Some songs I liked from my youth
Apr. 4th, 2005 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI've been learning that you never know what will suddenly become obscure. Take Soundgarden, for example. I was a senior in high school when Badmotorfinger came out. I was driving around with my friend Ed (who was trying to teach me how to drive with my knees) when he started wailing "I wish to wish I dream to dream I try to try and I live to live and I die! to die! But I know! Whyyyyyyyyyyy!" I wanted to know what he was on about (it's the opening line from "Somewhere", track 6) so I grabbed a copy on cassette. I got that album deep into my veins pretty quickly.
Moments like Ed's wail made me understand Walt Whitman's "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world". That album, Dinosaur Jr's Green Mind, any Pixies album and Talking Heads Remain in Light became my travel music. It got to the point where even Frangie (my dad) knew some of the songs.
I was thinking about the song "Mind Riot", found near the end of Badmotorfinger. It has that great line "I was crying from my eye teeth and bleeding from my soul, and I sharpened my wits on a dead man's skull; I built an elevator from his bones...". When Cornell hits the word 'elevator', it sounds like he's saying "arbor vita" with a long i. Since I was usually driving when I listened to this so I couldn't stop to read the lyric sheet, I assumed he meant building a tree of life. I had no idea what that meant, but it was captivating. Then I found out it was an elevator and conjured some H.R. Giger-style images of ghastly, mostly-dead elevator operators.
I had to explain Badmotorfinger to someone recently. We were driving around talking about the movie Dazed & Confused and I was explaining how the song "Slaves & Bulldozers" from Badmotorfinger has all of its rhythm cribbed from Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold" ("Here I come again now, baby, like a dog in heat..."), a song used in D&C. Then I wound up explaing about the B-side album that came with some copies of BMF, "Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas". It's a five-song disc with the most smoothed-out Devo cover ever. The name is also a palindrome. Sweet, eh?
Keep in mind that all of this is from 1991. None of this seems old to be at all. I mean, 1991, right? I was sixteen. Bush was president, hair was big and crunchy, pants had tapered legs the way nature intended, and music was leaving the suck behind. Goodbye Hammer, hellooooo Soundgarden!
Then metal ended. Ended? How? Like, that doesn't seem possible. How could Ricky Rachtman be out of a job? Does anyone remember the first time you turned on Headbanger's Ball and found this piece of crap called "Superock" instead? It was like finding your grade school bully in a frilly shirt at New Wave Night. I mean, they had on Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a band I love, but I couldn't bear to watch it. They were being paraded like tarts. There severely nothing metallllllllllll about it.
I wasn't even big into metal. I was a wuss compared to the metal heads. I should've been happy to see it all go, right? Alll those jean jackets and bleach blond brains filed into the dumpster? Somehow, I knew it meant this line of culture would need to find an outlet somewhere else. All of that aimless testosterone can do severe damage if it's not channeled into a silly enough outlet.
Frank Zappa wrote a piece in late 1989 for Guitar Player magazine on trends he expected for the 1990s. One thing he expected was that metal would get corny and the metal heads would come off the way aging hippies had by the Eighties. He also concluded that Spanish flamenco would make a comeback because of the Barcelona Olympics and the World's Fair in Seville bringing attention to Spain again. I guess Nirvana took the wind out of those sails. What's sadder still is that we wouldn't have Zappa to keep us from immolation: he died of cancer in December of 1993.
Metal died and it crushed a lot of bands with it. Many of them couldn't adapt to being mods instead of rockers. However, what crushed metal was its own expense: many of those bands were bloated and had lost track of what made an audience lose its shit. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains both started their commercial exposures on the metal circuit but got seen as too wuss for that crowd. Throw 'em at the college kids and the metal crowd suddenly comes running with 'em.
Okay, what was my point? Ummm... yes! Ah! All of this knowledge could die with me and it wouldn't matter. None of these events were obscure (I think BMF went platinum). However, no one slighter younger than I am recalls this stuff. The Baby Boomers get to wrap themselves in the music of their time until they die; my generation has already been told to get stuffed. No one will be starting a chain of radio stations that overplay "Full On Kevin's Mom" (from Louder Than Love, a title itself a burn on Motley Crue's first album Too Fast For Love and the Smiths' Louder Than Bombs).
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kestrell and I were driving around and she pointed out that you can now hear Blondie and The Clash on light rock stations. You can hear "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" in hair salons full of old ladies. Like, how did this happen? It's as if everything eventually becomes wallpaper.
All of this blurs my memories of what I'd felt back then. I need to start writing these stories down or I'll lose the impact they had on me. Then again, why am I getting nostalgic about anything?
-things I find as I clean, Dante
Moments like Ed's wail made me understand Walt Whitman's "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world". That album, Dinosaur Jr's Green Mind, any Pixies album and Talking Heads Remain in Light became my travel music. It got to the point where even Frangie (my dad) knew some of the songs.
