or Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation never became household name albums, the largest of which is usually bad luck/timing or other larger forces at play (i.e.–the contradictory nature of the radio industry in that payola is illegal but they still get paid and pushed into playing certain artists and songs).^[2] Another reason that some albums never achieve household name status is that, for a myriad of reasons, they don’t age well. An example of this is The Real Thing by Faith No More, an album that happens to sit at the midpoint between the releases of Appetite For Destruction and Nevermind.

When I was in seventh grade (1989-1990) it was defined mostly by the following: The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, and the album The Real Thing. The television shows are self-explanatory—The Simpsons fell into the wheelhouse of every other boy at my junior high if only for Bart, who was like a younger, animated, jaundiced version of Ferris Bueller; and Saturday Night Live and In Living Color were the only options (other than David Letterman) in which to find the kind of (to me and my friends) groundbreaking and oddball humor, the kind of humor that allowed us to do the very guy thing of quoting comedic lines and skits. It also didn’t hurt that SNL had Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Dennis Miller (and the indescribably awesome “Immigrant Song” intro for “Weekend Update”) and Phil Hartman, while In Living Color had Damon Wayans, Jim Carrey, and glimpses of rap in a prime time setting.

The Real Thing came out in June of 1989. I don’t exactly recall when it was that I saw the video for “Epic” for the first time but it was pretty much a life-changing event (in as much as a music video can be a life-changing event to a seventh grader). “Epic” rocked and it rapped, and it did both in such a way that it made the Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C collaboration on “Walk This Way” feel like it was recorded twenty years earlier. It seems a bit strange now but for a stretch of time one of the identifiers of rap artists was to at times sing the lyrics with kabuki-like intensity and jaggedly throwing your arms forwards and backwards, alternating between a pose that looked like it was mimicking being in a straight jacket. (Thankfully, rap hip hop embraced fluidity of motion.) To a seventh grade white kid growing up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, Faith No More’s frontman Mike Patton’s kabuki style delivery of lyrics mixed in with his In Living Color-esque attire and hopping, jagged movements (complete with facial expressions that sometimes suggested electrocution) was indescribably fresh and awesome.

As I mentioned earlier, “Epic” made “Walk This Way” seem foolish and contrived. “Walk This Way” is a totem for the Ronald Reagan/Jerry Bruckheimer ’80′s: it was large and manufactured as hell right from the get-go; there is nothing organic about it as it is presented to you from the start as two distinct halves coming together (with the video showing a literal wall being broken down to further reinforce its meaning on you—the fourth wall came equipped with a hammer to hit you on the head with).^[3] “Epic” is a rock song that happened to have rap vocal elements brought to you by the aforementioned hyperactive Patton. It is easy to see now why “Epic” has not aged well as nobody really raps like that anymore; the kabuki style exhortations of short lyrics are still in the downturn of the rap/hip hop cycle. But musically I think it still holds up fine as its fusion of ’80′s west coast punk funk, hard rock, and “Layla”-esque ending makes it a classic in the vein of Songs That Time Forgot.

Faith No More would resurface a couple years later with Angel Dust, an album that many fans agree is better than The Real Thing, and Mike Patton would enjoy further cult status as the frontman for the band Mr. Bungle. But for me The Real Thing and specifically “Epic” is what defines Faith No More on a large scale, and I fully realize that my seventh grade nostalgic bias is in play to some extent here. When push comes to shove I have to go with the song that either made a large impact on the music landscape or in my life personally and I feel that “Epic” did both in spades. Its impact on music in 1989 may not have resulted in spawning new bands with a similar sound but if you were in your formative years when it was released it was a song that clearly stood apart from anything else that was being played consistently on the radio or on MTV. And then you bought the album and heard “From Out of Nowhere” and “Falling To Pieces” and “Woodpecker From Mars” and their cover of “War Pigs” and it all made for a Holy shit! moment. Additionally, I believe a case can be made that the popularity, however brief, of Faith No More was a necessary step in the broad acceptance of alternative music such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains a few years later; Faith No More’s image made for a good bridge to the “grunge” look that bands would sport a couple years down the road.

