This video is late, and by late I mean three months late. I intended to do it first thing after vacation and I just kept getting sidetracked -- by other projects, by a broken camera, by an unexpected visit from my parents, by the fact that the script fucking sucked and I kept having to rewrite it -- I worry that this has rotted on the vine, after working on it this long I simply have no idea if it's any good. But the important thing is that it's done, hopefully.
Ah ha ha my ancient camera that I should've replaced a billion years ago (we partially filmed Suburban Knights on it. It's old.) won't let me get the goddamn files off of it because both the USB port and the SD card reader stopped working. So it's in the shop! I've been trying to get this episode done since, no joke, before I went on summer vacation and things just kept coming up and I kept pushing it back, so naturally when I actually filmed the goddamn thing the goddamn camera finally gives up the ghost. I wanted to get this episode done by last month. I'm annoyed and frustrated! But at the very least, it's time to upgrade the camera. (I also recently replaced my ancient lighting rig which flickered constantly and would occasionally fall over on me.)
Anyway, I have a Song vs. Song poll up. We're going back to 2006 where we talk about two male-female duets where they flirt and probably don't have sex, Nelly Furtado ft. Timbaland's "Promiscuous" and Shakira ft. Wyclef Jean's "HIps Don't Lie." Please vote! https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-hips-vs-91716283
There’s a viral Tumblr post, pretty well-known by now, where Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is rewritten so that Jolene is some unspeakable, Lovecraftian monstrosity who portends the apocalypse. You know it; “We cower here beneath your gaze, that sets the earth and sky ablaze, have mercy at the end of days, Jolene.” People have added what must be hundreds of verses to this, recorded their own versions; it’s one of the finer moments of Tumblr lore (at least as far as I can tell, never having used Tumblr much).
That’s a good bit, but to me this isn’t just a solid laugh; I would call it one of the most astute pieces of music criticism I’ve ever heard. It's funny because it captures something that was already there; “Jolene” basically already was a horror song. Right from the opening notes, the tone of the song is overwhelming dread -- the tense, stuttering guitar that opens it; the ghostly wail of “Joleeeeene” that closes it out. There’s something very dark and chilling and Southern Gothic about it, something eldritch in its construction, that makes it sound like it’s about something much more serious than a jealous wife and an infidelity that hasn’t even happened yet. You half expect the song to end in murder.
With Dolly having basically ascended to modern sainthood, it’s interesting to look through that lens back at “Jolene,” her most iconic hit. It’s kind of an odd pick to become Dolly’s signature song. It’s too good not to be, obviously, but it’s easy to argue that one of her other hits should hold that spot, are more important to Dolly or fit her better; “I Will Always Love You” is integral to her life story, and “Nine to Five” cemented Dolly as “Dolly!” “Jolene,” meanwhile, was early in her career – it wasn't quite her first country hit, it was her first crossover to the pop charts – and Dolly hadn’t become the icon we know and love yet. In the clip above, you can see the young Dolly being introduced by her mentor/Svengali Porter Wagoner; his tone is almost condescending, and Dolly (though already wearing her trademark big hair and makeup) seems humble and even nervous. Her relationship with Porter is music legend at this point, but it’s still jarring to see. Music biopics like to show the Year One early days before the future legend finds their footing (see Bohemian Rhapsody where Freddie fumbles with the mic stand in his first time on stage). Hollywood cliché bullshit? I always thought so, but you can see it happening in real life, in that clip of “Jolene.”
An insecure Dolly sings that song above, just like an insecure Dolly wrote it (according to legend it was inspired by a bank clerk flirting with her husband). Around the time she released “Jolene,” Dolly broke free of Porter’s control, and then a few years later moved from Nashville to L.A. to realize her ambitions. (“Here You Come Again,” the song that announced the new Dolly and her very most sellout track, is my favorite of hers.) But before all that she wrote “Jolene,” and the writer of that song is no movie star. That woman isn’t just jealous of Jolene, isn’t just scared of losing her man – she’s absolutely wrecked by her powerlessness. She is sick with horror at this woman – described indeed like an all-powerful goddess, who has already woven her spell and bewitched her husband – and how easily she could destroy her marriage and her life. Of course Jolene is all-powerful; why else would Dolly be going to her to try and save her marriage rather than her husband? “My happiness depends on you”?? Good god. That was fifty years ago, and Dolly has sung this song over and over in the decades since, even though she spent the intervening years becoming the kind of larger-than-life sex bomb that could steal a man, not lose one. (Her first country hit, "Coat of Many Colors," is even more humble, and it's honestly shocking to compare the Dolly that sings it to the Dolly she became.)
There’s another piece of Internet lore that’s sprung up around “Jolene”: the alternate interpretation that Dolly is attracted to Jolene herself, and maybe even imagining her husband’s attraction, projecting her own onto her husband. That’s certainly not the intended subtext of the song, but it’s a valid reading; Dolly’s descriptions are… a lot. (“Your voice is soft like summer rain”?) And yeah, this could be some sublimated gay yearning, or for that matter many other displaced emotions; “Jolene”’s intensity can be extrapolated into a lot of places. Here’s one I came up with on my own. I don’t know if anyone has made this observation, but have you ever noticed there isno indication whatsoever that Jolene has any intentions on Dolly’s man? Or even knows who either of them are? For all we know, Jolene is just at the grocery store minding her own business, and then this weeping wife comes out of nowhere to confront her. I like to imagine a confused Jolene saying, “He talks about me in his sleep? …I’m sorry, who is this again? Have I met him? Who are you?” (I made this joke on Twitter, and a couple sex workers said they’ve gotten this kind of email from wives of their OnlyFans subscribers.)
