Never Trust a Hustler

520. STEPHEN STILLS, "Love The One You're With"
Produced by Bill Halverson & Stephen Stills; written by Stephen Stills
Atlantic 2778 1970 Billboard: # 14

521. RYAN ADAMS, "New York, New York"
Produced by Ethan Johns; written by Ryan Adams
Mercury 177242 2002 Did not make pop charts

You're probably tired of hearing me say this by now, but so often it's the music--and, more than anything, the arrangement--that tells the real story of a single. Lyrics are just text, but music is subtext.

Take these two songs. Lyrically, they're very distinct. Both sum up eras: California in the Age of Free Love; NYC just before 9/11. Stills' song, along with Jackson Browne's collaboration with Glenn Frey on "Take It Easy" the following year, is the ultimate expression of the (male) ethos of free love. Supposedly, Stills heard Billy Preston utter the phrase at a party and took it from there. Adams, by contrast, is singing about his struggling days as a musician in Alphabet City during the 1990s. Prominently featured on his first album with a major label, this song is very much his self-conscious farewell to his starving artist days. The fact that the title character of the song gathered a great deal of symbolic resonance between the time Adams recorded it and when it was released, however, made audiences hear it in a very different way.

The thing is, though, for all their lyrical differences, musically, these two tracks are amazingly similar. Yes, Stills has more star power (Crosby, Nash, Rita Coolidge, and Mama Cass on backing vocals, maybe Booker T on organ--on his side, Adams may have had Adam Duritz on backing vocals). Yes, there are slight instrumental differences (the reeds at the end of Adams' track, the amazing turn by Stills on steel drums on his).

But listen. Basically--and I am using that word almost in its literal sense here--both tracks are the same rhythm section and organ layered on top of that same acoustic guitar with the same strumming pattern.

Why? Because it's the same song: a hustler justifies his abandonment of one object of desire for another. In one case, it's a woman; in the other, it's a cultural center. In both cases, these singer-songwriters are making sure the music moves fast enough that the listener won't catch up with their lapses in logic. Musically and personally, they feel, it's simply time to move on.

Was Adams thinking of Stills' song when he recorded his? Maybe. He probably knows the song at least. All I know is, whenever I hear that chord progression played in that specific strumming pattern, I think of the one time that Stills' song hit me hardest: on a subway platform in Boston with my college roommate as he waited for a train to take him to the airport to pick up his hometown girlfriend whom he hadn't yet told about his college girlfriend. We had been talking, but when he realized the exact song that the busker was playing, he broke out in embarrassed laughter. Neither of us said a word about it, but both of us knew that he had been busted: the gods had decided to throw down a song cue.

So yeah, songs like those, I don't care about the words. Those chords in that strumming pattern? For me, that is the exact accompaniment of erotic rationalization.

One Way to Avoid a Club Fight

598. N.O.R.E. "Nothin'"
Produced by the Neptunes; written by Chad Hugo, Victor Santiago, Jr., & Pharrell Williams
Universal 582914 2002 Billboard: # 10

My best friend insists that "humor can often defuse a tense situation." This worked once for him, when he was at a camp as a kid, and he's used it ever since. In my experience, though, cracking wise in the wrong situation can often get your head cracked open. Usually, when the shields go up, I find it's best to keep my mouth shut.

Then there's N.O.R.E., aka Noreaga aka Victor Santiago Jr., who raps his way out of a club fight on this track, the way only the best of the best can do. On the refrains, Fat Joe sounds as if he is ready to do some very serious damage, but our hero just keeps plowing through. The longer you listen, the more you think, maybe he will talk this guy down. These rhymes aren't threatening or even menacing. They're just . . . distracting, which may be all he needs to slip away without catching it.

He uses everything he's got here, including both sides of his racial heritage. Much was made of the fact that N's next album, N.O.R.E. y la Familia...Ya Tú Sabe, explicitly drew on reggaeton, but here the influences are mixing it up as much he and Fat Joe aren't.His maternal African American tradition of words is laid here on top of a rhythm track (courtesy of the 'Tunes, of course) that owes more to the Puerto Rican music of his father. It's not a fully integrated musical genre, or even a peace treaty between the two cultures. Musically and thematically, it's just a stab at anything that will work.