As for personal impact, this song is just plain fucking great. What else needs to be said?

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[1] Whenever I hear people say that audiences are stupid and that that’s why the current state of [insert art form here] is suffering I think of this quote by David Foster Wallace about poetry (but it can be applied to television, music, or cinema). The last four sentences are the most pertinent [emphasis mine]:

“Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There’s a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol’ ‘The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we’re marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah.’ You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it’s speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.”

[2] Pick up a copy of Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business for further reading on this topic. One of the things that the book goes into detail about is how Pink Floyd’s The Wall, an extremely popular album, was not played in some markets because of the advent of “indie” promoters.

[3] Furthermore, if you want to hear a rock-rap song with two groups that kills “Walk This Way” in almost every respect, have a listen to the Anthrax/Public Enemy collaboration “Bring the Noise.”

The metal genre is about as misunderstood as Nietzsche; people’s misconceptions about metal (that it’s all about death, and that its followers are causelessly violent, or suicidal) probably match up with most people’s misconceptions about Nietzsche (that he’s tied to German militarism and Nazism, and that his followers are causelessly violent, or suicidal). “I love metal” and “God is dead” might as well mean the same thing to people who have never delved into either.

“God is dead” was never intended to be a celebratory quote, or anything of that measure. The context of the quote has to do with Nietzsche’s opinion that science and modernism had killed God; that modern men (“murderers of all murderers”) had no need for God anymore. Thus, God is dead in the sense that the idea of God has outlived its usefulness. But I am sure that many people believe the quote to mean that God was murdered, or that there is a spectacle associated with the death of God and that we should relish in its demise. The reality is that Nietzsche did not unilaterally despise religion (he was positively affected by the teachings of Jesus Christ, despite his ironical writings that could be construed to the contrary) and was dismayed by what he believed was the collective death of God in society. But Nietzsche’s image suffered greatly for many decades after his death when his sister allowed his writings to become propaganda for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Even after scholars and writers rediscovered his works and brought his name to a better standing Nietzsche is still widely misunderstood (i.e.–killers, most recently Jared Lee Loughner, still quote and look at Nietzsche like the Nazis did by misinterpreting his “will to power” and “God is dead” quotes).

Metal music suffers from an image problem too. Ask people who aren’t metal fans to describe metal fans and I am sure that some of the following descriptors would be tossed around: long hair, freaky looking, lots of tattoos, imposing, scary, violent, aggressive. The Venn diagram of metal’s perception would most likely have “Violence” and “Suicide” intersecting at some point, regardless of how much of that is rooted in urban legend type perception. (Honestly, how many people do you know personally have been beat up by a metalhead for absolutely no reason at all?) Metal prides itself to some degree in being the metaphorical Bogeyman and on many occasions the media and parents’ groups took up the task of trying to assign a literalness to metal’s inherent outward theatrics: Marilyn Manson caused the Columbine shooting; Judas Priest caused a couple of kids to kill themselves with shotguns. And so on.

The reality is that most metal music, like many of the works of Nietzsche, simply attempt to show life and human nature through a different lens. At its most fundamental core, metal explains life better than Bob Dylan or The Beatles or Randy Newman ever could. There is more existentialism in metal than in “When I’m Sixty-Four” or “Mr. Tambourine Man.” In this respect, metal is also like Dostoevsky: it’s not for everyone but it speaks powerfully to those it connects to because it oftentimes deals with death and personal (and literal) hells and the underground; the stuff that we love to explore but usually not at stalagmite depths (or with blurry fast—and/or shrill—riffs, or assaulting and quick drum beats).^[1]

