Can We Give the Drummer Some?

243. GO-GO'S, "We Got The Beat"
Produced by ; written by
IRS 9903 1982 Billboard: # 2

Of all the New Wave bands that get no respect from doctrinaire punkists, none are more unfairly vilified than the Go-Gos. When they proclaimed on a comeback single (that I'll post on eventually) "Punk rock isn't dead!" many casual listeners must have wondered what they were talking about.

But the Go-Gos did form on the Sunset Strip in the late 70s as a punk band, at a time when the definition of what punk meant was a lot more fluid than it would be after Classic Punk was over and therefore writ canonical. What the Go-Gos became and succeeded as, of course, was a retro pop band--but then again that was what Joey Ramone always wanted his band to be and could never quite pull off, especially with DeeDee in the mix.

With the Go-Gos, as with the Rolling Stones and so many other groups, the band is a lot more generic if you focus on the lead singer and (here I go again) the lyrics. Listen to the instrumentalists. In this case, listen especially to the drummer: Gina Schock. Like most drummers who aren't vocalists, I'm not sure she ever got the respect she deserves.

Listen to the drums on this song, and you can hear the roots in punk--which is to say, the roots in surf music, which is the musical DNA of all American punk, especially the rhythm section. In this case, given the nominal theme of the song, the beat tries hard to be as generic as possible. If you heard it in a club or at a party in someone's basement, "The Beat" is almost too easy to find. It's got a backbeat you can't lose it, etc.

But hark ye now the little lower layer. Put this on headphones, earbuds if you must, and crank it up. Play with your equalizer if you're oldschool enough to know how to do that. Listen to it closely and you'll hear it. That simple beat has microbeats inbetween. The drum stutters, and not in a predictable pattern. What sounds generic at first listen is actually subliminally idiosyncratic and quirky.

This single doesn't succeed because it's blatantly generic; it excels because it's covertly aberrant. And you know how I feel about boring from within.

How Real Can You Get?

233. LEAH ANDREONE, 'It's Alright, It's OK'
Produced by Rick Neigher; written by Leah Andreone & Rick Neigher
RCA 64662 1997 Billboard: # 57

I've loved this song since the first time I heard it, but there's no way I'd ever call it "authentic."

This is a singer-songwriter thing. The master narrative goes something like this: Bob Dylan changed American music forever by taking folk music and making it personal. After him, coffeehouses sprung up all over Europe and North America, but suddenly singers were no longer required to sing musty old Scottish songs. They could sing about the material of their own lives. And they did it alone, just them and a guitar or a piano on a stage. It was personal and it was non-industrial, just an artist talking to a selective audience.

There are a lot of problems with that reductive narrative, more than I can cover in a single post, but let me begin with just two words: Joni Mitchell. For me, Joni Mitchell was the greatest of the singer-songwriters, maybe not as great a songwriter overall as Dylan, but certainly the greatest at writing confessional songs that were both personal and relatable. Again and again, she wrote songs that you can "get" on first hearing, but you can still find new layers in them every time you listen.

But you know what? Mitchell's greatest album, Blue, is impossible without technology. I really felt this with a vengeance a few years back when Ted Turner did one of his tributes to modern songwriters and they featured Mitchell. For nearly all her great songs, those paying tribute couldn't really do justice to them with just one vocalist. All those gorgeous harmonies she laid down? Multitracking. Even when she did everything on an album, it didn't recreate a spontaneous, intimate performance, anymore than Beach Boys' Party! did. Each of Mitchell's albums was a labor of construction, every bit as much as one of her paintings, most of which show a lot more craft than your average Jackson Pollock.

A quarter of a century later, we have Andreone, definitely positioned by her label to be an inheritor of the Mitchell-derived tradition. Writing confessionally? Check. On the first Lilith Fair tour? Check. Huge in France? Check. But, on the other side of the ledger, is she a sellout? She doesn't play all the instruments! She cowrites the song with her producer! She's a fraud!!

I have a simple solution: this isn't folk, or even confession, and it's certainly not truth. It's Pop, and rather accomplished Pop at that. This is a good song about an almost total mental breakdown, but it's too polished to have been written by someone who had ever suffered one. I would bet, though, that she has been around someone who has, because several of the details recorded here seem spot-on. Moreover, no matter what the purists might claim, this song wouldn't have been as good on solo acoustic guitar, because you need the rhythm section and especially the organ to move you through it. And are white confessional folk singers from L.A. allowed to wail like that, as if giving into despair inevitably leads to facing Mecca?