I LIke You So Much More When You're Being Bitchy

979. ELTON JOHN, "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" Produced by Patrick Leonard; written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Polygram International 588895 2002 Did not make pop charts

Oh, I have a confession to make. I've never really liked Elton John much. (My sister will kill me.) As you can probably guess by this point, it's not that I don't like sentimentality. I just don't like his kind of sentimentality--or Bernie Taupin's kind of sentimentality--it's so confusing. I'll get to that soon. I don't know. Maybe it's a Brit thing.

In any case, I love this song, in no small measure because it sounds at first blush like a repudiation of everything John and Taupin had done for over thirty years. This leads us into the hall of mirrors, the question of who means what precisely. The video for this song is a striking continuous take of a surprisingly bearable Justin Timberlake as a young Elton wandering backstage at an early 70s arena show where virtually anything a young man could want is offered somewhere, in one of the rooms off that seemingly endless corridor. In this case, song and image blend beautifully, and that makes one think that this song communicates Elton's actual feelings about his past and present.

But then you remember that it's Taupin not John who writes the lyrics. John just writes those chords around the pre-existing words, the same chords that he has freely admitted in interviews he has stolen outright from Anglican Church hymns. These are Taupin's words, but are they words he has chosen to write about John's life?

The key to surviving this song is the bridge, as textbook an example of what a bridge is supposed to do as Tin Pan Alley ever produced. The singer and the lyricist are both running down, and the song is a defense against the exhaustion of age. What they both mean is that this train doesn't want to stop. Whether it will . . . well, that's anybody's guess.

. . . 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.

How Dirty Vibes Get Clean

189. LIL JON & THE EAST SIDE BOYZ ft/YING YANG TWINS, "Get Low"
Produced by Emperor Search, Bryan Leach, Lil Jon, Rob McDowell; written by D. Holmes, E. Jackson, S. Norris, & Jonathan Smith
TVT 2394 2002 Billboard #: 2

190. USHER, "Yeah!"
Produced by Usher Raymond; written by Chris Bridges, Sean Garrett, LaMarquis Mark Jefferson, Rob McDowell, James Phillips, Jonathan Smith, & Patrick J. Que Smith
Arista 59149 2004 Billboard: # 1

The life cycle of a pop style in just two singles.


Crunk, like gangsta before it, can present a problem for some listeners. In the best crunk singles, the vibe is slammin, but the lyrics can give you pause. Lil Jon's "Get Low" is an obvious example of this: it has a great dance groove that makes you want to get out on the floor, but its lyrics (about a trip to a strip club) can make you want to take a shower after listening. Even the trembling vocals of the East Side Boyz on some of the verses can make you feel a little shaky.

Fast forward two years, and here's Lil Jon again, this time fronting for Usher. You know: sweet, cleancut, sexy but not sleazy Usher. The poor boy's being cornered by a girl in a club. He's so cute that you've got to believe that this happens to him all the time. But this girl is something special, her power is almost hypnotic, and soon enough he's caught up in a 21st century Billie Jean scenario. None of it is his fault, you see?

The two songs, of course, have essentially the same groove, and this is how you make dirty music clean: Ludacris and Lil Jon serve as Usher's dirtyminded wingmen; Usher just plays it smooth and "Aw shucks"es his way through the song. In "Get Low," Lil Jon and his boys talk it up, but let's be serious: they're almost certainly going home alone. In this song, Usher presents himself as more acted upon than acting, but he is probably not going home alone. The earlier single is filthier and more explicit, but this song more strongly implies the possibility of actual sex, sex that the singer will probably explain away tomorrow as something that "just happened."

And then there's the whole question of where the two songs are set. "Get Low" seems to be set in a strip club, but by the end of the song there's a shoutout to all the girls on the dance floor, suggesting that the performer now thinks he's in a dance club. (The song in fact did lead to a popular line dance that pretty much corresponds to the instructions in the chorus.) "Yeah" seems to be set in a dance club, but the featured performers' interpolated guest flows sound no different than what we heard in the earlier single.

So which is worse: frankly crass objectification of women, or the smooth rationalization that explains it away? You know what? I'm not entirely sure that that's the real question. I think the real question is why everyone seems to be confusing dance clubs with strip clubs in the first place.