At the Center, and in the Spotlight

500. SLEATER-KINNEY, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"
Produced and written by Sleater-Kinney
1997 Did not make pop charts

If I could pick one track that was at the heart of this project, this would be it. Why? I'll list just five or six reasons:

(1) It features a strong female band. There has been no greater change in rock and roll since 1980 than the fact that women are now commonplace in rock.

(2) It gives central mythic significance to the Ramones, which is only right and proper since the Ramones are at the center of the modern history of the Western world. Take that, Beatlemaniacs. And oh yes the fact that it was written in the year the Ramones broke up makes it even sweeter.

(3) The song plays very cleverly with the false distinction between pop and art, parodying the posing of underground rock clubs (come downtown/put on your best frown) while admitting the dirty little secret at the heart of most of the ridiculously named "alternative" music of the 1990s: everybody wants to be a rock and roll star. They all want to be wildly popular with adoring fans. They just don't want to be bland while doing it. But the idea that artistic merit is inevitably in inverse proportion to popularity is sophomoric and should be grown out of by any serious artist in a form as innately popular as rock. Otherwise, in the unlikely event that they do hit the jackpot, they will end up as twisted in knots and suicidal as Kurt Cobain (who, like S-K, came from the Great Northwest, so you can toss out your purely environmental theories of depression).

(4) For at least five years, Sleater-Kinney were the queens of rock and roll, hands down, no dispute. But please don't ask me to choose between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker for the title of Absolute Queen. Can't they just rule together?

(5) For thousands of girls who, unlike S-K and Patti Smith, couldn't make the gender leap, these three women were their Joey Ramones, the same way that the Beatles were Joey's, and Chuck Berry was the Beatles', and so on and so on, probably going back to King David and his mad lyrework way back in the day.

(6) It's what I thought. It's rock and roll. uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah :)

You know, if I could somehow tie this track into the last three decades of hiphop, it would be at the heart of this project. Well, at least I can put it at the center.