Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

Sleater-Kinney “Hot Rock”

“It’s not real. You don’t need to tell me that it’s not real.”

That’s the part of Sleater-Kinney’s “Hot Rock” I have played over and over, because that’s the part that hurts for me to hear. I can remember the first time I related to that line, and rewinding and playing it again and again on a Metro North train when I was 19 years old. If only it was just connected to that one moment in time. This lyric has been a refrain through my life – for unrequited loves, for deluding myself into believing bad relationship dynamics were in fact healthy and good, for thinking that anything for me could ever be happy and reciprocal – that it can feel like I’m just replaying the same small part of a three minute song on repeat. Like I’m just doing it to hurt myself.

This is what people do with Sleater-Kinney records. It’s not always about the same things or about the same songs, but listening to this band is all about willfully confronting your most painful and angriest feelings and hoping that by facing them head-on you will become a stronger person. They always sound brave, and they make the stakes of even their small handful of silly songs seem ridiculously high. Sleater-Kinney are never holding your hand or nudging you to jump into the fire. You leap in of your own accord because they already have, and they make it look like the only path to catharsis. You do it because they seem better for having done it themselves.

The most distinctive aspect of Sleater-Kinney’s sound is the contrast of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s voices. This was a very deliberate thing, particularly on their breakthrough albums Dig Me Out and The Hot Rock. Brownstein’s voice is cold and aloof, and her lyrics tend to be analytical in tone. Tucker’s voice is the polar opposite. Her voice is hot, loud, and intense. Her lyrics are direct and emotionally raw. She sings with such force that her most fierce wails sound as though they could blast a hole through a mountain range. They play off each other like overlapping thoughts in the same brain, with Tucker serving as the id and Brownstein playing the superego. They dramatize the messy, confusing feelings of a conflicted mind.

If you come to Sleater-Kinney’s music to jump into the fire, you quickly learn to distrust everything Brownstein sings. She’s the neurotic voice that convinces you to back away from your feelings and avoid taking risks. She’s the one who is being reasonable, which in this context is basically a synonym for repressed or cowardly. In “Hot Rock,” Brownstein turns the plot of Peter Yates’ 1972 heist film The Hot Rock into an extended metaphor for trying to steal someone’s heart. In her half of the song, relationships are seen in terms of property, and a crafty person can make someone fall in love with them. Tucker’s lyrics are a brutal counterpoint. She knows the horrible truth: “I’m not the one you wanted, not the thing you keep.” Even for the hyper-emotive Tucker, she sounds ragged and vulnerable here. Brownstein’s schemes and bravado are entirely neutralized by her nagging doubts. It’s hopeless. It’s not real.

I brace myself for the climax of “Hot Rock” every time. There’s a brief instrumental section heralding the part, and in those moments you can prepare yourself for the arrival of the bitter truth. The agonizing part of this is not in finding out that it’s not real, but in that you already knew that all along. The pain is in having to let go of the tiny bit of hope you had that your doubts were wrong, and that you had for once actually found the love you wanted. It’s a disappointment, but mostly in yourself for being fool enough to believe that anyone could want you. You’re not the one they wanted. You’re not the thing to keep. Don’t you get it by now?

At the end of the song, Brownstein rationalizes Tucker’s emotional revelation. She sees the truth of the situation, and with more clarity than the heartbroken Tucker. She knows what she has to do and makes a vow: “I’m going to steal my heart back and find a love that’s true.” This is where you need to trust Brownstein’s voice of reason. It’s not a happy ending, but it is an attempt to salvage some pride and self-respect from this mess. Who knows, you might be better off for having gone through this.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Michael McDonald “Sweet Freedom”

“Sweet Freedom” requires a contemporary listener to surrender to the extreme ‘80s-ness of it all. Even relative to the most egregiously corny ‘80s pop this song is a bit extra with its relentlessly perky funk and a recording style so precise and heavily synthesized that the percussion, bass, and keyboard tones all sound rather uncanny. The song was composed by English songwriter Rod Temperton – if you don’t know his name you’ve certainly heard his music as he’s the sole writer of the Michael Jackson classics “Rock with You” and “Thriller” among other late ’70s to mid ‘80s post-disco hits – and everything about the track is basically the Temperton aesthetic pushed to an auteurist extreme.

“Sweet Freedom” is basically a crew of studio ringers executing Temperton’s musical ideas, unfettered by the creative whims of a client artist. The track is dense with intersecting rhythms and melodies without feeling too heavy, and Temperton is so effective at directing your attention to the lead melodies that more the more rhythmic keyboard elements like the galloping chords on the chorus can feel relatively subtle in the mix. The song wasn’t written specifically for Michael McDonald but it’s hard to imagine it being better with anyone else at the center as he matches the track’s odd blend of primary color boldness and easy-going breeziness. Who else can seem to bellow like a grizzly bear but make it feel like a whisper?

Temperton was such a genius of funk and composition that his lyrics can seem purely functional, accessible and inoffensive phrases that simply carry the melody. But as I’ve obsessively listened to “Sweet Freedom” over and over in the recent past I’ve inevitably paid more attention to what McDonald is actually singing and I can’t help but imagine it as the ramblings of a very earnest guy who has just done enough cocaine to feel like he’s grooving on some deeper truths and clicking into some new, vague ambition. The whole song exists in the moment of epiphany – inspirational and aspirational, but also irrational. It’s a moment of intense self-belief and optimism extended, amplified, and frozen in time. McDonald sings “there’s no turning back from what I’m feeling,” and while he very well might come down from that feeling within an hour, he sings it like there’s no chance he could be wrong.