Yeah, yeah, I realize that you have to play along with country music. “Before He Cheats” requires you to believe that Carrie’s boyfriend is in fact cheating on her, Morgan Wallen’s “Thinking About Me” is him taunting his ex that she still thinks about him and you have to just accept that he’s not completely imagining it. I’ve never bought either song, but honestly, I think that’s on me, I’m a snarky asshole and these things are funny to me. I like my interpretation of “Jolene” though. Again, the narrator of “Jolene” is just emotionally wrecked on all levels, with jealousy, with despair; there’s no reason to think that paranoia isn’t in the mix also.
Dolly looks and dresses the way she does because – this is one of many stories she’s told over and over – when she was young she saw a woman described by the respectable people of town as the local tramp, and she thought this trashy woman wearing too much makeup was the most beautiful she’d ever seen and wanted to emulate her. Is that also the woman she thought about when she wrote Jolene? I think it probably was. Dolly clearly has thought a lot about femininity – that’s probably why this song is addressed woman to woman rather than Dolly talking to her man. Jolene sounds so much like the larger-than-life figure she aspired to be and eventually became, and yet for all that Dolly has achieved – an instantly recognizable icon, a movie star with her own theme park, a charitable saint seemingly beloved by all – her image remains humble and down to Earth. But there’s obviously a difference. When she says she hopes you like this next song, everyone knows she doesn’t actually have to hope for that. Once upon a time she meant it. Once upon a time she had to beg strange women not to destroy her family. And look what she became. Truly, Jolene is an inspiration to us all. All hail Jolene.
Does this count? I say it does... not. But I did it anyway. Happy Halloween!
As always, check my editing for me please. And as always, please vote in the Song vs. Song poll. We're doing The Foo Fighters' "My Hero" vs. The Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings." https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-my-hero-90792456
I was supposed to be doing actual things for work but I got sidetracked with a perpetually updating supercut. I'm not charging for this since it's not an actual episode; now I have to put the actual episode I was working on on hold because I have to work on the Halloween episode now. (The Spooktacular returns! Stay tuned)
Kelly Clarkson is divorced, y’all. I saw her in Vegas, right at the start of my vacation, and she may be one of the most divorced women I’ve ever seen. Not in an unpleasant or bitter way or anything, the night was a blast. But she was promoting her long-awaited divorce album, so the topic was naturally gonna come up, and yes, there was many a potshot taken at her ex. I have some divorced aunts in my family, and let’s just say that if Kelly had had a glass of wine in her hand, it would have been a familiar experience, Southern accent included.
It's interesting that Kelly Clarkson has largely taken over the role that Ellen DeGeneres once had as the queen of daytime TV. Ellen’s career was of course destroyed by a workplace bullying scandal, which you wouldn’t think ranks super-high on the list of cancellable offenses except for the fact that it went completely at odds with her image as the nicest person in media. Oprah would have survived that scandal. Kelly might also; her show has already had a toxic work environment scandal that largely didn’t involve her, but also her image and Ellen’s are not the same. Kelly Clarkson may be the new Queen of Daytime but she’s never tried to be the Queen of Nice. Where Ellen’s image was beginning to strike as phony long before she got exposed, Kelly Clarkson has always expressed a more human range of emotions. Her image (as a reality show contestant and then pop star and then talk show host) has always been bright and bubbly, and yet she’s been publicly angry plenty of times; at her exes, at her parents, at her collaborators, at her various bosses who’ve held sway over her career. Her defining hit, “Since U Been Gone,” was an angry one, and just like she did that night I saw her, she was able to turn her anger into something entertaining and relatable.
There were a couple songs that Kelly did not perform that night. She didn’t perform “Piece by Piece” (the love song she wrote to her now-ex-husband) for obvious reasons. She didn’t perform anything from My December, the career-derailing album where her anger became unrelatable and off-putting (though I’m sure more than a few fans would have lit up for it). She also didn’t perform “Dark Side,” an underperforming and now-forgotten single from 2012. Shame though; I at least would have cheered for it.
“Dark Side” was the follow-up to the #1 hit “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” and definitely did not reach the smash heights of its predecessor. The only commentary I saw on it were comments on her sudden weight loss in the video (gauche to notice, I realize, but she looks like a completely different person between “Stronger” and this). In hindsight, the Stronger album’s rollout feels very much like an attempt to recreate her biggest success, Breakaway. The first single (“Breakaway”/“Mr. Know It All”) finds Kelly at peace with herself despite everything that’s befallen her, the second (“Since U Been Gone”/“Stronger”) finds her blasting past the ex who wronged her, and the third (“Behind These Hazel Eyes/“Dark Side”) shows a vulnerable side. Most of these songs – a large portion of her catalog, in fact – are from a woman scorned. “Dark Side” is not. Partly for that reason, it holds a unique spot in Kelly’s catalogue; though it met with negligible success, it’s always stuck with me.
Kelly’s best early single, “Beautiful Disaster,” was about trying to love a troubled person; she herself is the beautiful disaster in “Dark Side.” “Everybody’s got a dark side/Do you love me?/Can you love mine?” She never says what her dark side actually is, or how it manifests; I guess you could call that dishonest, but I think it fits the song, whose overriding emotion is fear. She assures the listener that no one’s perfect, but we’re worth it, but she doesn’t seem to believe it, or at least doesn’t believe that she’s convincing. Kelly has been vulnerable many times, but she’s never had a song this self-critical. She’s been hurt, but this is the first (only?) single where she exhibits doubt and fear – fear of being abandoned, of being unlovable. Kelly’s generational peer and sometimes collaborator Pink has pulled this trick many times – we’ve seen so much of Pink behind her hardass exterior that it’s almost easy to forget that she has that exterior at all. Kelly is much more guarded, especially since the failure of My December, where she co-wrote all the songs. Since then, her singles have been rarely written by her (including “Dark Side”). There’s almost a meta element to the song; she did show her dark side on My December, and the public did run away. The record flopped, and she had to cancel her tour, even though she was the hottest pop star in America just two years earlier.
