On Hold at the Suicide Hotline

944. CARS, "You're All I've Got Tonight"
Produced by Roy Thomas Baker; written by Ric Ocasek
Did not make pop charts 1978
Did not make pop charts

The one time I ever had an extended conversation with Greil Marcus, after a while the talk turned to his friend Dave Marsh and my semi-obsession with The Heart of Rock and Soul. I talked about how the book gave me a window onto a generational experience that I had never quite comprehended before on a visceral level, but I also mentioned that it was weird for me how there were bands that Marsh discounted that held more significance for those, like myself, of a slightly younger generation. "Like what?" he asked. "Like The Cars," I instinctively blurted out.

I think every generation has bands like this, but for those Americans around my age, the Cars just captured something that was in the air. You could love True Punk in the 1970s and also love the sly subversion that the Cars slipped into the mainstream without most people realizing it. This song may be one of the purest statements of male masochism that has ever made it into regular rotation on classic rock stations. It helped usher in the whole great era of Pop Loserdom that I've referred in earlier postings and will treat at greater length later, but let's just say for now that this song has a kind of John the Baptist relationship to the later post-punk ironic reinvention of masculinity.

And only Ric Ocasek could sing this song. Whenever anyone suggests to me that the Cars were conformist treacle, I remind them to listen to Ocasek's voice. It is innately alienated, no matter what he may actually feel about the words that he is singing. Much like Pee Wee Herman, Ocasek could be singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and it would be conjuring up all kinds of deviant failure.

PS: If you can find a copy of the original demo for this song [featured on Mass Ave, the Boston entry in the old Rhino DIY series], grab it. It was enormously successful on local Boston radio stations before the band ever got a contract, and it is much, much rawer.

Yeah sure I can dupe you a copy . . .

Awareness Is Not the Same Thing as Attention (Just Ask William James)

138. JAMES & BOBBY PURIFY, "Shake a Tail Feather"
Produced by Papa Don; written by Otha Hayes, Verlie Rice, & Andre Williams
Bell 669 1967 Billboard: # 25

139. QUEEN, "Fat Bottomed Girls"
Produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen; written by Brian May
Elektra 45541 1978 Billboard: # 24

140. SIR MIX-A-LOT, "Baby Got Back"
Produced by Rick Rubin; written by Sir Mix-a-Lot
Def American 18947 1992 Billboard: # 1

141. SISQO, "Thong Song"
Produced by Kevin Liles & Sisqo; written by Mark Anderson, Desmond Child, Tim Kelly,Joseph Lango, Bob Robinson, and Robi Rosa
Def Jam 562599 2000 Billboard: # 3

142. MYSTIKAL, "Shake Ya Ass"
Produced by Charles Temple; written by Chad Hugo, Michael Tyler, Pharrell Williams
Jive 42721 2000 Billboard: # 13

A third of a century of B.A. in pop. No, not Bad Attitude. Butt Awareness. I first encountered the term in the early 1990s, although obviously the phenomenon to which it refers predates that era by quite a few years. Still, the early 1990s do seem in retrospect like some sort of crossover moment for popular representations of the posterior--a moment of epistemological emergence, if you will.

Like the other singles listed here, James & Bobby Purify's "Shake a Tail Feather" easily made the Top 40, chiefly on its strength as a dance tune.

The song itself is undistinguished and yet surprisingly durable, with multiple renditions stretching from the Five Du-Tones' original 1963 version to the Cheetah Girls' 2006 cover for the soundtrack of Disney's Chicken Little. The Purifys' version stands out, though, chiefly because of Papa Don's production. It's also worth pointing out, in light of the records considered below, that the reference to the butt here is more metaphorical than strictly anatomical. The singers seem quite happy to just dance in the club with the woman to whom they sing and don't necessarily require anything more from her.

Eleven years after the Purifys' tribute to dance club display, Queen received numerous protests from feminists for their own song's focus on that specific part of the female anatomy. Obviously, the picture sleeve for their double-sided single didn't help, but I've always thought that this song got a bit of a bad rap. It's nowhere near as sexist as the Stones' "Some Girls," which received protests around the same time, and it does provide a bit of a useful corrective about body image. This is a song that exhorts men to broaden their horizons and accept women of all body types. Ain't no beauty queens in this locality, the lyric goes, and it implies that that's a good thing, that widely circulated images of female beauty can desensitize consuming men to the charms of real-life women. If you take the song seriously (which I know may be a patently ridiculous thing to do). it is less about the culturewide objectification of women than about how heterosexual men do and don't visually appreciate the women that they know. Obviously, a man should not assess a woman wholly by her looks, but visual attraction is still an undeniable component of sexuality.

