You Can't Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms, But . . .

671. 10,000 MANIACS, "What's the Matter Here?"
Produced by Peter Asher; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 69388 1988 Billboard # 80

672. SUZANNE VEGA, "Luka"
Produced by Ronald K. Fierstein; written by Suzanne Vega
A & M 2937 1987 Billboard # 3

Codes vs. referents leading to a confused listening experience. Blame it on postmodernism, pop production, or (everybody's favorite target for projection) Ronald Reagan, as you wish.

If you pay any attention to lyrics, it's obvious what these two songs are about: child abuse.
So how did they get so high on the pop charts? Well, they're hummable, and even danceable, which are not necessarily qualities I look for in songs designed to raise awareness of previously ignored social problems. In both cases, I can remember djs doing these flip leadins and tags for these songs when playing them on the radio. One announcer I had formerly liked ever referred to the 10,000 Maniacs track as "Whatsamattayou?" in a jokey Italian dialect that I had thought had gone out with Pat Cooper records.

Some of the fault lies with the performers too, particularly the Maniacs. Natalie Merchant sounds as if she's having too much fun on this track. Maybe she is, maybe she enjoys telling off her stuckup albeit abusive neighbor, but that's not really the point now, is it? Then there's that jokey postmodern sleeve for the 45, which just signals ironic distance.

Don't get me wrong: I love not taking serious things too seriously. I'm part of the generation that took the overly precious hippie slogan "You Can't Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms" and added the words "But You Can Sure as Hell Teach It a Lesson" for our very own heartwarming bumper sticker. So no, I don't think you always have to be glum when singing about serious things. However, I do think that, no matter what kind of attitude s/he cops, a serious artist should never let her/his work help people forget things to which they should be paying attention. Falldown funny or painfully morose, art is always about getting you to see something you never saw before. It should never give you an easy out to avoid pain and discomfort.

That's ultimately why Vega's song is the more artistically successful of the two, although I don't think I'll ever understand why it charted this high. The Maniacs' track is about their rage and their superior insight, and I feel as if the kid gets forgotten in the mix. Vega's song, however, attempts to reproduce the kid's voice, and the avoidance here is true to the situation. Both the song and Vega's performance ask you to go beyond the surface and figure out the things that aren't explicitly said. I still think this is a tragic case of a folk singer adding too many instruments in the studio to what should always have been a bare acoustic song, but still it's a noble attempt. It gets you to ask questions, which is one of the many reasons we have art.

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.

. . . And Lead Me through This World of Self

374. PINK, "Just Like a Pill"
Produced and written by Dallas Austin & Pink
BMG International 95965 2002 Billboard #: 8

375. ROLLING STONES, "One Hit (to the Body)"
Produced by "The Glimmer Twins"; written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, & Ron Wood
Rolling Stones 05906 1986 Billboard # 28

376. RIHANNA, "Rehab"
Produced by Evan Rogers & Carl Sturken; written by S. Carter, S. Smith, & S. Taylor
2007 Did not make pop charts

377. AMY WINEHOUSE, "Rehab"
Produced by Mark Ronson; written by Amy Winehouse
Universal 1717823 2007 Billboard # 9

378. WARREN ZEVON, "Detox Mansion"
Produced by Niko Bolas, Richard Wachtel, and Warren Zevon; written by Jorge Calderon & Warren Zevon
1987 Did not make pop charts

379. WARREN ZEVON, "Splendid Isolation"
Produced by Duncan Aldrich, Andrew Slater, and Warren Zevon; written by Warren Zevon
1989 Did not make pop charts

In the early twentieth century, they called it "drying out." By the end of the century, it had somehow become "rehab." That's short for "rehabilitation," of course--which is funny in a sick sort of way, because by the time they started calling this "rehabilitation," most of the programs that had formerly sponsored social "rehabilitation" in wayward Americans had declined almost to the point of obsolescence. We don't "rehabilitate" prisoners anymore, for example--we just incarcerate them for a maximum/minimum sentence. All prisoners are considered irrevocably unredeemable, but somehow substance-abusing celebrities always deserve yet another chance.