I find it compelling as a portrait of Kelly Clarkson but it also hits home for me in a way that most of her singles don’t. I don’t really consider myself an angry person. I love “Since U Been Gone” and “Because of You” as much as anyone, but I’ve never quite related to them. “Dark Side” is a song I relate to a lot more – who hasn’t ever felt fundamentally unlovable? The fact that the song itself didn’t really go anywhere almost feels like it adds to the pathos.
The reason it failed, I think, can be mostly attributed to the fact is that it’s nothing particularly special production-wise (a problem for Kelly throughout her late career). I like it mostly for the themes but I wouldn’t say that lyrically it’s anything special. I haven’t particularly listened to it in the ten years since it came out, and I haven’t thought about it much until I noticed its absence from Kelly’s set list a month ago. Revisiting it now, it feels like Kelly’s oversinging the chorus in a way that doesn’t fit the vulnerability of the song – too triumphant, too secure that love will survive the dark side. The parts that hit happen during the softer moments, with the The original version of “Beautiful Disaster,” too, was a little buried under the minivan-rock trappings; it made a reappearance on Breakaway in a revelatory acoustic version, one that absolutely broke my heart and convinced me that Kelly was a generational pop star, which didn’t really turn out to be the case. Instead, she’s now a talk show host, and she’s made clear this job is not exactly all she ever wanted; she called the concert her “real job” when I saw her. I’ve always felt bad that the public rejected her dark side, but the new album, like My December, it’s an angry breakup album, and like My December, all the songs were co-written by her, and she seemed quite happy with how the new record was selling, even when she had nowhere to promote it because of the strike. Her fans that night in Vegas seemed as devoted as ever. Maybe people had room for her dark side after all.
“Ramble On” is just a feature I came up because with I wanted more money, and I needed to give people a reason to subscribe to this Patreon. But I found it’s been helpful for me, to help me get out my thoughts on things that in a little more thoughtful, deeper way than I do with my whole “YouTube snark douche” routine. But sometimes I come across a song that deserves the whole “in the Shadows” treatment but doesn’t really fit into any of the formats I use on YouTube; normally, that would leave me out of luck, but fortunately I have this series as a backup, where I can present things for more discerning fans such as yourself. So: here’s a piece of shit that fucking sucks that no one remembers but me.
In 2002, the idea of a white person rapping was still a joke, an anomaly, something not necessarily to be taken seriously. Eminem was of course the biggest music star in the world, but he stood alone, and the flood of clones he rapped about in “The Real Slim Shady” would take a decade to really take hold. But judging by Jason Mraz, the kind of hip-hop flow we now think of as “white” was already starting to spread. There may not have been many white rappers but white people were rapping; the white musicians inspired by hip-hop were getting airplay on the pop and rock stations, with catchy upbeat bops like “Semi-Charmed Life,” “One Week” and “Walkin’ on the Sun,” which were very far from hip-hop but were clearly doing a beach-party imitation of the intricate flows favored at the time. Jason Mraz emerged some time after those, in a summery VH1 haze alongside Michelle Branch and John Mayer, but unlike his folksinger brethren he wore his hip-hop influences on his sleeve. He wasn’t necessarily a rapper but he loved four-syllable rhymes and would cram them in whenever he could. He was self-conscious about it; “I’m all about them words,” he admits sheepishly in “You & I Both” (his best single). “This is a strange enough new play on words,” he says on “The Remedy” (his biggest single). His vocabulary became integral to his aesthetic, just as much as his trademark fedora; he was a wordsmith, a lyricist of complexity, a poet with an endless lexicon at hand. The title of his second album nodded to his image: Mr. A-Z, a nickname that nodded to his dictionary-length arsenal of words, and also a shockingly apt play on words for his last name. Ta-da: wordplay. That’s what he was about. That would also be the name of his lead-off single.
I came up with the idea of the “I’m Back, Bitch” single a few years ago (one of my best concepts). I defined it by three characteristics, 1) it’s by someone extremely famous, 2) it’s the start of a new album cycle, 3) it’s either about how great the artist is or about nothing at all. I said this about Taylor Swift’s “ME!,” which I thought failed because it didn’t have the fourth criteria. 4) It has to sound huge. So let’s say that to qualify as an “I’m Back, Bitch” single it has to hit three of those four points, because I’ve also heard singles that functioned the same way even though they were from artists who weren’t that famous, or weren’t technically leadoff singles, or actually did have actual topics. I want to include Jason Mraz’s “Wordplay” in this, because that’s clearly what it’s going for – the point of this song is nothing but Mraz bragging about his lyrical skills – but even by this expanded criteria, Mraz falls short. Mraz isn’t famous enough, and the song isn’t big enough. And in all of pop musicdom, there is nothing in the world sadder that an artist that tries to hit you over the head with their greatness and fails miserably.
To be fair to Mraz, he’s very upfront about the fact that he doesn’t want to be here, singing this stupid song. In what plays like an excuse, Mraz talks openly about the fact that he has to write a single or the record label will give up on him. He also sings about trying to avoid the sophomore slump, and worrying about being a one-hit wonder (I watched VH1 enough that I didn’t realize “You and I Both” wasn’t really a hit). I assumed that the label had rejected the record and made him go back and write this, but according to Mraz, he wrote this to deal with the anxiety of trying to follow up his first album, and once it was out of the way he was able to do the rest of the project.
This kind of meta-narrative will be familiar to any high schooler who’s ever turned in a creative writing assignment about a high schooler struggling to finish his assignment. It’s lazy; it’s sophomoric; it’s baby’s first attempt at being clever, like making “password” your login password. His big hit, “The Remedy,” meanders all over the place, but its soaring chorus (rented from superproducers The Matrix) hit a breezy groove that made it pretty relatable. I like songs about not worrying, and I hate songs about songwriting; I’m not a songwriter, I don’t relate. I don’t care about Mraz’s struggles with the record industry. This is sterile ground that Mraz should never have tried to plant on.