I suspect that this particular issue is more of a heterosexual (or if you insist heterosexist) phenomenon. This song is credited to Queen's lead guitarist Brian May, while its flipside, "Bicycle Race," is credited to the band's frontman Freddie Mercury. Nevertheless, Mercury delivers May's lyric with conviction, striking a blow for broadly conceived definitions of physical beauty everywhere.

Some of the protest against Queen may have been racially tinged as well. Nine years later when Spike Lee made School Daze, his musical about a historically black college, he received some negative comment for featuring a big dance number baldly titled "Da Butt," but these comments were mostly of the "shande for the goyim" variety: how could you let the ofays see something like that? what will they think?

By the time Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" came along in 1992, however, Butt Awareness had become an open sign of racial distinctiveness if not downright pride for some African Americans. While it may be arguable whether Queen's single is a self-conscious critique of widely circulated images of female attractiveness, there is no doubt that Sir Mix-a-Lot has his preferred mass culture targets lined up in a row here: Cosmo (too thin), Playboy (too fake), rock videos (too lifeless). The shoutout to Florence Griffith Joyner seems to be a stab at racial bragging, and I've always read the "red beans and rice" line as an attempt by a Seattle-based African American male to self-consciously include his Caribbean sisters in this oddly anatomical pride parade.

In the end, there is a world of difference between "Baby Got Back" and Mix's 1994 mammary-themed follow-up single "Put 'Em on the Glass." The former song is about appreciating the variety of female beauty, while the latter is simply about a lazily undifferentiated interest in, as Mix grunts repeatedly at one point, "lungs." Nevertheless, it was this latter song that pointed the way to the future, to singles that were more graphic and anatomical than the Purifys' old dance stylings but less personalized than Queen's and Sir Mix-a-Lot's tributes. Viewed side by side, "Thong Song" and "Shake Ya Ass," both released in 2000, give us the twentyfirst century hiphop version of a butt-based madonna/whore complex. Sisqo, liberated from Dru Hill, is now apparently worshipping fulltime in the Temple of the Butt. He chants and keens his adoration but dares not approach his sacred vision--or presumably notice that there is a human being attached to it.

As for Mystikal, don't be fooled by his old school, Cab-Calloway-meets-James-Brown vibe. This song features a scenario that will become all too familiar in 21st century dance and hiphop tracks, a scene on which I've already commented in my brief treatment of crunk. In this song, the singer tells the women to line up and move exactly as he tells them to. As in later "club" singles, the distinction between dance clubs and strip clubs seems blurred, and Mystikal's alternation of direct physical orders and promised material rewards make the epithet "ho" seem all too literal here. The line between appreciation and objectification is crossed in these two songs, more obviously in Mystikal's, more subtly in Sisqo's. The women in question are just body parts here, and the men singing about them don't seem to have even a perfunctory interest in the souls that animate them.

So, over four decades since the Five Du-Tones' original single, we have ended up here: with a variety of culturally provided images against which young men can physically measure the women that they actually know. I don't think that's progress, but it definitely qualifies as some kind of cultural evolution. (Some kind.)

Call me a nut, but I would really like to hearken back to one word in Brian May's easily dismissed lyric for "Fat Bottomed Girls": locality. Locality, specificity, individuality, soul--that's the core of beauty. That's what animates it, physically, romantically, or even purely sexually. And the more heterosexual men measure the varied real women that they know against the stylized icons that pop provides, the more they lose their grasp on their intoxicating souls.

No Interpretation Required

411. BUZZCOCKS, "Orgasm Addict"
Produced by Martin Rushent; written by Howard Devoto & Pete Shelley
1978 Did not make pop charts

Back in the dominant era of album rock, one of my friends always maintained that, if you didn't know what was going on in an AOR song, it was about either heroin or masturbation. This song was about the latter, but you didn't need the printed lyrics to know that, nor did you need to spend much time interpreting what you heard. And that's reason # 5,237 why punk was brilliant, necessary, and wicked cool.

