Nixonian Longing

425. CARPENTERS, "Superstar"
Produced by Jack Daugherty ; written by Bonnie Bramlett & Leon Russell
A&M 1289 1971 Billboard: # 2

Since I lived through the 70s the first time, for me the Carpenters are a love/hate thing. Actually, it's mostly hate, because I despise nearly all their orchestrations. If Phil Spector's overstuffed arrangements had taken the longing of the early 1960s and raised it to operatic levels, Richard Carpenter's arrangements for the tracks he and his sister Karen laid down in the early 1970s made passion and even desire safe for mass consumption. And of course, when Herb Alpert's one of your bosses, it never hurts to throw in a few peppy horns on the choruses, no matter how depressing the song is supposed to be. After all, you want to make sure all that those L.A. session players can keep drawing a semi-regular paycheck.

What keeps me coming back to the Carpenters, though, is what keeps anyone coming back: Karen Carpenter's voice. That voice may be safe, but it's not shallow. There is a sadness there that haunts even a song like "Close to You" that's supposed to be about indescribable bliss. In retrospect, we know now that Karen Carpenter's sadness killed her. It almost literally ate her up from the inside out, and no matter how much I appreciate her performances, I would much rather that she had been happy than successful. I would never have wanted to be her boyfriend, but part of me might have liked to have been the brother that a sweet soul like her deserved.

Supposedly, the vocal for this song was recorded on the first take, because Karen was uncomfortable with the sexual contact implicit in the lyrics. As it was, watchful brother Richard rewrote the original lyrics of the song so that "sleep with you" became the more ambiguous "be with you." Nevertheless, the Carpenters chose to record this song, even if it was a little out of their comfort zone. That's what makes the single interesting, of course: that it is a little out of the Carpenters' comfort zone. Birds and butterflies and beasts and children are easy. Waking up to realize that the love of your life was a one-night stand is hard.

Before Karen stepped up to the microphone for that single take, this song had already been sung by Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (who cowrote it), Bette Midler, Rita Coolidge, and Cher. Subsequently, it would be recorded by Luther Vandross, Sonic Youth, and Chryssie Hynde. And you know what? Karen Carpenter still owns it. Even though I wish her brother Richard had left the lyrics the way they were, I don't think "Superstar" is primarily a song about sex or its aftermath. It's a song about unfulfilled longing and the confusion that it brings. And something makes me think that Karen Carpenter had more of a handle on that than all the rest of those singers put together.

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.