Again, you could maybe forgive this on the grounds that Mraz just needed a bullshit radio single; many great artists have been forced by their labels to write bad singles. But Mraz disgraces himself beyond writing garbage for the radio; he commits a truly fatal error with the central act of the song, which is Jason Mraz bragging about how good he is at words. Because here’s the thing: Jason Mraz is a terrible fucking lyricist. For example, those lines I mentioned earlier from his previous big singles, about words. “Strange enough new play on…. words” is a forced rhyme with “dangerous liaison.” The next line after “I’m all about them words” is “…over numbers, unencumbered, numbered words.” What the fuck are you talking about? Long before Logic or NF, long before “lyrical miracle” became an insult, Jason Mraz was pioneering the entire concept of being a tryhard white boy writing multi-syllabic nonsense.
And even if he was good at rhyming: So what?? Who told Mraz he could boast about it? Jason Mraz is the opposite of a guy I want to see get up his own ass about how great he is. Mraz seems to be not aware that he’s a mandolin-playing dipshit in a stupid hat who looks all of 12 years old; he dares to call himself “Mr. A to Z” out loud as if that was not the most dork-ass thing in history. (It reminds me a bit of Martin from The Simpsons daydreaming about being the master of Latin conjugation.) Jason Mraz doesn’t have the right to be this impressed with himself. Especially since the brags themselves also sound ridiculous – “I’m the wizard of oohs and aahs and falalas,” “I built a bridge across the stream of consciousness,” What the fuck are you talking about? Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up, Jason Mraz!
“Wordplay” tanked into the ground, the more respectable but still overwordy follow-up “Geek in the Pink” didn’t do much better, and I expected to never hear of him again. When he shockingly reemerged at the end of 2008, he was emphatically not doing this folksinger-with-a-flow shtick and trying to write something that resembled an actual song (although his new style was no less annoying.) For what it’s worth, I’ve listened to Jason Mraz albums and heard songs I like, though I can’t recall them off the top of my head. “Wordplay” still annoys me deeply, one of the most indelibly awful songs I’ve ever hard, and it should be marked as a signpost of a new level of cringe on the horizon, it predicts both Ed Sheeran and latter-day Train. This song makes me think of words, all right – most of them four letters long.
Okay, so here’s my issue: Killing people is weird. I mean, yes, I know it’s wrong, that’s the main thing, but also, it’s weird, right? Have you ever thought about that? How weird killing people is? Most people don’t do that! I just did a Google search and the first site I read said that probably only about 48 people in a million have ever killed someone. That’s 0.000048 percent! Not a lot of people! This all goes to support my theory that murderers, for the most part, are just, like, total weirdos. Like, what the fuck.
Anyway, Hardy is part of the newer breed of country singers (he goes by a very-untraditional-for-country single name and he releases “mixtapes” that he calls “Hixtapes”), he likes trap beats and nu-metal (he does a pretty straight cover of “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd), and if you’re not into modern country you might know him from his viral terrible performance at WrestleMania (these live sporting events, man, technical problems everywhere). Lainey Wilson is also new, her thing is that she dresses like Janis Joplin and if you’re not into modern country, you might know her song “Heart Like a Truck” from those Dodge Ram commercials. (She’s going to be associated with the word “truck” for a long time.) Their duet, “Wait in the Truck,” was a big hit country last year through this year. It seems to be a critical success too; Billboard listed it as one of the best singles of 2022. If you like your country music darker, then this cold tale of a man committing, maybe not justifiable but at least understandable homicide will probably do it for you. It certainly has for a lot of people. I think most people liked the narrative because they were either effectively chilled by the act of violence, or felt that justice was done. I mostly just get confused.
The story of the song is, Hardy is driving down the highway (in a truck, of course) when he sees a battered woman on the side of the road. She doesn’t really explain, but what happened is obvious. Hardy asks who did this to her and where he is. He drives to the abuser’s house (“Wait in the truck,” he tells her), bursts through the door, shoots the man dead, and then calmly waits to be taken to jail so that he can be punished for his crimes. In the final verse, he concedes that he might spend the rest of his life behind bars, but hey, the guy had it comin’. He rescued this poor woman and maybe what he did was wrong but it’s not that wrong.
You can attack the song for its medieval logic. After all, killing is wrong, vigilante justice is wrong, and even if we understand the violence this man committed to be brutal and horrifying, meeting abuse with murder is not a case where the punishment fits the crime. On some level the song knows this; “I don’t know if he’s an angel… because angels don’t do what he did,” sings Lainey. “Have mercy on me, lord,” wails a gospel choir in the outro. You can’t say that this song has no moral judgment on murder; our protagonist knows what he did and he willingly accepts his punishment. That’s a lot more than you can say for, say, “Coward of the County” where the title character avenges his wife’s gang-rape and it’s treated as a pure unalloyed act of righteousness, or for “Goodbye Earl,” which gets most of its charge from its blithe refusal to carry any moral weight whatsoever. This is simply not a thing we have to consider in country music. You can also criticize it for its patriarchal framing; the title line is a man telling his damsel in distress to sit pretty while he slays the monster. At no point does the woman have a lot of agency, at no point does he ask her what she wants or needs; her only role is to be grateful for her savior’s heroism. And of course, real life does not work like this; freeing a battered woman does not necessarily solve the problems that put her in that situation, and considering the way her life is tied to her abuser’s, there could be plenty of unforeseen consequences to her; there is no guarantee that her situation has improved.
Those criticisms are all boring to me. I guess they’re all true, but I don’t like to judge songs on whether they match my values. The best point to be made is that these criticisms are boring because the song is boring; it doesn’t really have a lot of perspective or try something particularly new. But if it were simply a matter of not reinventing the wheel, then it should still work; country music is all about tradition, after all. No, my biggest problem is: Huh? So he just decides to go find the dude and kill him? What? To me, this is not a logical progression of the story.