While America Slept

501. RAMONES, "I Wanna Be Sedated"
Produced by Tommy Erdelyi & Ed Stasium; written by the Ramones
1978 Did not make pop charts

502. SONIC YOUTH, "Teenage Riot"
Produced by Nick Sansano; written by Sonic Youth
1987 Did not make pop charts

Two songs about rock bands, a bracket of narcolepsy to cover a decade.

When the Ramones recorded "I Wanna Be Sedated," it was a narrowly biographical work, just a song about a desperate urge to block out the bombardment of sensation that attended a nonstop tour, one that the band sometimes seemed to be on for its entire existence.

Very quickly, though, the song became an anthem, maybe one of the most widely recognized rock songs ever that never made the Billboard Hot 100. That in itself says something. The song didn't hit suddenly. It spread like a virus. Once exposed ,75% of the youth who heard it could never get it out of their heads. Yes, that was what it felt like, even if you weren't in a rock band: jesus christ it's just too much make it stop just give me my head back from all this overstimulation sure I'll try ritalin whatever.

Fast forward nine years to Sonic Youth, everybody's new favorite downtown New York band, who sometimes played Ramones covers for their encores at Maxwell's, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s. (Because of Manhattan's draconian cabaret laws, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s was in Hoboken, New Jersey.) Despite their affinity, Sonic Youth was in some ways the Ramones' mirror image. The Ramones always wanted to be widely popular but ended up serving a sizable cult. Sonic Youth always wanted to be a cult band and tried to hide their true love of pop under an overcompensating level of postmodern winking. They knew enough Madonna to cover her in the late 80s but hid it under the moniker of Ciccone Youth; they covered the Carpenters's best song, but they did it for a pro-choice benefit album.

The most important difference, though, is one of time: in "I Wanna Be Sedated," Joey Ramone wanted to keep sleeping; in "Teenage Riot," Thurston Moore wants to wake up. And while the Ramones aren't singing about anything more than a rock and roll tour, Sonic Youth is purposefully singing about something much larger. As critics realized from the second Daydream Nation (the album on which the song appears) was released twenty years ago, this is an indictment of young apathy in the Reagan era, and it's pretty scathing if surprisingly indirect.

As a member of the generation under indictment here, I could point to all sorts of things that we successfully resisted in those years--apartheid, US involvement in Central America, etc.--but the very fact that I'm emphasizing resistance rather than direct political confrontation might be enough to constitute yet another charge against semi-conscious ol' us. But your honor, you can't indict an entire generation on the basis of just two rock and roll songs. Look at all that these other, worthy, alternative teens accomplished in that decade, the ones who didn't fritter away their time going to rock clubs. Basta. We slept, in part because we were tired of the 60s, which seemed to drag on endlessly into the 70s, and of hippies and their phony Beatlemania and their endless to-do lists because the planet was never perfect enough for them.

Eventually, we did wake up, but we should have set the alarm earlier. We had too much to do that day.

Walking in Central Park, Singing after Dark

330. ROLLING STONES, "Miss You"
Produced and written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards (aka "The Glimmer Twins")
Rolling Stones 19307 1978 Billboard # 1

This is a ghost story, pure and simple, and the spirit in question is a love that's going or gone, quite possibly because of the singer's own actions. If you want to be narrowly biographical about it, it may be about the slow dissipation of Mick's marriage to Bianca, which would still technically last two more years after the single was released. If you want to wax musicological, it may be about the slide from discotheques to disco, fed by a beat that Billy Preston allegedly passed on to Charlie Watts during the Stones' dates at El Mocambo in 1977; about how, even if you frequent 54, you can still wish you were going to a go-go the way you used to back when. But personally I've always thought that this is a song about New York, as so much of Some Girls is about that city in the odd cultural twilight of the 1970s. When Mick and Keith chose it as one of the two songs they sang at the Concert for New York two months after 9/11, I was even more convinced. This is a song about remembering what used to be, what should be, but secretly wanting to revel in the dirty truth of what is. And if that doesn't describe New York City in the late 1970s, then I don't know what does.