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Aerosmith “What It Takes”

Steven Tyler doesn’t ever come across like a loser in his songs, even when he’s singing from the position of a guy who’s been dumped and can’t figure out how to move on in “What It Takes.” He’s always the cool guy, the sexed-up fun guy, the guy who’s rough around the edges but always has a high status. He’s a rock star and he’s always got a party, and he’s always inviting you to come along. His problem in “What It Takes” is not so much that he’s been dumped but that this happens so rarely to him that he doesn’t even know how to process it. He’s so used to being on the other end of the dynamic that not getting what he wants is somewhat alien to him. This could be kinda gross, but it’s not – the arrangement is rooted in blues but it’s played in a bright major key, and while Tyler sings with feeling he’s also giving us his usual razzle dazzle, so it’s more hammy and theatrical than genuinely melancholy. It’s more like he’s indulging in the idea of sadness than spiraling into actual despair. Maybe it’s supposed to be that thing of “let’s acknowledge this feeling, honor it, and move on.”

“What It Takes” is from Pump, the hugely popular follow-up to Aerosmith’s comeback album Permanent Vacation. That record re-established the band as hitmakers with the help of outside songwriters Jim Vallance and Desmond Child and while the soppy power ballad “Angel” has a touch of desperation to it, the band mostly just sounded like a brighter version of themselves with major late ‘80s studio gloss. Aerosmith fit in well with the hair metal party rockers of that era but the music was more complementary than similar, and the songs on Pump in particular have a high degree of ambition and sophistication that it’s easy to forget when the most memorable bits are just big dumb rock n’ roll. “What It Takes” is exceedingly warm and rich, a gloriously decorated dessert of a song that would have quite good but far less remarkable with a more standard rock arrangement, and possibly very bad with a more maudlin and earnest power ballad arrangement.

“Love In An Elevator” is a good example of studio excess of Pump working in Aerosmith’s favor. It’s a swaggering rock song about fucking on the job that starts with the line “workin’ like a dog for the boss man” and even attempts a winking double entendre on the word “fax.” It’s a song with some sledgehammer hooks, a dirty riff, and a Penthouse Letters lyrical conceit, and you really could just stop right there and you’d probably have a hit. But they just keep upping the ante, piling on harmonies and pushing the song higher until you get to the point where they basically decide to turn this horny himbo anthem into their “A Day In the Life.” It’s musically satisfying but also totally absurd, it makes the joke of the song funnier but also presents Tyler as someone who is horny on like, a cosmic or mythological level. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this or even if it’s necessarily aspirational, it’s more like listening to this is communing with some kind of raunchy godhead.

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The Loud Family “Sodium Laureth Sulfate”

“Sodium Laureth Sulfate” puts you off balance from the start, blasting you with noise and clips of studio chatter, opening Interbabe Concern in a way that pushes the listener to consider that there’s something wrong with their CD. Once the song shifts into a more normal but still off-kilter pop structure it’s a different sort of fractured, with Scott Miller singing from two perspectives, one of which is rudely interrupting the other:

So you’ve got a new girl, better tell us all
about her
    well, we met—
No, we were thinking of lascivious detail

I love this as the start of a song, immediately cutting through the bullshit to nudge the song into something less mundane. Of course, instead of getting something sexy, the other guy gives us something…more descriptive:

she’s a little like
tendon-slash dimension crash entropica
cryogen magenta kevlar ebola

As the song goes along we never get a clear picture of this woman, but we do get the gist of the situation – she’s stringing him along, she’s distant, she’s emotionally brutal, she’s fascinating. The other guy is concerned, but this dude is too far gone – “and the zero times she calls me back refine my soul.” He’s beyond rationalizing her behavior, she’s giving him exactly what he craves: high drama and casual cruelty! As a wise woman would write many years later: “Boys only want love if it’s torture.”

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Wire “Three Girl Rhumba”

“Three Chord Rhumba” is built like a logic proof, a simple and efficient argument that stops after just a minute because the point has been made. Most of the early punks were attracted to blunt stripped down arrangements for its roots in earlier iterations of rock or for its utility in expressing anger and aggression but Wire focused in on the possibilities rock minimalism had to offer in servicing formal ideas and making it so cerebral lyrics could be presented with a musical punctuation that could make them physically engaging.

The first verse of “Three Girl Rhumba” is a structured like a game that seems designed to keep you distracted, like a musical version of Three-Card Monte. You think of numbers, open boxes, open and shut your eyes, think of more numbers. You end up with no numbers, and it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s not a nihilistic song – you end up doing the impossible to avoid the inevitable, and that seems pretty cool. Even better, the logic of the song moves towards a conclusion in which all efforts to project meaning on an experience is rejected in favor of just dancing.

Buy it from Amazon.

Elastica “Connection”

OK, here’s a different card game. This time it’s all about luck and timing, and you win by making it appear to others like you actually have control over circumstances that are entirely random. Justine Frischmann demonstrates how it works by looking and sounding like the coolest human imaginable – androgynous, mysterious, effortlessly graceful, and casually flirty in a way that seems to presume that everyone’s interested and thus it’s all very low stakes. She almost seems bored by a positive outcome: “somehow the vital connection is made,” sung with a droll sarcasm that suggests it’s impossible to avoid her inevitable victory.