My problem is that killing a stranger on behalf of another stranger just strikes me as odd. I don’t understand his motivation. He doesn’t know this woman. He doesn’t know this man. He doesn’t have any backstory of his own. He doesn’t seem to have any feelings about the situation either before or after, he expresses no concern, no outrage, no sympathy, no painful memories triggered. He just takes it as given that a man who would do this to a woman deserves to be dead, and makes it so.
If I had to guess what inspired this song, I’d say probably Sling Blade, a movie about a backwoods simpleton who – spoilers here for a thirty-year-old movie – kills an abuser to save a mother and child he’s grown to love. He does it in cold blood and without remorse; his simplicity grants him the clarity to see what has to be done, the courage to do it and the strength to bear the consequences. Or, perhaps “courage” and “strength” aren’t the words. When Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl kills, it isn’t brave, because he has no moral compunctions about it. He has enough empathy to want to save this woman and her son, but he lacks the civilizing aspects of society that would stop him from killing; he’s done it before, he’s okay with it. And he was on the fringes of society anyway so returning to institutionalization causes him little harm; he knows what’s waiting for him and maybe it’s not the greatest situation in the world but it’s fine. The loss for him is small. My point is, his decision makes sense to him, and the movie walks us through every step of Karl’s cold, deadly logic.
Meanwhile, I don’t know what the deal is for Hardy’s character and his response doesn’t make any sense to me. Killing the abuser in this situation is just not something people do. It only makes sense if either the sight of this abuse victim causes him so much pain that he has to take matters into his own hands. But it doesn’t seem to be a hot-blooded crime of passion. Lainey sings “he was hellbent to find the man behind all the whiskey scars I hid,” but Hardy sure doesn’t seem hellbent. He seems more sympathetic to Lainey than outraged, and he stays calm and composed as both a character and a narrator when the deed is done. Even in the music video, where the act of murder gets more complicated than it does in the song, Hardy doesn’t seem especially angry. The act seems entirely cold-blooded, which makes Hardy a fucking freak with no place in a civilized world. And the song apparently just doesn’t see him that way, the guy described seems fairly normal, he’s functional enough to be driving a truck and have places to go, he has enough emotional intelligence to not ask this poor beaten woman too many questions. He’s just a normal guy! I don’t get it!
And so this song just doesn’t work for me. Hardy and Lainey wail “Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy on me, lord” with the backing of a gospel choir and I don’t buy it. This is not a song with any moral weight because they do not otherwise have any guilt; it rings hollow. Hardy’s victim had no humanity; Hardy says bluntly that that guy’s burning in hell where he belongs, and the woman he saved is doing fine now because of his actions, so I don’t know why he’s asking God for mercy. Hardy didn’t make a rash decision, he made the right call, with the only negative consequence being the loss of his personal freedom. He’s a martyr, if anything. So fuck off with this “I don’t know if he’s an angel, ‘cuz angels don’t do what he did” shit, clearly he is and clearly they do. The nod to morality feels entirely obligatory, and I much prefer “Goodbye Earl”’s decision to not pretend they even remotely give a shit. It’s like they feel like the killing won’t matter if they don’t make a nod to Christian piety, but it only makes the song’s weightlessness stand out even more.
Anyway, as always, please lemme know if you see any errors. Also: of course, please vote in the Song vs. Song poll! This week, inspired by last month's coronation, we are arguing over "Anarchy in the UK" vs. "London Calling"! https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-anarchy-82914865
I had a conversation once with a friend about which pop stars would make it into the pop-averse Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Mariah Carey? Almost definitely – she’s a powerhouse vocalist, she wrote most of her songs, her music is enough in the soul/r&b tradition that the traditionalist rock hall writers would approve. George Michael? The fact that his legacy is split between Wham! and his solo career might be held against him, but he was also a great songwriter, he had some r&b roots, his gayness lends him some cred as a groundbreaker. Britney Spears? Definitely not. She’s not a technically virtuosic singer like Mariah, and she’s not ever seemed to have a strong hand in her own music (unlike other rock-respected pop stars like Madonna). The Rock Hall would have to be a completely different place with a completely different set of values before it gave any respect for Britney Spears and her strongest suits – having a killer catalog, putting on great live performances, and mainly, just being Britney Spears, a person who can pull attention at any moment.
You know who else isn’t in the Rock Hall of Fame? Ozzy Osbourne. That might be because he’s inducted as a member of Black Sabbath, but plenty of artists are in as both band and solo – the Beatles, for instance – while others have their solo careers neglected – Diana Ross, for instance, a big friend of the Rock Hall but only inducted as a member of the Supremes. I think Diana Ross might not be a solo inductee because her career was simply too pop, too gaudy, too Cher-ish. I think the same might be true for Ozzy. I looked up one of those old VH1 countdowns and the way people talk about the Blizzard is very interesting. “He’s a showman,” says Dave Mustaine. “He’s a legend, he’s bigger than life,” says Ozzy’s sometimes sideman Zakk Wylde. The most telling comment comes from Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P., who says “Ozzy is respected for being Ozzy, Ozzy is worshipped for being Ozzy, but Ozzy will probably never get the respect as a musician that he deserves.” This all sounds to me like the way stans praise Britney (and this was all before he began his second career as a reality TV entertainer). I mean, what does Ozz do exactly? His success has always been contingent on his ability to attract strong collaborators. He’s not really a songwriter – he contributes the melodies to his songs (which is important!) but the lyrics and music are written by others. No one really talks about him as a vocalist (although, like Britney, he has one of the most immediately recognizable and arresting voices in music). Mostly what Ozzy does is be Ozzy Fucking Osbourne, the Madman, the Prince of Fucking Darkness, the guy who has a whole mess of fucking great songs, the man who ripped apart headlines for being a trainwreck you simply could not look away from (again, like Britney Spears). Ozzy Osbourne, first and foremost, is metal’s greatest pop star. And when metal went pop in the mid-‘80s, who else but Ozzy should have taken advantage.