In the span of 128 days in 1970 Black Sabbath released two albums—their eponymous debut, followed by Paranoid. For all intents and purposes, their debut album is the progeny of the metal genre while Paranoid is the first true metal masterpiece. (And it was probably considering the defining metal masterpiece until the ’80′s arrived with Metallica and Slayer in tow.) In its nascency metal was mostly considered to be heavier music that didn’t really fit typical rock conventions. This made sense to a degree as bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream in the late ’60′s, with their virtuoso guitarists and bass-heavy sound, could have been easily classified as hard rock/heavy metal. Black Sabbath was always seen as something heavier than the aforementioned bands but in the beginning they were all kind of lumped together, if only for a short time. In the ’70′s bands like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper were also thought of metal as well until Judas Priest and Motörhead arrived and fully established the boundaries of what metal was. Even before this boundary-establishment took place Paranoid was already seen as an instant classic album. “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” were fuck-yeah tracks that connected with many casual music fans—the former has an indelible opening riff and lyrics that are even more indelible; the latter has the feel of an update to Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” that makes it almost impossible to dislike, especially if you love Zeppelin.

And while “Iron Man” is probably the bigger casual music fan favorite I believe that “War Pigs/Luke’s Wall,” the opening track on Paranoid, is Sabbath’s masterpiece. I think that the intro to “War Pigs” is better than “Iron Man” and that the riffs in general are of higher quality than any of the songs that were released on their first two albums. The most important reason, though, as to why “War Pigs” was selected for this site—and what sets it apart from other songs in the Sabbath catalog—are the lyrics. The lyrics are incendiary and so damn perfect, and in a historical context they serve as a great origin for metal’s brand of existentialism and social commentary. The song starts famously with the lyrics,

“Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds, oh Lord yeah!”

To be sure, these lyrics are outstanding as the rhyming and the construction make for something that is both serious and theatrical. But it is the next groups of lyrics that, to me, best encapsulate the incendiary nature of the song:

“Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor”

The opening set of lyrics uses words (“sorcerer,” “witches,” “black masses”) that border on cartoonish, but the next set of lyrics has a pure fuck off intensity. The rhyming couplet is ditched in favor of being able to fully level you with its true point of view and opinion,^[2] and it’s all the more powerful when Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward are so perfectly and powerfully in sync. When it comes to anti-war songs “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival is the gold standard, and rightfully so as it manages to be the auditory equivalent of a middle finger wrapped in a deliciously catchy tune that clocks in at under two and a half minutes.^[3] But if “Fortunate Son” ranks at #1 then “War Pigs” comes in at #1B because it doesn’t hold back at all. It wants to punch you in the face, and it does. And it does this musically by getting louder and louder at about the midway point: when the track begins you just want to turn the volume up as high as possible so that you can live inside those riffs and Bill Ward’s drumbeats, and as the song progresses the volume keeps getting higher until it envelops you and you begin to wonder if you should turn it down a little. (Note: you should not turn it down.)

As an anti-war song “War Pigs” is par excellence, and its legacy as an anti-war song by itself is something that allows for immediate entry into the Pantheon. But its lasting and most significant legacy is that this song essentially defined the origin of the metal genre. Sabbath’s debut album came before “War Pigs” and the debut album definitely sets up the roots of metal but Paranoid is the foundation for everything that came after it and this song is the best track from the album. “War Pigs” is instrumental in creating the genre that is widely misunderstood and, like Nietzsche, it will probably always be misunderstood by a sizable group of people. The key is that something this great and powerful will always have its keepers to correct those who want to assign random nonsensical actions of unbalanced people to it. And in a stroke of irony, the people who are legitimately well versed in metal (and Nietzsche) are some of the most levelheaded people walking around this earth, despite their scary, imposing look.

If you are looking to get your feet wet in the metal genre, this is the place to start; if metal doesn’t appeal to you at all you would still be hard-pressed to find a better heavy song in the modern rock catalog than this.