“Connection” famously lifts its riff from “Three Girl Rhumba” but it’s less a copy and more like a sequel – the Aliens to Wire’s Alien, in which core ideas that were once expressed with a brute minimalism are now presented with a sleek poppy maximalism. Elastica accessorize the spikey central riff with new wave synthesizers, alt-rock crunch, and a very ‘90s sort of gloss that sounds the way shiny vinyl clothing looks. Style for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted…

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Pavement “Westy Can’t Drum”

Stephen Malkmus is playing a game too; it’s called Telephone. He deliberately lifts the riff from a song that everyone knows to be a “rip off” – the essence of popular music if we’re being real, but being a clever songwriter he only just uses it as a starting point before heading off in his own direction. So maybe the game he’s playing is actually Exquisite Corpse? He complicates the riff a bit while keeping its energy – always a smart way to avoid legal issues – and by the middle he’s off on more of a Stereolab-gone-feral tangent.

Malkmus possesses a slacker elegance similar to that of Frischmann and a playful mind comparable to Newman, but he doesn’t come off anywhere near as severe as either. “Westy” is very silly in a way that feels distinctly American to me in much the same way that Frischmann’s version of sexiness and Newman’s sort of intensity feels specifically English. Malkmus stacks evocative phrases like he’s fully in the zone with a magnetic poetry kit, each verse ending in a punchline – “all embrace and segue to the burning masses,” “brings to mind the portraits on the coinages and Lincoln’s beard…but why’s he got a horse’s body??” The impossibilities that are inevitable here are all fanciful and strange.

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Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Middle America”

I hear echoes of the Pavement song “Greenlander” in “Middle America” – not enough that they’re extremely similar on a structural level, but close enough in tone that they share a particular shade of melancholy and evoke a frigid and empty landscape. In lyrical terms they’re from very different ends of a lifespan. “Greenlander” confronts a very youthful sort of awkwardness and regret, with the line “everything I did was right, everything I said was wrong / now I’m waiting for the night to bring me dawn” standing out as one of the young Malkmus’ more straightforward and poignant moments. “Middle America” is more like a collection of wise thoughts and observations, but presented in a humble and low-key way. There’s some good advice in the song but the emotional power of it lies more in the bits where he seems far less certain of himself or anything else. There’s something in the way he sings the “in the winter time” hook that conveys a sweet vulnerability and vague doubt that actually makes him come across as a stronger and more reliable person.

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Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Surreal Teenagers”

You go into a Malkmus song expecting some degree of evocative wordplay, but even with that expectation, “Surreal Teenagers” is especially rich with odd and interesting images. (I feel like there’s at least three or four very strong band names up for grabs in this one.) Malkmus is extra playful on this one too, to the point of singing the last two verses in a fanciful lilt as he takes on the character of some dandy dreaming of moving to Micronesia with his manservant John.

“Surreal Teenagers” circles back to the English folk and prog rock influences that went into much of Pig Lib, but it’s also informed by the dramatic flair that came from Janet Weiss’ presence in the band – basically, it’s like “1% of One” as a rollercoaster ride rather than an extended jam. This is from Jake Morris’ first record as The Jicks’ drummer, and the song showcases his strength as someone who can shift from an expressive jam band looseness to a more straight-ahead post-punk style on a dime.

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Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Share the Red”

The part I always remember from “Share the Red” is the one little part of the song that breaks from its slack, easygoing sway to tighten up and get dramatic as Malkmus sings “I’ll be watching all the time” three times with an unguarded passion. That’s the moment of clarity, the rest of the song is all mixed emotions as he sings about raising his children and taking note of the ways they’re wild and unformed before fully absorbing the rules of society. It’s not a sentimental song, but it is an empathetic one. He’s appreciating their lack of perspective while doing what he can to expand it in his role as a father. I love the nuance of this song – you can tell he cares about his kids and enjoys being a parent, but also how challenged he is by it and how exhausting it can feel. But I wouldn’t characterize this as expressing ambivalence about the situation, just an acknowledgement of the complexity of the situation.

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Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Wicked Wanda”

The lyrical content of Real Emotional Trash is split between playful imagery and thoughtful introspection, and in the case of “Wicked Wanda” it’s pretty much an even bisection. It’s two angles on psychedelia – the first half more fanciful and trippy, the second half much about ego-loss. This song, along with “Elmo Delmo,” confronts anxiety and fear in a way that was unusual for Malkmus up to this point in his career – or at least for him to be so direct about it. This part breaks into two verses, and the first is more tranquil and ideal as he lets go and allows himself some clarity and peace of mind in feeling small. The second verse is darker: “stories, not reality / I feel like a junk contraption / truth is I can’t shake this vile fear.” That last line always rattles me a bit, partly because Malkmus always presents as being so unflappable. But that image of him, the man who’s got so much style that it’s wasted? That’s a story, not reality.

“Wicked Wanda” attains some degree of grandeur and grace thanks in large part to the presence of Janet Weiss on drums and backing vocals. Weiss was a member of the Jicks for a little over five years after Sleater-Kinney dissolved after touring for The Woods, but she only plays on Real Emotional Trash and Mirror Traffic. She has a more heavy influence and obvious presence on the former, and it’s clear that working with a drummer as powerful and proficient in her emboldened Malkmus to aim for a dynamicism and drama that wouldn’t have ever worked with any of Pavement’s drummers. Weiss’ predecessor John Moen was similarly proficient but not quite as hard hitting or as flashy with fills. She does well with the songs on Mirror Traffic but that material doesn’t seem as tailor-made for her, and while that is probably just the natural drift of his songwriting muse it also seems like the novelty of having a drummer like that became less of a novelty and more of a day-to-day reality. Four albums down the line from her departure it feels like Weiss’ presence was a very good experience for Malkmus to have, but also something that was probably better as a phase than a permanent situation.