In 1986, Ozzy got his first charting hit. It was not “Crazy Train” or “Bark at the Moon” or “Flying High Again” or any of the other earlier tracks which define him now; it was “Shot in the Dark,” peaking at #68. (Only four of his songs have ever made it to the Hot 100.) This came after years of being tabloid fodder, biting heads off bats, pissing on the Alamo, and generally writing his legend into rock history. He had just left the Betty Ford Clinic and was trying out sobriety. He had his reward with his (at the time) highest charting song and highest charting album. And yet, in the years since, his first real hit “Shot in the Dark” has been all but written out of Ozzy history, as has its parent album The Ultimate Sin. The official reason is that Ozzy hates that album – too flat, too samey. He would cut Jake E. Lee, his main collaborator at the time, from the picture shortly thereafter; Lee remains a distant third in prominence among Ozzy’s sidemen, well behind Randy Rhoads and Zakk Wylde. The truth of “Shot in the Dark”’s erasure is probably elsewhere; Ultimate Sin is not his strongest album but one would have to stretch to call it a bad album. Reportedly, the actual reason is cold hard cash; Lee has a long-standing dispute about writing most of Bark of the Moon but not getting any songwriting credits. More specifically, the skeleton of “Shot in the Dark” comes from one of bass player Phil Soussan's previous bands, meaning that Sharon Osbourne, the most coldly ruthless manager since Colonel Tom, has kept it the song off of compilations and live performances ever since to keep Lee’s former bandmates from tying them up in litigation. Soussan never worked with Ozzy again either. The video’s not even on Ozzy’s YouTube page.
This is a real shame because “Shot in the Dark” is probably my favorite Ozzy song, an instant classic. It is not surprising to me at all that this was his first crossover hit. It fucking rips. It kills. One wouldn’t mistake it for Def Leppard or anything, he still has his metal cred, but it is a great pop song, maybe his best. Jon Bon Jovi would kill for a hook that good.
Chuck Eddy called this kind of music “flashdance” -- the driving, minor key, synth-and-hard-rock guitar music of the ‘80s. (The song “Flashdance” is only questionably flashdance, but “Maniac” definitely is.) You can hear bits of that in the embryonic demo version of it by Soussan's former band Wildlife. Wildlife sounds like a wannabe Survivor (“Eye of the Tiger” is maybe the first flashdance song) but there’s something going in there. The best part is the stalking synth bass, sounding a bit like a slower version of “Another One Bites the Dust” (actually maybe that’s the first flashdance song).
Ozzy’s version is much different – much harder, much faster – but it keeps the haunted tone. I have no idea what the song is actually about, but the lyrics hint at Ozzy stalking someone like an assassin, despite being conflicted about something. The video gets a major thing right about the song – it’s about desperation and paranoia (as were all flashdance songs, basically). A bunch of girls are going to an Ozzy concert, but for some reason one of the girls is being haunted by Ozzy himself. She has visions, she gets headaches that seem supernatural; it’s shot like she’s turning into a werewolf or something, she flexes her long nails like claws and her eyes glow red. I’m not clear what’s happening there, but it’s the right tone for the song. This is a song where something is going wrong and it’s tearing Ozzy apart inside.
What isn’t right for the tone of the song: Ozzy’s glittery outfits. He’s wearing some kind of sparkly kimono that makes it look like the woman is being haunted by Liberace. The band is all wearing spangles too. This is a play to the ascendant hairspray-and-makeup metal scene, and even though Ozzy was not really separate from it, the look doesn’t fit him at all. (One of the kids in the audience is wearing a Metallica T-shirt, a band who was aesthetically representing the backlash to hair metal long before Nirvana.) By his next album, Ozzy was wearing the black suits and cross necklace that we associate with him now. If Ozzy should have any regrets about the Ultimate Sin era, it’s those silly outfits, and that as much as anything is why he abandoned it. He’s never had a song that could be called flashdance ever again. Perhaps Ozzy can only be metal’s pop star metaphorically; he’s not a person who has any desire to make pop-metal. Still, what a great experiment, and what a loss for the historical preservation of his greatest work. How can you release an Ozzy greatest hits album without his first big hit?
Anyway, I swear I'm trying to get this video done this month. The month got away from me, plus these Trainwreckords videos are just fuckin' hard, man. They're hard! I've been trying to get this done for months and somehow I finished two other videos instead. But anyway, I am working on a Trainwreckord (my first in seven months??) and no, it's not about any of the albums you've asked for. Wish me luck!
My deep dark secret is that I’ve never been much bothered by Kid Rock, or at least the vast majority of his career. I still like “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy” as much as I did in junior high. I’ve never found “All Summer Long” particularly objectionable. The rhyme of “things” and “things” doesn’t bother me. Disliking Kid Rock is an easy lay-up for a music critic, and imagining the “type” of person who Kid Rock’s music is “for” has been an easy Twitter dunk for years that I’ve resisted. It’s not like I actively listen to Kid Rock either, I can’t remember the last time I heard one of his songs voluntarily, but it’s always been hard for me to really hate any of his music. I did hate that awful song he did in those National Guard commercials that used to play before movies. That was pretty bad, I guess. In my opinion, the worst Limp Bizkit songs were much more painful than the worst Kid Rock songs, but Fred Durst aged into a cuddly old man instead of a Trumpy loudmouth so people are much fonder of him in hindsight and forget how bad “My Generation” or “Hot Dog” were. I don’t think Kid Rock’s music is that bad.
But I also find it hard to be offended by Kid Rock as a person, which is much harder to justify because objectively, Bob Ritchie the man sucks. A man who willingly visits the Trump White House, a Northerner who waves the Confederate flag, there’s just no excuse for that. Fuck that guy. Idiot. And yet, I find it hard to muster anything angrier about him than a dismissive jerk-off gesture. Something about his right-wing, ooh-am-I-offending-you culture warrior shtick just comes off as cute. As I was writing this, Kid Rock just got angry about Bud Light supporting trans people, one of the few times he’s actually offended me. The first thing I think of when it comes to Kid Rock’s politics are not the actual attempts to piss me off but his vague gestures in the other directions; his disavowal of Nazis, his confused laughter when Trump attempted to get his thoughts on North Korea. (Kid Rock was in the Oval Office and was the adult in the room. Dark horrible times we’ve survived.)