In practice, the best word for what happens to celebrities at Betty Ford or Promises may be "detox": 30 days (or 70, if you're Amy Winehouse) to get your chosen poison out of your bloodstream. Then you're back to Malibu or Tribeca or wherever. There's supposed to be a behavior modification component involved, a commitment to staying away from the sorts of friends and activities that lead to bad decisions, but anyone who even casually follows the tabloids knows how well that usually works out.

The truth is that the last half of the twentieth century turned the Western world into a society of addicts. It may not have been that more addictive substances were available than ever before (do you have any idea how much alcohol the average American consumed during the 1830s?), but rather that the therapeutic language of addiction seeped into our wider culture. Even people who had never been in therapy or counseling started talking like psychiatrists or social workers. As usually happens when any specialized discourse comes into general usage, the language of addiction studies became omnipresent. Addiction became a common explanation for all sorts of personal failings, not to mention an inevitable metaphor.

Pink, the Rolling Stones, and Rihanna, to choose just three instances, all see love and desire as addiction: Pink hooked after a first use like a proverbial young person experimenting with crack (yes, I know crack doesn't come in pills, but the metaphor still fits); the Stones deep into a bad habit, probably heroin, that is punishing them physically and yet requiring greater and greater doses for even the most rudimentary of highs (and at least one of the Stones obviously knows something about that); and Rihanna, understanding the same cycle of bliss and masochism that the Stones sing about but seeking treatment to "wean myself off of you." Writers use metaphors to make the unfamiliar familiar, and it is striking that all three of these songs assume that the listener understands drug addiction but may not really understand love or desire, at least not in the sense that the singer does. Cab Calloway may have fetishized marijuana in "Reefer Man" and Cole Porter may have slyly alluded to cocaine in the original lyric of "I Get a Kick out of You," but neither assumed the familiarity with controlled substances that these songwriters assume. The pop world really has changed since the 1960s.

For Amy Winehouse, of course, rehab is not a metaphor but a pending social engagement. Her single broke globally in early 2007--the Year of Rehab, if you will--and much of the rest of the year felt like a process of waiting for the other shoe to drop. No, as a matter of fact, your daddy doesn't say you're fine. Now will you go? As Bonnie Raitt discovered for herself shortly before Winehouse's birth, listening to blues records isn't necessarily the best way of kicking booze and drugs. You can do group therapy, counseling, etc., and come back writing and performing maybe better than you ever did before.

Even more than Raitt, though, the person Winehouse should really seek advice from is unfortunately dead, but much of his wisdom about life, love, and addiction is there in his songs. Warren Zevon was a great many things to the history of rock and roll--wit, satirist, legendary partyer, brilliant lyricist, underappreciated pianist--but maybe more than any of those, he was the greatest recovering alcoholic that American songwriting has ever seen. That is to say, the songs he wrote after his recovery in the late 1980s may be even better than the more widely circulated songs on his three great albums from the 1970s. I'll have much more to say about Zevon and his songwriting in later entries, but for the purposes of this one, let me focus on his two greatest songs about his alcoholism, one obviously so, the other not so much.

In the 80s, Zevon very publicly entered Betty Ford, and everyone knew that his next album would have some commentary on it. Those of us who considered ourselves his fans were all hoping that recovery wouldn't turn him into a weepy wuss the way it had with so many other rockers--and it didn't. "Detox Mansion" is every bit the Betty Ford satire we wanted it to be, naming names and giving out the daily schedule, making recovering celebrities an object of spectacle if not outright ridicule. And it rocks.

I've often thought, though, that "Splendid Isolation" never got the attention it deserved, possibly because the track was on Transverse City, an album that only aficionados got into. The word "addiction" is never used once in the song, but the ideas and scenes in this lyric could be right out of a celeb-studded AA meeting. The alienation and lack of connection Zevon details here are exactly the sort of self-pitying anomie that addicts and celebrities often have in common. Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that you don't need to be a millionaire to isolate yourself like Elvis, all you need is a sixpack, but certainly the disconnected life of a celebrity, without the daily functions that keep so many of the rest of us grounded, makes it easier to give in to tendencies they might have anyway. Hence Winehouse, Richards, Raitt et al.

I wish anyone struggling with addiction well, whether they're widely known or otherwise obscure. I pray that, in the end, they may all find themselves as redeemed and rehabilitated as my favorite pop trickster, St. Warren.