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Stephen Malkmus “Pencil Rot”

“Pencil Rot” nudges the ersatz new wave of the Pig Lib song “Dark Wave” a bit further into more demented territory, sharpening up every part that could be called “angular,” piling on scuzzy effects, and going hogwild with the bleep-y synthesizers. “Dark Wave” was basically just a genre goof but “Pencil Rot” firmly establishes the more wacky keyboard-centric end of the Jicks aesthetic, a sound that was eventually taken to a logical extreme on Groove Denied.

The lyrics of “Pencil Rot” start off by embracing the silliness of the music, with Malkmus telling us about a villain in his head named Leather McWhip – “he needs to be stopped!!” But as the song moves along Malkmus’ riff on villainy shifts from a celebration of the cartoonish to a rumination the insidiously mundane:

I’m here to sing a song, a song about privilege
the spikes you put on your feet
when you were crawling and dancing
to the top of the human shit pile, shit pile
somehow you managed to elucidate
something that was on all of their minds
and other people see themselves in you
and I can see them in you too

From the perspective of 2021 it’s easy to read this as a pretty good description of Donald Trump, though in context he may have actually been thinking of George W. Bush. But in either case I like that Malkmus focuses in on the utility of the privileged megalomaniac as someone who can distill negative impulses and allow for identification that crosses class divides. It’s the idealized self, the version that can do whatever they want with impunity and wield actual power in the world. It’s grasping power and privilege by proxy, and the proxy is nothing without this shared delusion.

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Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “(Do Not Feed the) Oyster”

“Oyster” is a turning point for Stephen Malkmus as a songwriter. The majority of the first Jicks record could’ve been Pavement songs – in fact, a few of the songs had at least been rehearsed with that band. But “Oyster,” which was debuted on stage well before Pig Lib was released, could only be a Jicks song. This is the sound of the middle aged Malkmus, more winding and digressive in his guitar melodies and supported by a band more capable of pushing into more epic and bombastic territory. It’s not a world away from where he’d been, but it was an aesthetic breakthrough that gave the Jicks a character beyond “the guy from Pavement playing with people who weren’t in Pavement.”

The sound of “Oyster” feels vaguely nautical, like there’s some sea shanty mixed in with the tuneful English folk and prog rock in its DNA. The lyrics reflect this somewhat, but it’s very confusing – like, what would it mean to feed the oysters when they survive by extracting algae from water? It sounds cool, though, and that’s usually his goal. The most intriguing bit is when the song circles back to the second verse and it’s suddenly about the disappointing hassles of adult life. It’s an interesting contrast with the songs on Pavement’s Brighten the Corners, which often seemed to long for these mundane rituals. Malkmus was 30 when he wrote those songs and nearer to 40 when he wrote “Oyster” – certainly less intriguing when you’re not a guy constantly touring through his 20s and probably wondering from time to time what being a regular grown up might be like.

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Stephen Malkmus “Vague Space”

Stephen Malkmus went through a phase in the late 90s and early 00s in which he clearly felt a natural pull towards writing traditional romantic pop songs but felt weird and self conscious about it, so any time a melody suggested a sentimental cliché he wrote in something absurd or off-putting to subvert the listener’s expectations. You can hear this on “You Are A Light,” “Spit On A Stranger,” “Major Leagues,” and “Ann Don’t Cry” on Terror Twilight, and very obviously in “Vague Space” from the first Jicks record. This isn’t all conjecture – early versions of these songs have been in rotation for ages and the demo version of “Vague Space” featured on the “Phantasies” single features an early version of the chorus that goes “I love to turn you on” before it was revised to “I love to tear you off.” The editing process was pretty transparent.

There’s a part of me that sees this as a cop-out, a way of shrinking away from genuine emotions because you don’t want anyone to accuse you of being corny. But that impulse to shrink away from feelings, to put up a flimsy defense – that’s a very relatable feeling, and “Vague Space” is definitely a song about hedging emotional bets and playing it cool. The first verse is a dodge on a “define the relationship” conversation that includes a genuine compliment that’s also a neg – “I came to crave your spastic touch, the honest way you move’s too much,” and the second verse drifts into poetic nonsense, as if to say “haha, never mind.” As it goes along Malkmus tries to downplay everything – “this is no new romantic blitzkrieg” – but the sound of it all makes it obvious that he’s coming from a sweet place and just hates dealing with pressure. The “vague space” is a comfort zone, a way to enjoy feelings and moments without any particular responsibility. It’s not necessarily the most noble thing, but it’s an understandable position.

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Tears for Fears “Break It Down Again”

“Break It Down Again” was released in 1993 and was a solid radio hit, which is sorta surprising in that the aesthetic of the song is extremely un-1993, the point at which post-Nirvana “alternative” sounds had become entirely dominant in the mainstream. It’s one of the last songs to make it out of that fascinating bubble of pop history that I explored in this playlist – the ‘80s mutating into a glossy, self-consciously classy new ‘90s sound that ends up entirely abandoned within a couple years as the major aesthetics of the era are defined by a cohort of artists who favored more raw styles of rock, pop, and hip-hop.

Tears for Fears, a defining band of the ‘80s, showed up a bit late to the ‘90s party partly because Roland Orzabol had become a studio perfectionist in the late ‘80s but mostly because the band was derailed by his acrimonious split with band co-founder Curt Smith. “Break It Down Again” and the rest of the Elemental album sounds like it would have fit right in with the zeitgeist of 1990 or 1991, but in 1993 it’s already a throwback in the midst of a rock scene centered on records like In Utero, Siamese Dream, Vs., and Pablo Honey. Some of Tears for Fears ‘80s contemporaries had at this point successfully reinvented themselves with very ‘90s palettes – U2, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., The Cure – but Orzabol made no such concessions. It’s not clear to me whether this was out of fidelity to a specific artistic vision or because the record was in the works for so long that there was no way to update the sound of it without starting from scratch. Probably a little of both.

