Sleater-Kinney, “A Quarter to Three” (The Hot Rock, 1999)
Elliott Smith, “2:45 A.M.” (Either/Or, 1997)
Seventeen-year-old me freaked out when he realized two of his favorite artists had written songs about the same alarmingly specific thing. Neither is especially cheery, but Sleater-Kinney’s take is definitely the more anxious, perhaps because its bleary narrator never quite lets go of the doomed hope that things will get better. Smith, on the other hand, is serene—reality seems to crumble around him, and yet he strides ahead with conviction, strangely at peace in his own self-destruction.
The pitch for Conor Oberst’s 2008 self-titled release felt like a zen koan: “What is the sound of a one-man band’s solo project?” The answer was a pleasant surprise—fans finally got to hear how Bright Eyes would sound if the dude would lighten up for a minute. Outer South is a different beast. Read the rest of my review at Paper Magazine.
Studio 360, “New Lyrics for Old Broadway” (Episode: Ben Hong, West Side Story, Sufjan — April 17, 2009)
WNYC’s Studio 360 recently ran a short segment on the current Broadway revival of West Side Story that’s worth a listen. The new production has a daring and poignant twist to it: the Puerto Rican characters converse with one another in Spanish, and on the songs “I Feel Pretty,” “A Boy Like That,” and the “Tonight” quintet, they actually sing in Spanish. Lin-Manuel Miranda, writer and star of In the Heights, prepared the translations with Stephen Sondheim’s blessing, but on one condition—Sondheim insisted the songs still needed to rhyme in the right places.
That this idea could work says something to me about the way iconic music lives in our minds. West Side Story’s songs are perhaps the most memorable showtunes I can think of. Now that they’re fifty years deep in our cultural history, most of the audience for this show, and in fact most people who care anything about musical theater, are likely to know the words by heart already. As for the uninitiated, I like to think they’ll glean the songs’ meanings by mere virtue of being in a room full of people who adore them—that Sondheim’s lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s music belong to a vast collective unconscious, one which neophytes can tap into if given the right kind of prodding.
The Barmitzvah Brothers, “Agatha Read” (Mr. Bones’ Walk-In Closet, 2003)
Neko Case, “Margaret Vs. Pauline” (Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006)
The titular character of “Agatha Read” is scruffy and unassuming and yet wise beyond her years, which is how I’ve always thought of the Barmitzvah Brothers. When I first encountered them in 2004, playing a barn-burning show at New York’s Sidewalk Café, they didn’t have many years between the three of them—drummer Johnny Merritt was 17, multi-instrumentalists Geordie Gordon and Jenny Mitchell were 18 and 19—and Mr. Bones’ Walk-In Closet was already a year old by then. Their solid musicianship and cunning way with arrangement on this album grant a compelling depth to the characters; far from your standard teenage antihero mewling about how parents just don’t understand, Agatha comes off as positively epic, striding down the block with a warm trumpet wind at her back. She moves through her world with grace and authority, confident that her talents will be appreciated one day. Neko Case’s Margaret isn’t quite so blessed—her musical backdrop is a beautiful one, but its brushed drums and crying pedal steel have a doleful quality better suited for shuffling one’s feet than walking tall. With a spirit broken by a lifetime of rotten luck, Margaret lives in bitter envy of the girl who got all the chances she missed; “Everything’s so easy for Pauline” is Case’s tragicomic answer to “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
Marilyn Manson, “Coma White” (Mechanical Animals, 1998)
For the better part of Marilyn Manson’s tenure as a chart-topping artist and pop culture reference, he seemed bent on convincing listeners that he was their sacrificial lamb—that he walked the earth cursed with the burden of saying things one wasn’t supposed to say and having scorn heaped upon him, so that the rest of us might one day achieve greater intellectual freedom. The “Coma White” video wasn’t the first time he crucified himself in the name of something or other, but it sticks out in my mind because of its other main setpiece: a reenactment of the JFK assassination, starring himself and then-girlfriend Rose McGowan as John and Jackie. For all the church-baiting sacrilege and spooky-ooky imagery he conjured elsewhere in his career, the few seconds here where McGowan screams for help, cradling a lifeless Manson in her lap, still strike me as the most disturbing stunt he ever pulled. It may be histrionic, self-indulgent, morally hollow, and in terrible taste—but it taps into real-life horror, something the rest of his ghoulish antics could never manage.
Bob Fosse, “Hospital Hallucination” (All That Jazz, 1979)
This clip from Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz doesn’t actually depict the moment his self-referential protagonist dies—that moment, naturally, is saved for the finale (which you can check out here if you’re up for watching Ben Vereen and a cadaverous chorus repeat the same terrifying phrase for ten minutes). But this sequence gets to the heart of Fosse’s musical meta-fantasy about an artist whose dual life as a workaholic and pleasure junkie leave him no time for the people who love him, nor any regard for his own health. When heart disease begins to claim the latter, hallucination takes hold and the story morphs into a narcissist’s dream: a musical about himself. Roy Scheider, as Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon, is visited in his hospital bed by the ghosts of neglect past, present, and future, in the person of his ex-wife, current girlfriend, and young daughter, as well as by a bejeweled bevy of all the chorus girls he’s loved and left. Together they perform a scathing revue, reminding him that in spite of all the beauty and brilliance he’s given the world with his art, his true legacy is a trail of broken hearts.