One of the great shames about the reverse snobbism of so much 1990s music culture was that it tried to sell smart Pop as something that it wasn't. This song isn't Truth, but it does have a fair amount of soul. And it's not "upbeat," no matter what the allmusicguide might claim.

Sprechen Sie Popp?

199. NENA, "99 Luftballons"
Produced by ; written by
Epic 04108 1983 Billboard # 2

200. FALCO, "Rock Me Amadeus"
Produced by ; written by
A & M 2821 1986 Billboard # 1

Maybe it was MTV (which took American pop stars a bit by surprise), maybe it was the decadent phase of the Cold War, but the 1980s was probably the peak of Europop in the United States. In widely circulated English versions, one of these singles made the top of the charts, the other almost did, but both songs also got a fair amount of stateside airplay in their original versions. Originally, both songs were cut, not in German, but in a breathlessly wonderful Deutschlish patois that spat American culture back across the Atlantic in that sweet love-hate manner that elder European nations tend to adopt when regarding their bratty younger sibling.

They may have hated our politics back then (heck, many of us hated "our" politics back then), but they loved our music. In the early 1980s, just as white Englishmen were much less self-conscious about singing soul than their American counterparts, white Germans were much less self-conscious about attempting rap. As all these words spewed out of their mouths, Nena and Falco both charmed their Anglophone listeners in part because they seemed to have no idea how precariously they teetered on the brink of parody. In both cases, I think speaking in German helped: everything sounds just a little bit more hardedged when you're bringing those blended consonants up from the back of the throat.

Lamest. Stalker. Ever.

867. TOMMY TUTONE, "867-5309/Jenny"
Produced by Chuck Plotkin; written by Alex Call and Jim Keller
Columbia 02646 1982 Billboard # 4

Forget the video: does anyone really think we need to call out the cops on this guy? For God's sake, George Michael sounds creepier in "Father Figure." And speaking of men's rooms, I've always wondered if there really is someone named Jenny at that number or whether it's just a practical joke that a bunch of drunk guys are playing on their [male] roommate. (It happens more than you'd think, people.)

It's legitimate to ask whether this song would be as fondly remembered by some if it had been produced in any other era than the early 1980s. It stands halfway between the sad case of the paranoid boyfriend in the Rays' "Silhouettes (on the Shade)" and the non-stop male gaze of our own era. Less New Wave than opportunistic ex-singer-songwriter, this is what happens when someone pours his heart out and finds he's a couple of gallons short. You want to believe this song is ironic, but I'm not so sure. . . .

She Stood Just Like Bill Wyman

499. SMITHEREENS, "Behind the Wall of Sleep"
Produced by Don Dixon; written by Pat DiNizio
1986 Did not make pop charts

When I first heard this single I remember thinking: a boy is singing about a girl in the band. Hmmm. That's a milestone for pop, especially from willful retrotasters like the Smithereens. Okay, he's stalking her--we didn't say "stalk" so much back then, "getting creepy" worked well enough--but still it's not just the girl in the audience crushing on the guy. That's got to count for something.

At the time, I actually had to look up (pre-internet, I'll have you know) who Jeanie Shrimpton was, and when I showed her picture to a few friends they all agreed that he had to be singing about Michael Steele, formerly of the Runaways, then of the Bangles.


Well, we saw a resemblance, especially since they both had red hair.

In any case, it's nice to live now in an age where a female bassist is neither unknown nor exotic. Although I still hope the bassists are getting respect. It shouldn't always be the frontwoman who pulls in the fans.

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.

Well I'm Not Sure I'd Stay but . . .

942. CHER, "If I Could Turn Back Time"
Produced and written by Diane Warren
Geffen 22886 1989 Billboard: # 3

The ultimate comeback number--by no means the best, but absolutely the ultimate. In fact, while this song is almost nonsensical as a plea to a former lover, it makes perfect sense as a plea from an artist to the audience that she foolishly abandoned. Forgive me the marriages, forgive me the plastic surgery, I can't be what I used to but let's pretend that I am. The song comes nowhere near even wonderful 70s cheese like "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves," the arrangement is that unimaginatively tight drone that characterized so much Top 10 80s pop, she can't hit the notes she used to, it all goes on too long . . . but you know what? Somehow, I forgive her.