“Break It Down Again” is maximalist and bombastic, and absolutely jammed full of ideas. Orzabol was no stranger to this approach – if anything, the band’s 1989 hit “Sowing the Seeds of Love” is twice as dense – but the relavitely compact structure of this composition makes the swerves from martial political fanfare to hyperbolic synthesized orchestral hits to smooth layered harmonies feel a bit dizzying. Orzabol gets away with his most highbrow notions and acrobatic feats of arrangement because he’s so gifted with melody, and “Break It Down Again” is so stacked with ear-catching hooks that it feels like it could tip over and crash like a Jenga tower at some points.

The lyrics are just as packed as the composition, to the point that each iteration of the chorus has a new set of lyrics attached to the melody. Orzabol approaches the idea of “breaking it down” from multiple angles: dissolution of both personal relationships and nation states, the deconstruction of masculinity, the erosion of emotional walls and the things that keep you from finding your inner truths, the eventual decay of all things. The song embraces the concept of entropy – not so much in the sense of awaiting oblivion, but in that the end of things allow for new beginnings. The lyrics convey an intriguing blend of cynicism and optimism, to the point that he seems to be begging for destruction as an impetus to change. I don’t know if Orazabol intended this song to espouse accelerationism, but it certainly comes off that way.

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Tom Petty “Walls” (Live)

“Walls” is a song that exists in a limbo zone between a relationship falling apart and fully moving on from it. It’s part of an emotional journey but only just the longest, most boring part of the trip, like indefinitely cruising down a featureless interstate of the soul. This sort of thing but be tedious in fiction but it’s perfect for a song, particularly one like this that so perfectly evokes an emotional palette with well-mixed shades of ennui, regret, bitterness, and affection.

Tom Petty’s lyrics strive towards a warm-hearted clarity, like he’s just trying to be reasonable and patient as he processes it all. But the song resists its own attempts to put feelings in perspective – sure, some days are diamonds and some days are rocks, but that’s just what you say in the verses. The real feeling of the song is in that simple, beautiful chorus where he can’t quite get over this person with a heart so big it could crush this town, and he has to admit that one way or another he’s gonna crumble along with all those walls.

Buy the Wildflowers box set from Amazon.

Prince “Forever In My Life” (Live in Utrecht, 1987)

The version of “Forever In My Life” we’ve known for decades is one of Prince’s greatest minimalist productions – a gorgeous soul ballad of devotion and vulnerability backed mainly by the crisp, electronic clatter of a drum machine. There’s vocal overdubs, but it’s all his voice responding to himself, emphasizing the sense that he’s totally lost in his thoughts while contemplating his love for someone else. There’s a bit of acoustic guitar at the end, which is a tonal shift that suggests arriving at a peaceful emotional grounding. It’s a brilliant and evocative arrangement, and now with the alternate versions of the song featured on the new expanded reissue of Sign O the Times, we know it’s the work of thoughtful revision.

The studio outtake version included on the fifth disc has a drastically different character with its emphasis on a strummed acoustic guitar groove and a generally warmer tone falling somewhere between country rock and classic soul. It’s a far more straightforward piece of music and works very well on its terms – it’s not hard to imagine this one becoming a minor hit if it had been released in this form instead as it’s a very radio-friendly mix. But knowing where he went with it, it’s easy to hear what he thought was missing: It’s a little too normal, and not really getting close to the raw and candid emotional place he got through revision and cutting out so much clutter. This version is gorgeous and says the same thing, but it doesn’t quite look you in the eyes like the eventual album mix.

The more stunning alternate version was recorded live on stage after the album was released. The Utrecht recording splits the difference between the two extremes, centering the song on the mechanical beat but playing the groove on an acoustic guitar with a bluesy flair. Prince reorients the song towards blues and gospel, integrating groups of male and female backup singers but calling out through the performance when to silence parts of the band like he’s leading a band the way he’d move sliders and twist knobs on a mixing board. The live version is long but very dynamic and engaging, particularly as it moves along and he starts working the audience as part of the arrangement. The recording is actually too crystal clear in capturing the musicians on stage to include much audience noise, but it’s just enough to get a sense of what’s happening.

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Whitney Houston “I’m Your Baby Tonight”

From the first few seconds “I’m Your Baby Tonight” feels slightly, imperceptibly wrong. It’s something about the beat – is it too fast? Or too emphatic too soon, like it’s somehow starting with the climactic fill? There are pop songs that sound like an idealized experience of cocaine, or like the music one might make on cocaine, but this song is like being around someone who’s totally coked up in the most cartoonish way while you’re stone sober.

The frantic energy of the music feels incongruous with the song on a compositional level, but it does suit the lyrics, in which Whitney Houston sings about obsessive, yearning lust. It’s an interesting contrast with her earlier hit “How Will I Know,” which approaches similarly neurotic crush feelings from a more wholesome perspective. That song is also quite energetic, but it’s stable and grounded and as much she overthinks her situation in the lyrics the music conveys faith in a positive outcome. “I’m Your Baby Tonight” feels frazzled and insecure. Whereas “How Will You Know” is confiding in someone else about a crush, this song directly addresses the object of affection and while that’s drastically bolder, it’s also significantly more nerve-wracking. The words are direct and frank and sung by one of the most confident vocalists to ever live, and yet when paired with this percussion all of that is undermined. But then again, the lyrics also contain some rather morbid asides like “from the second you touched me I was ready to die / I’ve never been fatal, you’re my first time.”