Today’s post introduces a new feature to the site, which my girlfriend cannily suggested I call This Blog / That Blog, and which will profile arts and culture websites that tackle their subject matter in engaging and provocative ways. The first installment is dedicated to my favorite new thing on the internet, Pre-Durst.
My sentiments are hardly unique; founded scarcely a month ago by Stephen Swift, 27, and Adam Zavala, 26, Pre-Durst has already received nods of recognition from the likes of NYMag, Idolator, Blender, and Flavorwire. Its focus is simple: YouTube clip by YouTube clip, the two authors chronicle the Top 40 hits that informed their lives between 1990 and 1997, the year Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill Yall$ hit shelves and became a bellwether for the dawn of nü-metal and modern rock. This week, Swift and Zavala submitted to an email interview and told This Blog / That Blog about their creative process, how YouTube has changed the game for bloggers, and what Everclear has to do with getting to third base.
So what is it about this time period that’s so dear to you?
Stephen Swift: Well, that’s when my childhood happened. 1990 is when I started listening to the radio, and 1997 is about when I started turning to sources besides the radio to find bands I liked, and I figure anything I heard in-between is fair game. It feels a little disingenuous to claim that the blog is easy to write because that’s when music was good, man, but it seems to me that every decade has its own little streak of popular culture aligning with the music independent artists are creating, and I managed to land squarely on top of one of them. If I were a decade older I’d probably have a lot to say about Kate Bush and The Style Council, and I think it’s happening again now with the interlocution of mass media and internet media, both with barely-signed Brooklyn bands playing TRL before it went off the air, and with artists like Cassie building their rep on MySpace, and with bands like Paramore, who are basically descendents of the Promise Ring and Jejune, selling out giant arenas. Either way, though, there was a distinct period in my life during which I loved basically everything that crossed my ears, and whether or not there’s some underlying cultural explanation for my young enthusiasm, I’d imagine “being thirteen” is more than enough reason. Read more…
Elvis Costello, “Georgie and Her Rival” (Mighty Like a Rose, 1991)
The Magnetic Fields, “100,000 Fireflies” (Distant Plastic Trees, 1991)
The early 90s were a dark, strange time for Elvis Costello (if you need proof, check out the video for Mighty Like a Rose’s lead single, “The Other Side of Summer,” and witness him in his scraggly-bearded, shoulder-length-haired, biker-jacketed glory). “Georgie and Her Rival” displays a particular lack of faith in the human institutions of romantic love and common decency, profiling a couple who lack interest in both and yet remain together out of spite. Predicated upon phone tag and booty calls, theirs is a relationship in name only; as the song’s title suggests it’s much more of a game, nay, a war, with each party’s pride at stake.
“100,000 Fireflies” hails from the days when Stephin Merritt was too shy to sing on any of his songs, and so had Susan Anway handle lead vocals for the first two Magnetic Fields albums, Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus. In retrospect it’s a damn good thing; even though Merritt found his voice later on (a sardonic drawl that turned his lilting love songs into something far more cynical and fascinating), songs like this one are best left to someone who’ll put their whole heart into it. Anway spends much of the song intoning bizarre epigrams on the things that make her sad (“I have a mandolin / I play it all night long / It makes me want to kill myself”), but her heavenly voice and Merritt’s music-box orchestration make it all go down easy. The heart-exploding kicker, though, comes at the end, when the cryptic metaphors suddenly give way to raw honesty (“You won’t be happy with me / But give me one more chance / You won’t be happy anyway”). What sounds at first like a brief coda ends up extending for a full minute, laying out the bleak future of two people brought together by loneliness rather than love.
UPDATE — Costas Lignos wrote a kickass comment on this post that distills its overall point in an incredibly clear and concise way, so I’ve decided to repost part of it here:
“I think there’s an interesting contrast in the way that Stephen Merritt and Elvis Costello handle the dysfunctional relationships that account for the bulk of their songwriting. In Costello’s world a song’s narrator is almost always a detached, astute observer, watching oblivious lovers continue to harm each other because that’s the only way they know how to love. In most of Merritt’s songs, the narrator is in the relationship and as the song develops expresses their awareness of how sub-optimal they, their partner, and/or the relationship is, but is ultimately willing to submit to destruction at their lover’s hands because they prefer it to nothing at all. Costello’s lovers confuse love with destruction, while Merritt’s know the difference but resign themselves to accept destruction with love.”
As of today, This Song / That Song is seeking submissions for guest posts. The whole point of this thing is to foster discussion and get people thinking about the music they listen to in new ways, and as much as I love spouting off about the stuff in my own library, to keep it a solitary venture would royally defeat the purpose. If you like to write, if you like music, and especially if you think you could offer some perspective on areas I don’t regularly cover, then by all means send me an email and pitch away.
Please include a brief (one or two sentence) synopsis of the post you’d like to write, making sure to include the song, artist, and album names. If you have links to the songs on Imeem, YouTube, or some other streaming format, feel free to include them. If you’re new to TS/TS, then browse through the posts in the Features category to get a feel for what the site’s all about.
Thanks for your continued readership—now get cracking!
This Song / That Song is a blog about thematic connections in popular music. All songs are posted in streaming format, for discussion purposes only. If you are the creator of one of these songs and would like it removed, let us know.