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[1] Please do not misread this paragraph: I am in no way suggesting that only “real” people appreciate existentialism or its elements that appear in metal. I am in no way trying to devalue The Beatles or Bob Dylan or Randy Newman because their exploration of the human condition is not Dostoevsky-esque. I love “When I’m Sixty-Four” and its pop approach at looking at aging.

[2] The original title of the album was War Pigs but the label was nervous about it because there were still a lot of people, in England and in the U.S., who were for the war in Vietnam. It was renamed Paranoid but the cover was allowed to depict what the band considered a war pig to look like.

[3] The only thing I suspect that would be harder than writing a definitive anti-war song that is catchy as hell and clock in at under two and a half minutes would be writing a 1,000-page novel that reads like a 300-page novel.

Two days after my eleventh birthday Ministry released The Land of Rape and Honey, an album that forever changed the direction of the band’s music. Before The Land of Rape and Honey, Ministry’s music had more parts pop or dance than industrial or dark. They scored an unexpected hit in 1984 with “(Every Day Is) Halloween,” a song that combined a danceable melody with lyrical goth elements. To this day it is still a great anthem for anyone who feels like an outsider, or who loves any of the psychology associated with Halloween and/or the goth lifestyle. The early Ministry catalog sets up a very good foundation; Rape and Honey blows it up, creates a new foundation, and constructs an almost entirely new mythology built off the blueprints that Throbbing Gristle and Killing Joke first drew up—a blueprint that involved pushing music to its loudest and most angriest levels without fully encroaching on metal or (death metal) territory.^[1]

(A few words about the album’s title for those of you who have never heard of it and who are reading this and see “rape” and “honey” and begin to think that this album is hopelessly depraved, or possibly even Satanic. While this album is dark—how could it not be with tracks named “Stigmata,” “Destruction,” and “The Missing”?—the title’s inspiration comes from something much more banal and decidedly un-evil: the slogan of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, whose main sources of revenue come from rapeseed and honey. Yes, when you drive into Tisdale you will be welcomed to the land of rape and honey.)

I will readily admit that most of the industrial music genre is over my head. I was really into Nine Inch Nails in high school; I saw them in concert a couple times which meant that I got to see Killing Joke and a couple of other bands live that opened for them that I can’t remember off the top of my head (Front 242 maybe?). What I soon realized when I tried to delve into the industrial pool was that I really just liked NIN and that was about it. This is not to say that I think industrial music is bad across the board or anything like that; it’s just not my thing on the whole, the same with modern punk and metal. The genre has a story to tell but the soundtrack can just be too much at times. Everything has a balance and while I admire some people’s goals of destroying that balance it is still a razor’s edge when it comes to the actual music (for me anyway).

So I buy The Land of Rape and Honey during the spring of 2003 on a whim after it was referenced in something I was reading and it instantly became one of those albums that when you buy it its existence becomes the very totem of seemingly everything in your life at that moment. In the spring of 2003 there were two things going on in my life that couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed in terms of perceived significance (both in present-day terms and in hindsight) but they were significant nonetheless. They were: 1) I was working for the worst boss I ever had^[2] and 2) the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer was nearing its series finale. The former is probably pretty self-explanatory in that I loathed my boss to such a degree that on some days my subconscious flooded my daydreams with images ranging from beating him with a lead pipe to just setting him on fire at his desk while he scolded our team for not reacting quick enough to a network outage at 11p the night before at a satellite four-person office (even though our contract with the building’s network support was written as such that they would not support us beyond the hours of 8a-5p) and my oh my what a welcome breath of fresh air it was to hear Al Jourgensen’s buzz saw-like vocals on the beginning of this album and be able to channel my aggression in a more socially acceptable manner, as opposed to committing manslaughter (or a murder) in a Brick Tamlin-like way.^[3] The latter has to do with the introduction of Caleb during the final season of Buffy.

Caleb was a very creepy and extremely misogynistic fallen priest who appeared in the final five episodes of the show. He had a creepy southern accent and he acted as a vessel by which the First Evil could enter, thus making him extremely powerful. (And his eyes would turn completely black when the First entered him. Creepy.) He constantly referred to girls and women as whores and sluts and “dirty girls” and he relished the opportunities to beat them up, or kill them. Again, creepy.