“I’m Your Baby Tonight” was written and produced by L.A. Reid and Babyface, and the latter’s involvement is made obvious in the bridge to the chorus. It’s the best part of the song and the melody is so obviously Babyface, not too far removed from his then-recent solo hit “Whip Appeal.” The song falls in a strange spot on the R&B timeline – it’s part of Babyface’s ascendency as a major figure in the genre through the ‘90s, the verses are seemingly influenced by Michael Jackson’s 1987 hit “The Way You Make Me Feel,” the production is adjacent to Teddy Riley’s emerging New Jack Swing style. It’s a few too many things at once, but in a good way – it sounds like a specific moment in time, and the musical decisions are risky as so much of it is a step away from the aesthetics that had made Houston a superstar.

Houston’s first two albums present her a safe, idealized young woman and the focus of every track is on her enormous technical prowess as a vocalist. Her last major hit before “I’m Your Baby Tonight” was “One Moment In Time,” a ballad recorded for the 1988 Summer Olympics and that makes all kinds of sense because her approach to music up until that point was more similar to an Olympic athlete than a typical R&B or pop vocalist. Showcasing this vocal talent remained the focus of her work through the rest of her life, but “I’m Your Baby Tonight” was the first single of her career to offer up a version of Houston that was allowed to seem less than superhuman. I’m not sure if the goal was for her to return with a song that conveyed anxiety and vulnerability or if that was just the organic result of the artistic process, but it was nevertheless an important step in her progress.

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Genesis “Invisible Touch”

Try to imagine “Invisible Touch” without any of the ‘80s-ness of its arrangement. It’s not easy, given how overwhelmingly ‘80s it sounds. You have to strip away the keyboards, the drum machine, the echo effect on the guitar, the very sound of Phil Collins’ voice. Like a lot of beloved ‘80s hits, “Invisible Touch” is essentially a Motown-style R&B song played in a completely new style utilizing then-cutting edge technology. Collins and the rest of Genesis were working from a structural template and an approach to singing rooted in Black music, but the result is so transformed by their aesthetics that it barely registers as direct influence. From the perspective of the early 2020s, this looks like a very responsible sort of appropriation.

Phil Collins’ fascination with drum machines in the ‘80s is interesting to me because as a very technically gifted drummer, there was very little he could do with programming that he could not emulate at a drum kit. He was going after a sound – modern, fresh, colorful. The programmed drum fills in “Invisible Touch” have a timbre closer to keyboards than any acoustic percussion instrument, and that’s the appeal. Drums without drum sounds, keyboards that sounded like no analog instrument: We’re so used to artificial textures in music now that it’s hard to get a sense for how revolutionary this was at the time, and how quickly the technology moved that early iterations of these new sounds could be horribly dated and unfashionable within a couple years.

As massively popular as Collins and Genesis were in the ’80s, a lot of people reacted poorly to this sort of drum programming and I think to a large extent it’s because in addition to the false notion that programming drum machines was “easier,” the synthetic sound removed the physical elements of drumming that could be respected as a show of athleticism – a performance of masculinity. “Invisible Touch” has all the function of an up-tempo R&B-based rock number but excises everything that could be interpreted as macho. Artists working in the industrial and hip-hop spaces would go on to convey an aggressive masculine-coded energy to drum machines by the end of the decade, but Collins and a lot of new wave, dance, and synth-pop acts were deliberately rejecting all that.

“Invisible Touch” is sung from the perspective of a guy who is absolutely terrified of a woman he believes is attempting to seduce him, possibly with nefarious goals. I hesitate to say this song is misogynistic, but it is expressing a level of distrust in female sexuality that suggests a lot of unflattering things about Collins, who wrote the lyrics. The paranoia is focused on this woman, but it sounds to me more like he’s projecting a lot from a deep fear of sex in general. The words present this woman as having some special power – an invisible touch, yeah – but I get the impression that this character would see sex as a corrupting influence regardless, and a way of losing a sense of control over himself. It’s a remarkably anti-horny song, and when the song modulates upward for that big key change in the final third it’s almost as though he’s leaping up to evade the clutches of this scary sexy lady.

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Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City”

I’ve come to the conclusion that when people think abstractly about the concept of the “rock star,” whether it’s in casual conversation or corporate rhetoric or in hugely successful rap songs, they’re basically thinking of Guns N’ Roses, and Axl Rose in particular. While there are other figures who probably are mixed up in this – Kurt Cobain for the people fixated on authenticity, Jagger/Richards or Led Zeppelin for ‘70s classicists – Axl Rose represents all the attitude and every excess that goes along with the term.

To some extent, this is by Rose’s own design as Guns N’ Roses is the postmodern synthesis of nearly all the major tributaries of popular rock aesthetics up through the mid ‘80s: metal, glam, blues, and punk most obviously from the start. By the time they released the Use Your Illusion albums that would expand to prog, folk rock, rock opera, and Beatles-derived pop. Guns N’ Roses united all of this with a musical and visual aesthetic that was as iconically rock as it gets while rooted specifically in the late ‘80s. The look they and their cohort in the Los Angeles scene in the ‘80s refined and codified the appearance of the “rock person,” and their stylistic influence continues to this day.

Guns N’ Roses made themselves a living, breathing representation of rock values and aesthetics at a time when this canon was becoming formalized both in the development of the “classic rock” radio format, the recent opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in the pages of Rolling Stone, a magazine with a vested interest in establishing and maintaining a canon built around what they had been covering for 20 years. While the construction of a critical canon is always self-conscious affair, the beauty of Guns N’ Roses’ achievement is that their synthesis of all this rock history was almost certainly an intuitive move coming out of natural fandom for all the popular bands of the past 15 years or so up to the point they got together. It looked and sounded authentic because they’d internalized all the same things their audience had – they were sharp critics and analysts of all that music, but that was filtered through strong songwriting instincts and a genuine “give ‘em what they want” populism.