I was thinking about the song "Mind Riot", found near the end of Badmotorfinger. It has that great line "I was crying from my eye teeth and bleeding from my soul, and I sharpened my wits on a dead man's skull; I built an elevator from his bones...". When Cornell hits the word 'elevator', it sounds like he's saying "arbor vita" with a long i. Since I was usually driving when I listened to this so I couldn't stop to read the lyric sheet, I assumed he meant building a tree of life. I had no idea what that meant, but it was captivating. Then I found out it was an elevator and conjured some H.R. Giger-style images of ghastly, mostly-dead elevator operators.
I had to explain Badmotorfinger to someone recently. We were driving around talking about the movie Dazed & Confused and I was explaining how the song "Slaves & Bulldozers" from Badmotorfinger has all of its rhythm cribbed from Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold" ("Here I come again now, baby, like a dog in heat..."), a song used in D&C. Then I wound up explaing about the B-side album that came with some copies of BMF, "Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas". It's a five-song disc with the most smoothed-out Devo cover ever. The name is also a palindrome. Sweet, eh?
Keep in mind that all of this is from 1991. None of this seems old to be at all. I mean, 1991, right? I was sixteen. Bush was president, hair was big and crunchy, pants had tapered legs the way nature intended, and music was leaving the suck behind. Goodbye Hammer, hellooooo Soundgarden!
Then metal ended. Ended? How? Like, that doesn't seem possible. How could Ricky Rachtman be out of a job? Does anyone remember the first time you turned on Headbanger's Ball and found this piece of crap called "Superock" instead? It was like finding your grade school bully in a frilly shirt at New Wave Night. I mean, they had on Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a band I love, but I couldn't bear to watch it. They were being paraded like tarts. There severely nothing metallllllllllll about it.
I wasn't even big into metal. I was a wuss compared to the metal heads. I should've been happy to see it all go, right? Alll those jean jackets and bleach blond brains filed into the dumpster? Somehow, I knew it meant this line of culture would need to find an outlet somewhere else. All of that aimless testosterone can do severe damage if it's not channeled into a silly enough outlet.
Frank Zappa wrote a piece in late 1989 for Guitar Player magazine on trends he expected for the 1990s. One thing he expected was that metal would get corny and the metal heads would come off the way aging hippies had by the Eighties. He also concluded that Spanish flamenco would make a comeback because of the Barcelona Olympics and the World's Fair in Seville bringing attention to Spain again. I guess Nirvana took the wind out of those sails. What's sadder still is that we wouldn't have Zappa to keep us from immolation: he died of cancer in December of 1993.
Metal died and it crushed a lot of bands with it. Many of them couldn't adapt to being mods instead of rockers. However, what crushed metal was its own expense: many of those bands were bloated and had lost track of what made an audience lose its shit. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains both started their commercial exposures on the metal circuit but got seen as too wuss for that crowd. Throw 'em at the college kids and the metal crowd suddenly comes running with 'em.
Okay, what was my point? Ummm... yes! Ah! All of this knowledge could die with me and it wouldn't matter. None of these events were obscure (I think BMF went platinum). However, no one slighter younger than I am recalls this stuff. The Baby Boomers get to wrap themselves in the music of their time until they die; my generation has already been told to get stuffed. No one will be starting a chain of radio stations that overplay "Full On Kevin's Mom" (from Louder Than Love, a title itself a burn on Motley Crue's first album Too Fast For Love and the Smiths' Louder Than Bombs).
kestrell and I were driving around and she pointed out that you can now hear Blondie and The Clash on light rock stations. You can hear "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" in hair salons full of old ladies. Like, how did this happen? It's as if everything eventually becomes wallpaper.All of this blurs my memories of what I'd felt back then. I need to start writing these stories down or I'll lose the impact they had on me. Then again, why am I getting nostalgic about anything?
-things I find as I clean, Dante
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 01:54 pm (UTC)This metalhead smiled and got into her car, turned on K-Rock, and cranked up the Sum 41.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 02:32 pm (UTC)Seriously. Nothing ever dies as long as it has commercial possibility. The long tail is forever. And when you can see The Clash and Motley Crüe stickers on Beemers, the wallets feed it, and that tail gets long indeed. Now I know how my parents -- well, okay, my friends' parents -- felt when they saw "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac", or how Trudeau felt when he heard "Talkin' 'bout my generation" in a doctor's office...
I got your rage right here. At least the Kleptones are putting out brand new fuckyous to the music industry. In the ultra-post-modern-cyber world, to ridicule your enemy you must paint a picture using his entrails.
BTW, dude, you should totally help out the wikipedia when you have a knowledge gush like this. They could use the history.