(A few words about the final season of Buffy and about Caleb specifically for those of you who have never seen the show and think that the previous paragraph seems hopelessly depraved, or possibly even Satanic. Don’t worry, no spoilers are coming. Under creator/executive producer Joss Whedon’s direction, the show, throughout its seven year run, consistently zigged when everyone expected it to zag. He introduced characters that the audience initially loathed then wrote them off or killed them right when everyone began to love them, and his mission statement could probably be summed up as Don’t give the audience what it thinks it wants; in his universe, Sam and Diane never get together. The philosophy inherent to the show was executed in near perfect literary terms, which only reinforced the audience’s love of the show—myself included. So when it came time to plot out the final season’s arc, Whedon and the writers came up with this: Buffy is predicated on strong feminist ideals, what better final villain should Buffy have to go up against then a thoroughly evil and gruesome misogynist? I bring this up because I don’t want people who’ve never seen the show to divine from the previous paragraph that Caleb, and by extension the final season, was created to be solely evil and causelessly violent. Also, if you have never seen the show, do so immediately. Caveat emptor: the first season seems really dated now.)

The Land of Rape and Honey, like the Caleb character, is dark but its darkness has a commentary to it—or at the very least an extension of complex philosophical ideas. It is in our human nature to want to explore darkness up to a certain point; to gaze into the abyss as Nietzsche once wrote. Whether it was Milton’s idea to make Satan an antihero or Conrad’s explorations into our hearts of darkness, music at some point took a cue from literature on a larger scale and went in search for the underground caverns of our nature and souls. Blues and country singers began incorporating murder and violence in their music; songs about con men ruining lives became a theme.

I am not here to say that Ministry found the core of darkness on Rape and Honey but they got pretty damn close, and they did so while also creating music that still sounds remarkably fresh today considering that the album will turn 25 in a couple of years. What I will say, though, is that the album’s masterpiece, the title track, “The Land of Rape and Honey,” is the best song I have ever heard that resides closest to that darkness. It is a song that dovetailed perfectly with the introduction of Caleb.

“The Land of Rape and Honey” combines traditional industrial drum beats with blurring tape loops and audio samples of a Hitler-led Nazi rally. I fully realize that seeing the words “audio samples of a Hitler-led Nazi rally” can be off-putting to the point of outright dismissal, or of no return. Using archived audio from a Nazi rally for a song seems like a fundamentally crass thing to some; I completely understand that. Just like I understand that seeing “misogynistic fallen priest hurts and kills girls” can sound profane to some. But half of accepting and digesting and appreciating great art is in the audience’s willingness to explore the direct and peripheral meanings associated with the art. If you are unwilling to look past certain taboos or creative differences, the art becomes something of no value. Conversely, if you sit on the opposite end of the spectrum—if you feel that darkness is unappreciated or dismissed by the masses—then this type of art can be exactly what you are looking for, a counterbalance to collective mainstream sensibilities. This song could easily fit into both categories: Offensive and Welcoming.

By releasing an album entitled The Land of Rape and Honey and producing a track of the same name, Ministry knew who its target market was and probably had little concern for the offended (just as I am sure that Milton didn’t let the criticism he surely envisioned he would receive get in the way of writing Paradise Lost). “The Land of Rape and Honey” is not for everyone. But its darkness should not be misconstrued as a call to violence or the shredding of any moral or social fabric. This song is important because it, and by extension the album from which it came, redefined the industrial genre as well as representing the first steps of Ministry’s reach into influencing metal (and metal-like) bands of the ’90′s and ’00′s.

I suspect that a lot of people point to Nine Inch Nail’s debut album Pretty Hate Machine as the progenitor of modern industrial music, and in many respects they are not incorrect as that album was able to break through the fringe with “Head Like A Hole.” But to me The Land of Rape and Honey should be seen as the origin as it was not only released a full year before Pretty Hate Machine but the title track thoroughly eviscerates anything on NIN’s debut album.