“Paradise City” is the pinnacle of that impulse in their catalogue. The song, written and recorded long before they’d ever played arenas much less a stadium, is built to be the ultimate mass-scale rock experience. It’s hard to imagine the starting point for this track not being something along the lines of “we need the best concert-ending song ever.” It’s starts off as a cousin to “Sweet Home Alabama,” is built around a big sing-along chorus hook, and moves through big riffs, punky verses, solos and more and more opportunities for everyone to sing along. “Paradise City” is extremely eager to please, but it never feels cheap or condescending, and there’s so much momentum in the song that it never feels overwrought, plodding, or clumsy. As with everything on Appetite for Destruction, Mike Clink’s production is sleek and professional but allows for a ragged, wild energy to come through in a way that sets it apart from most other big mainstream rock albums of the mid ‘80s. “Paradise City” is mixed to evoke a massive scale so that it feels like you’re front row in your personal stadium concert.

This much is clear if you listen to the earlier version of “Paradise City” recorded live in session at Sound City that is featured on the expanded “super deluxe” edition of Appetite for Destruction. It’s a great raw version of the song and it feels a bit more edgy and ferocious, but the song doesn’t ask to just sound like five guys in a room playing instruments. “Paradise City” demands to be presented as an idealized experience of rock music, performed by untouchable iconic figures. The sound of it needs to imply your presence, to make you feel included. A lot of rock music thrives on feeling like a document of a special moment in a studio, but songs like “Paradise City” are more like works of fiction that ask you to complete it by imagining the most perfect and magical experience of the music.

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Madonna “Express Yourself” (Shep Pettibone Remix)

The Shep Pettibone remix of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” – the famous one used in the genuinely iconic David Fincher-directed music video, the version that was a hit – is maybe the best ever example of a remix being so much better than the album recording that the original is made obsolete by its existence. It’s not that the version that appears on Like A Prayer is bad – it is still the same song in structural terms and has the same vocal take as far as I can tell. But Pettibone’s arrangement strips out all the dorky ‘80s-specific elements of the album version, like the horn arrangement and the campy male vocal part, and finds the appropriate level of energy for the song. Pettibone’s aesthetic is sleek and elegant in a specifically turn-of-the-’90s way, and just as with his production on “Vogue” a year later, he found a sound that’s very much rooted in its moment but still feels incredibly stylish today.

This is a quote from Madonna about this song from an interview with Stephen Holden published in the New York Times in 1989 that has really stuck with me, both adding some extra depth to the music but also just functioning as very good life advice:

”The message of the song is that people should always say what it is they want,” Madonna said. ”The reason relationships don’t work is because they are afraid. That’s been my problem in all my relationships. I’m sure people see me as an outspoken person, and for the most part, if I want something I ask for it. But sometimes you feel that if you ask for too much or ask for the wrong thing from someone you care about that that person won’t like you. And so you censor yourself. I’ve been guilty of that in every meaningful relationship I’ve ever had. The time I learn how not to edit myself will be the time I consider myself a complete adult.”

Madonna was 30 years old when she said this, and in the process of finalizing her divorce from Sean Penn. 31 years later, I wonder if she still feels this way.

“Express Yourself” is generally understood as a female empowerment anthem, and it is, but more than anything it’s Madonna singing about the value of communication. Without communication, there is no happy relationship. Without communication, there’s no negotiating for what you deserve personally or professionally. Without communication you can’t authentically express your identity. And communication in a relationship is a two-way thing, so if you can’t make your partner open up it doesn’t matter how well you advocate for your needs. This last part is so crucial to the character of the song – Madonna’s lyrics acknowledge the shortcomings of most men raised with stifling heteronormative gender roles, but she’s telling you to not bother with those guys. The song allows for the existence of good men, and considers them a luxury she’s earned. She’s begging you to do the same, and for the men who aren’t up to the standard to level up.

It’s notable that the verses of “Express Yourself” make a point of contradicting pretty much everything she sang a few years earlier in “Material Girl.” Madonna did not write that song, but its sassy cynicism was so aligned with her persona in 1984 that it’s been understood as a sort of mission statement through her career. She’s always said she liked the song because it was “ironic and provocative,” which it absolutely is, though it’s hard to fully buy it when she says she’s not actually at all materialistic. But still, the lyrics in “Express Yourself” – which she wrote herself – ring a lot more true to her actual personality. It’s easy to take this song as being from the perspective of the Material Girl a few years later, with the experience to know that the fancy sheets and expensive jewelry aren’t enough of a reward for having to deal with some dull, shallow rich guy.

Nearly ten years ago Lady Gaga released “Born This Way,” one of her best singles even if a lot of the lyrics are clunky for various reasons. The common complaint about “Born This Way” then and to this day is that it sounds too much like “Express Yourself,” as if this could ever be a bad thing or that there were too many other songs like it, which there are not. This criticism frustrates me to no end, partly because I find it rather insulting to Lady Gaga. The songs are similar but not the same. There’s a clear line of inspiration, but of course Lady Gaga is inspired by Madonna. Madonna practically invented the lane of pop stardom Gaga exists in, it’s no different from how there’s countless artists directly inspired by previous template-setters like The Beatles or James Brown. To act like spotting this influence is some career-undermining “gotcha!” is absurd, and furthermore is a standard not applied to artists in other genres, most especially rock and rap.