He's a Little Bit Folkie, She's a Little Bit HipHopSoul

720. EAGLE-EYE CHERRY, "Save Tonight"
Produced by Klas Ahlund, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Kent Gillstrom, & Adam Kviman; written by Eagle Eye Cherry
Work 41273 1999 Billboard: # 5

721. NENEH CHERRY,"Buffalo Stance"
Produced by Booga Bear; written by Booga Bear, Neneh Cherry, Jamie J. Morgan, Phillip Ramacon
Virgin 99231 1989 Billboard: # 3

For my money, late twentieth-century pop music's best brother-sister act. Okay, they're technically half-siblings,but does it really matter? They've got Donny and Marie beat by a Stockholm mile. Don C must be so proud.

If Philo Vance Organized a Clipfile of NME Reviews (A Preface in Process)

This blog is an emerging "answer song" written in response to Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. I hope that it will be completed at some point in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Marsh's original book. As many critics noted back in 1989, Marsh's book can seem willfully wrongheaded at points, but over the last twenty years it has more frequently struck me as under-appreciated, misunderstood, and thoroughly wonderful, especially in those places where I find my own taste most at odds with the author's. You can find a virtual version of the book by clicking on the title for this particular post, but I would suggest you go out and buy your own physical copy right now, read it, then come back here.

{Sound of Jeopardy theme played several thousand times}

Okay, good. Now we can talk.

As you can see, Marsh's book is an argument in list form. If you read it from start to finish it has some interesting things to say about Western popular music in the late twentieth century, particularly about the role of the single as opposed to the album, and about the cultural gumbo that is pop music. The book's center of gravity is the mid-1960s. As someone who was starting grade school at that time, I owe whatever appreciation I have of artists like Paul Revere & the Raiders or the Rivingtons to what Marsh has to say about them in this book.

However, as someone who came of age a little later than Marsh did, I also find his argument has little room for some of the pop artists of the 1970s, 1980s, and later who have meant the most to me. Moreover, even though Marsh offered (in his preface to the book's tenth anniversary reprinting) a list of 101 singles from 1989 to 1998 that might have "made the list" had he revised it, they seem almost beside the point. His book describes a phenomenon, a world of pop music that developed in the 1950s, as r & b slid into rock & roll (whatever that is), and dissipated into generality during the 1980s. As Marsh shrewdly notes in that tenth anniversary preface, the flowering of punk and hip hop in the 1980s made a "new world" out of the old one and effectively ended the story that he had written about. In a way, it seemed as if the trans-racial pop art of the Beatles/Motown era was a thing of the past, never to be recreated in an age in which many would-be popular artists equated widespread popularity with aesthetic failure. In twenty-first-century America, we call this the "Jonathan Franzen syndrome," but it was certainly in evidence as early as the 1980s when the corporate motto of independent SST Records proudly proclaimed "Corporate Shit Sucks."

But a funny thing happened as we moved from Reagan and Bush to Clinton and . . . well, Bush: pop didn't die. It didn't get dumb--at any rate, no dumber than it was in the early 1960s. And even if you deplore the atrocity that is American Idol as much as I do, I still think Western pop today is a fascinating stew, one that can very much challenge its audiences, if only its creators take pop seriously.

This blog will be an attempt to tell that story, the sequel (or "answer song") to the story that Marsh told in his book twenty years ago. In terms of strict chronology, it will stretch back to the early 1970s and forward to last week--or sometime next spring, about a year from now. Like Marsh's book, it will be an argument in list form, but in homage to S.S. Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case, another orphan book that I love, I will be throwing the list up out of order on purpose. Think of it as a Dickensian era serial novel that emerges from the shotgun collaboration of Mark Danielzewski and Lester Bangs; or as music criticism as written by a post-Swan-implosion Desmond Hume.

And you. Add comments. Disagree vehemently. Suggest artists and singles that you think I'm neglecting. If you're eighteen years younger than me, tell me the story I'm missing by putting my center of gravity in . . . oh, but that would be telling. As the singles I hope to write about frequently demonstrate, harmony may begin far more easily in dissonance than it ever does in mere identity.