The tragedy of Kid Rock is that he was once the respectable face of Family Values-era rap-rock. He played nice with the rock establishment, he was constantly paying tribute to his elders and he was eloquent in defense of the classics. He wrote a Bob Seger homage and got Seger to do piano on it and it rules. His Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech for Cheap Trick is an all-timer. He’s a lousy rock star but an excellent music nerd; in an alternate universe, Kid Rock is the keeper of the flame for classic rock, rather than the joke he’s become.
Anyway, I forced myself to listen to Kid Rock’s “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” all the way through for the first time to write this essay. (This essay is five days late because it took me that long to work up the courage.) Actually, no, that’s not true, I didn’t listen to it “all the way through,” I had to take a break in the middle. I made it three quarters of the way through, tapped out and watched a couple episodes of Damages and then listened to the last minute of the song. But at least I can say I have actually listened to every second of this song now. “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” went viral in 2021 and I saw a lot of people dunking on it; even most of the comments on YouTube are dunking on it. I resisted the urge, in the same way that I don’t watch stand-ups with specials with names like Trigger Warning. They want you to dunk on them. They’re getting off on it. It’s a symbiotic relationship that I don’t want to be a part of. And I live to dunk on bad music! I make a good living doing it! But honestly I was a little annoyed to see so many people take the outrage bait. Don’t give him that! (I thought about not including the video like I usually do; you don’t have to click that link.)
Before now, the only tiny bit I had heard of the song was because I needed to use it in comparison to Aaron Lewis’s foul “Am I the Only One” for a video once, and at the time it struck me what a different animal Kid Rock is to Aaron Lewis. Lewis is a horribly sincere man; every word he sings he means, down to the bottom of his blackened, miserable heart. He hates you and he hates all your values; he dreams of eradicating you and your kind. Kid Rock, meanwhile, doesn’t hate you; he’s just annoyed by you. He dislikes you the same way you dislike him; he thinks you’re lame. “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” takes aim at OFFENDED SNOWFLAKES and their MILLENNIAL FEELINGS and their PARTICIPATION TROPHIES. In the video, Kid Rock rides a rocketship shaped like a middle finger to space, one of the few times this shitshow is stupid enough to be funny. But unlike his fellow grifter Tom McDonald, Kid Rock doesn’t actually have the guts to stake out any actual political position. He doesn’t say what these snowflakes are offended by; he doesn’t say what the middle finger is actually pointing at except in the vaguest terms. More than anything, Kid Rock wants to be cool. I’m sure his right-wing leanings are real, but they’re shallow; more than any politics, Kid Rock is driven by wanting to be his idols, Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger, the dirty white boys of rock. At the end of the song he lists a bunch of people he wishes he was; Rev. Run (?!!), David Lee Roth, Bruce Springsteen.
Let’s take those one by one. Run-DMC are legends and always will be, and they performed with Kid Rock on several occasions; one of the first good things Kid Rock did with his fame is to put some respect on their names. But a man who willingly waves the Confederate flag has no right to claim any inheritance from Black legends. Run-DMC were also very old school, and hip-hop quickly outgrew their flow. Kid Rock began his career as a rapper in 1989; when hip-hop moved past his corny flow, he had to re-invent himself. He has nothing to do with hip-hop. It’s an insult.
David Lee Roth is the closest of the three to being something that Kid Rock can emulate. But David Lee Roth, as a performer, was always an entertainer. He was there to have fun. Van Halen was aggressively apolitical; they were a party band. “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” has no joy in it, no fun. It’s a bitter, try-hard, ugly track; I don’t think David Lee Roth would enjoy it very much.
And then of course, Springsteen. I noted at the time that this was the big difference between Kid Rock and Aaron Lewis; Kid Rock still likes Springsteen. As well he should. I’m honestly torn which is worse, though; Aaron Lewis hates Springsteen for his politics, which is a repellent and unjustifiable position, but at least Lewis seems to understand what his position is. If Lewis is going to be the man he is, he has to hate Springsteen. What right has Kid Rock to love Springsteen? What right has he to be the man he is and still aspire to The Boss’s mantle? It reminds me of those shitty anti-woke stand-ups who adore Pryor and Carlin but don’t remotely understand Pryor or Carlin.
Kid Rock does get more political on the rest album, apparently (I am not going to find out for myself) but I notice this song, the vague one about offended millennials, was the single for a reason. I think he still thinks he can be a real rock star, even though the world has so drastically passed him by. His version of cool isn’t cool anymore, and wasn’t even really cool when it was big. I don’t want to take easy dunks on this because it’s too uncomfortable; there’s a tragic pathos to it. It is Kid Rock’s curse to have great taste as a music listener but terrible taste as a music maker. It’s like watching Amadeus if Salieri thought he was as good as Mozart.
This was supposed to be done by the end of February but other projects, personal shit and illnesses got in the way. Here it is! Help me out and catch any errors.
I hate posting things without a video attached but this month I think I am getting out two episodes. I hit a creative dry spot but I think I know what my next three episodes are and I feel excited for them. Get ready for them soon!
The curse of the white woman is to be disadvantaged in some ways and privileged in others, so that when they talk about serious women’s issues it can sound like they’re ignoring the vast amounts of advantages they do have – hence the rise of the term “white feminism” as a pejorative. And to be fair, the term doesn’t come from nothing; there are a lot of white women out there who do actually suck, and will use feminism either cynically or myopically in their own self-interest with little thought about whether it improves the world as a whole. The other curse of the white woman is that there’s too many of them. Most underprivileged minorities have an outsider status that makes their preferred aesthetics inherently cool. But white women aren’t a minority; they’re the largest demographic, actually. And so, things that white women like -- pumpkin spice, Sex and the City – are considered lame both to a patriarchy that disrespects the tastes of women and to hipsters who only see in them the hegemonic boot of the mainstream. It will never be cool to be a white woman. And thus, every single totem and slogan of female empowerment gets diluted and becomes humiliatingly basic in no time at all. Pink pussyhats. Notorious RBG. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss. Cringe, am I right?