I’ve been writing this site for almost 20 years, and in that time I’ve been sent a few thousand records and I’ve screened a lot more looking for songs to feature. And in all that, I’ve probably basically heard the same stupid punk rock song thousands of times by hundreds of bands. No one complains about this, though if you ask me, they should because it’s tedious and lacking in imagination. But to people who like punk rock songs, there’s never enough of the same damn thing. But somehow the notion of there being one other song that sounds like “Express Yourself” is offensive to people? This boils my blood. I’d much rather live in a world full of “Express Yourself” copies.

Madonna, no stranger to these sort of disingenuous criticisms and a shameless magpie herself, was a good sport about “Born This Way.” When she toured for MDNA in 2012 “Express Yourself” was part of the show, and near the end of the song she seamlessly integrated the song’s chorus. It rules.

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Nirvana “All Apologies”

The guitar line that runs through “All Apologies” sounds like a mid-‘60s Beatles melody stretched out and twisted into a Moebius strip, as though Kurt Cobain had found a way to take the essence of ephemerality and joy in rock music and make it seem eternal and holy. The core of the song, extending out into Cobain’s lyrics, is in this tension between the joy of living in the moment and the vastness of all the time around that moment. It’s like he’s taking this thing he obviously cared deeply about – the inspiration and thrill of the moment, of living and feeling as authentically as possible – and making it into a religion. And in this faith, Rubber Soul is a book of psalms. In this creed, “All Apologies” is as much an expression of guilt and shame as it as a hymn to the power of the rock music can make life feel urgent and exciting and real.

It’s hard to get over how much “All Apologies” sounds like a suicide note set to music, even with the knowledge that Cobain wrote the basic structural elements of the song and its lyrics before Nevermind even came out. A lot of the ideas that Cobain put into his actual suicide note are there in the lyrics, but so was a reference to the famous Neil Young lyric “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” “All Apologies” sounds like it’s trying to do both – the chorus hinges on the fantasy of being incinerated in the sun, the ending evoking the gradual erosion of time with everything eventually turning to dust.

Cobain had described this song – which is mostly him singing about gnawing guilt and self-loathing and an inability to experience joy like other people – as “peaceful, happy, comfort.” I suppose when he said that, he was mainly thinking of the Lennon/McCartney sunshine in that guitar melody even if he played it as overcast, and in the notion of embracing total oblivion. Or maybe he was thinking of that last “married, buried, YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH,” a moment of dumb rock fun in a song that’s otherwise heavy and solemn.

For many years I never thought too much about the “married” part of this song, but there’s a passage in Rob Sheffield’s first memoir Love Is A Mix Tape that changed my perspective on it. The book, which is mostly about Rob’s marriage to the late writer Renée Crist, takes place in the ‘90s and there’s a bit midway through the book in which Rob remembers listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York shortly after Cobain’s death. The album really messed him up at the time, and not for the obvious reasons. Rob and Kurt were around the same age and married around the same time, and this point of identification made Rob zero in on this aspect of his life. He heard it all as love songs, especially “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies.”

A little excerpt:

“He sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn’t see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn’t be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.”

That’s the guilt in the song. It’s the fear of not being enough for your wife and child, of feeling in over your head and not up to the challenge of being what you know is owed to them. Like a lot of Nirvana songs, “All Apologies” is about grappling with the expectations of masculinity, but unlike a lot of Nirvana songs it’s not coming to the conclusion that these gender roles are all bullshit. In this one he’s confronting his shortcomings and inability to “be a man” and deciding he’s not enough and never will be enough. He’s sorry about it, but finding a sort of peace with it. It’s the mentality of someone who’s convinced that he’s a failure and people are better off without him.

Because this song is coming from such a specifically masculine perspective I think it’s a hard song for women to cover, though several have tried. The version sung by Lorde, backed up by the surviving members of the band, Kim Gordon, and Annie Clark, is interesting but when I hear her sing it I don’t sense much connection to the material. It’s more like she’s just engaging with the abstract concept of Cobain, the Pure Authentic Rock Star. The version by Sinead O’Connor, released the same year he died, is better. Her vocal is strong and her connection to the themes comes across, but the arrangement omits the central guitar melody and that’s just too essential to the song for any version to work without it. If you’re not playing that part, you’re just not doing the song.

I’m more fond of Herbie Hancock’s instrumental take on it, which really digs into the possibilities of Cobain’s guitar and vocal melodies while voicing it all with more soulful inflections. It engages with the musical tension of the song, that pull between right now and forever. Hancock’s version is like a What If? comic, imagining what the song would’ve been if it came out of a totally different artistic lineage – jazz, R&B – but was reckoning with all the same ideas and feelings.

There are several recordings of “All Apologies” by Nirvana besides the original studio version on In Utero and the famous acoustic version from MTV Unplugged. Demos at various stages of completion, a early live version with unfinished lyrics, a handful of different mixes for the In Utero version. One of the most striking things about even the earliest versions is how the differences between them and the final recording are relatively minor – the structure doesn’t change much and though he revised the lyrics a few times the sentiment is always the same. The greatest variation is in tone, and I imagine one’s taste in “All Apologies” versions largely comes down to what aspect of the song is most resonant. If I had to choose, I probably like the proper In Utero version mixed by Scott Litt the most, but I do love the deep, funereal cello moan and soft landing of the Unplugged recording. I like the way the “2013” mix adds some scuff marks and texture to what Litt arrived at in the booth. Even the one demo version on the deluxe In Utero with the often barely audible scratch vocal and the overbearingly jangly Lemonheads-ish second guitar part is worthwhile, if just because there’s something perversely wonderful in hearing Cobain force the song into a happier, more carefree shape.

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