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[1] Nine Inch Nails enjoyed the most mainstream success employing this technique, with Marilyn Manson probably coming in second.

[2] He is still the worst boss I have ever had. (He left the company in 2005 but I’d still like to take this opportunity to say: Fuck you, Bob.)

[3] “Things got out of hand quickly; Mike killed Bob with a trident” became a good running joke the following year when Anchorman came out.

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.

Will people remember the name Michael Franti & Spearhead forty or fifty years from now? Maybe not. Will people remember the song “Say Hey (I Love You)” by its track name decades from now? The odds are probably pretty slim that they will. But I do think that people decades from now will recognize the song by its melody, kind of like how people nowadays probably wouldn’t know “Nobody But Me” by track name or who The Human Beinz were but they would probably know the song once they heard it.^[1] The primary reason why I think that “Say Hey (I Love You)” will have some staying power for decades to come, aside from the fact that it is quite infectious and addictive, is because it is a terrific summertime song. It is arguably one of the best summertime songs produced so far in this nascent century.

The best summertime music consists of songs that attach themselves like molecules to the very fabric of Summer, to the warm air that we all wait for and daydream about on cold January nights. Summer is the smell of chlorine. It is rolled-down windows and open convertible tops. (The convertibles, invariably, will either have a couple in their fifties, or older, driving around wearing faces of reserved enjoyment, or it will contain a packed co-ed assortment of young people with one or two people getting out of the backseat with the ease of a deer walking for the first time.) Summer is being surrounded by exposed, tanned skin. Skirts and dresses—solid-colored ones and brightly printed ones—are finally relieved of their probation from the back of the closet and appear in broad daylight once again. Summer is when music becomes part of the air, whether it be through speakers at a public (or backyard) pool or emanating from someone’s stereo in their backyard or garage. Summertime is the time of margaritas and Coronas-and-limes and, more recently, craft brews that use hints of honey or lemons or other fruits that make it feel as though you are drinking a lovely 85 degree day out of a 45 degree bottle (or pint glass). And last but not least, summertime is a time for those seasonal crushes and bouts of young love. I’m not talking about crushes that occur during or after college. I’m talking about the power that summer could have had on you when you were in junior high or high school—those times when seeing a guy or a girl riding a bike, or hanging out at a park or in front of a convenience store, was like a transcendent force on par with religious or philosophical enlightenment.

The summertime of your youth (most likely) plays out like a veritable montage of fun images and memories if you were to think back to it: lightning bugs in jars, going to the beach, going to a relative’s house who had a boat, and all that jazz. During junior high and high school my summers consisted of playing hours and hours of real sports (basketball and baseball)^[2] and virtual ones (Tecmo Bowl, Madden, NHL ’95). I spent countless hours at my grandparent’s house on Paw Paw Lake, most of which was spent playing table tennis or watching cable TV or playing canasta in the downstairs floor that included: snare drum light fixtures on the ceiling, a monstrous record player/radio/8-track player that lit up and looked like it belonged in a celebrity’s home, and a beautiful bar that combined old school craftsmanship with ’70′s-style sensibilities (the sides were red shag carpeted and the entrance to the liquor closet nearby had those hanging beads that could best be described as “hippie curtains,” even though my grandparents had no hippie tendencies whatsoever). The summers of my youth were also marked by those mornings and evenings in which the weather is so perfect that you feel like you are capable of doing anything that you want; that the Gods and Mother Nature gift-wrapped this day for you and you alone and it doesn’t matter if you lay or sit in the grass all day because it is the best day to do just that.

“Say Hey (I Love You)” is not my song. It was not released when I was in junior high or high school. There are no memories from my youth in which this song was playing in the foreground or the background.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is that this song is so loose and perfect and upbeat and wonderfully melodic and airy that it feels so natural to listen to it during the summer that I can’t help but to think of summers past. Franti sings at one point, “I don’t want to write a love song for the world/I just want to write a song about a boy and a girl.” If I may borrow his desire to set aside the macro in favor of the micro, I didn’t want to write a post about a song. I wanted to write a post about what a song can mean in purely peripheral terms, or how a song can make people think of something that is wholly separate from the original meaning. Life is a soundtrack and “Say Hey (I Love You)” is a perfect song to randomly appear in one while at the pool, or drinking a colorful drink at the beach, or hanging out with friends at a bar or on someone’s deck, or, if you are young, admiring a boy or a girl from a distance.

Writing about songs that were released last decade always makes me feel a little nervous because it’s always a tricky thing trying to attach significance to something that hasn’t fully aged yet (what if the song becomes devalued by the artist’s future musical endeavors?). But the tag line of this site is Songs That Define An Artist (And Modern Music) and I think it is fair to assume that this song will define Michael Franti, and that it also defines modern music because I think it is a song that both defines the decade of the ’00′s and modern mainstream reggae music.

It’s also a song that makes me think of the memories from summers past, and if it does the same for you—if it makes the cut for your overall soundtrack, or the soundtrack of your memories—then it probably goes without saying why this song should make this list, regardless of how it’s thought of decades from now.

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[1] And if you’re thinking to yourself Who the hell are The Human Beinz and what song is “Nobody But Me”? and you’re doubting whether you have ever heard that song, not to fret: you have most certainly heard this song before.

[2] My friend Mark and I would primarily play baseball with a wood bat and a tennis ball. (Sometimes we’d use a Wiffle bat and tennis ball.) Because it was mostly just the two of us who wanted to play baseball, we came up with a way to be able to play one-on-one baseball. His house sat on a corner, and his backyard was pretty oversized and long. Across the street from his house was our town’s sewage plant. (Yes, it smelled gruesome outside on really hot, humid days, thanks for asking.)

The rules:

— The catcher was replaced by a folding chair and if a pitch hit any part of the chair it was a strike
— No base running (we used ghost runners)
— Since there was no base running, hits were determined as such: any ball past you (but before hitting the line marked by a random bush) was a single; any ball past the random bush (but before the sidewalk) was a double; any ball past the beginning of the sidewalk (but before the street) was a triple; any ball that landed on the street (but before the fence to the sewage facility, which also included a parkway and sidewalk) was a home run; any ball hit over the sewage facility fence counted as an automatic grand slam, and if there were any ghost runners on base all of them scored plus four runs (so, if the bases were loaded and you hit it into the sewage facility plant it would be 8 runs; if no one was on base it was 4 runs). Here’s a very professionally made drawing of his house/baseball diamond which also includes the markers used to determine hits. (Picture is not to scale)
— If a ghost runner was on 2nd, a single would not score a run; it had to be a double that was hit (a single would only drive in a run if the ghost runner was on 3rd)

Hitting a ball over the sewage facility fence looked pretty realistic but it wound up being very difficult: there were trees in front of it that killed many potential automatic grand slams. One day, Mark absolutely murdered one of my pitches. As soon as he hit I knew that I had given up the first automatic grand slam, and to make matters worse: the bases were loaded. He was gonna get 8 runs. As I watched the flight of the ball and muttered FUCK! to myself numerous times, I prepared for the inevitable bragging that was to follow. Except… the ball hit a power line (those were in front of the sewage facility too) and it redirected the ball so that it fell harmlessly onto the street. He got 4 runs instead of 8. It was the stuff of legend, the way he fell down on the ground with an expression of You have got to be SHITTING me! and the way I celebrated having only given up a traditional grand slam instead of our new 8-run variety grand slam. Rick Reilly would’ve written an obvious and ham-fisted Sandlot-themed column about it if he were there that day. Neither one of us ever got close to hitting an automatic grand slam again.

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.