This is not a new development of the #MeToo era. For as long as the concept of coolness has existed, feminist slogans have become uncool, long before you could tag them as “white.” Today it’s “girlbosses,” before “girlbosses” it was “girl power,” and before “girl power” it was “I am woman, hear me roar,” all of them doomed to go from empowering to embarrassing, emblematic of a one-dimensional and thoughtless (and, most likely, middle-to-upper-class and white) version of feminism. The source of that last one is Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” a number one hit in 1972 and the iconic anthem of second-wave feminism, a truly groundbreaking era of thought and activism that radically rearranged American society. Long before I ever heard it as a song, I knew “I am woman hear me roar” as a stock punchline of the ‘80s and ‘90s (much in the same way that “woke” has become a sarcastic insult now). But in its day, coming just after the “Mad Men” era of rampant choking sexism, “I Am Woman” was not just a pop hit for pop feminism, it was a radical statement. Imagine playing this for a Zoomer now and trying to explain that to them. At the risk of understatement, “I Am Woman” has aged very strangely.
Helen Reddy was an Australian pop singer, and we mean “pop” in the “pre-rock and roll” sense of the word. She did write some of her songs, but she had more in common with Barbra Streisand or Anne Murray than Carole King. Her only real hit before this point had been a cover of a showtune (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar). Every picture of her has her in a housewife’s haircut and tasteful clothing. She’s no one’s image of a bra-burner or a riot grrrl, in other words; for god’s sake her name is “Helen” (the “Karen” of the ‘70s). Why was she the one to write the iconic female empowerment of all time?
Women’s Lib attracted all types, of course, not just campus radicals. Helen Reddy was one of them. To hear her tell it, she had to write “I Am Woman,” because it straight up didn’t exist at that point; songs by strong women, sure, but songs about strong women? Before “I Am Woman” there was nothing. This is as hard for me to imagine as the world just suddenly coming into existence; how could there be a time when there was no music to inspire women? In that regard, Helen Reddy was not just a woman making a statement, she’s a musical pioneer who invented an entire genre of song. My god, she could be one of the most influential songwriters of her lifetime.
But does it still inspire? “I Am Woman” is probably the world’s greatest example of white feminism, and in this case I don’t mean “white” to mean exclusionary – indeed, it goes out of its way to make its message as universal to the experience of womanhood as it can be. In this case, when I say “white,” I mean in the sense of being aesthetically just extremely fucking white. This is a song that has never heard a swinging rhythm in its life. It claps on the one and three without fail. Its potato salad is bland. If one is generous, you can hear bits of gospel in the singers backing up Helen that she is strong, she is invincible, she is woman. But that one whiff of soul is thoroughly undone by the dorky country guitar lick that opens the song, the layers of ‘70s-cheese woodwinds and horns, and most of all by Helen’s prim schoolmarm vocals. “I am woman, hear me roar,” sings Helen Reddy in a confident but un-forceful tone that never once seems like it’s going to reach a roar.
Maybe its whitebread-ness actually added to its power. Reddy’s music was soft enough to not be alienating to anyone, and at a time when the ugly stereotype for feminists was undateable battleaxes, the sight of Helen Reddy – young, married, visibly pregnant during some performances that year – throwing her support to those supposed hags (“nasty women,” you might say) might have been genuinely subversive. But it’s a tightrope -- “I Am Woman” is a radical message about womanhood (at the time the supposedly “weaker sex”), defining it as strength and struggle, “wisdom born of pain.” And yet despite that, it’s expansive and loving, and even equanimous in the battle of the sexes. “Such a long long way to go until I make my brother understand.” I have never, ever heard a feminist anything that referred to the male half of the world as “my brother,” or made the end goal of the movement “understanding.” This is not an angry song. If “I Am Woman” strikes as edgeless and uncontroversial now, that may be by design – most of its power comes from its sunny, undiluted optimism.
Maybe instead the problem is that it’s not exclusionary enough. Basically all songs about what “women” or “men” are like are too broad, and they all kind of rub me wrong. (I don’t even really like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” very much. Some girls just wanna study hard and focus on their careers. Where’s their song, Cyndi?) What right has Helen Reddy to try and speak for all women anyway? As the inter-feminist wars of the new millennium have shown, some women you just straight up don’t want to be in solidarity with. I first heard – really heard – “I Am Woman” as a song because of a radio DJ parody circa 2008 about Sarah Palin; it takes no stretch of the imagination at all to envision Sarah Palin singing “I Am Woman” sincerely. Can a song like “I Am Woman” retain any power if even Republican women can sing it? Could a song like that not be ruined when the “wrong” kind of women like it? The only notable recent cover of the song is by the cast of Sex and the City during the second movie (another astonishing work of white feminism, and here I do mean “white” as in “privileged and myopic”); what could possibly be more of a case against the song than that?
But could “I Am Woman” have worked if it hadn’t been that broad? One of the more fascinating quotes from Reddy about it was that her brother-in-law used it as a pump-up anthem to start his day. Is a song called “I Am Woman” any good if men like it?? That’s a stupid question, of course that doesn’t stop it from being good; how many white people have enjoyed songs by Black artists about civil rights? It’s easy to forget amongst the relentless doomerism of today that the movement represented by “I Am Woman” accomplished many great things. If “I Am Woman” can take credit for any of that, it would surely because it made female empowerment so palatable to so many.
I love “I Am Woman.” Unreservedly. I don’t know if a man’s endorsement is a point in its favor or not, but I can easily see why it was a hit. I’ve interrogated myself to see if I mean that in any kind of ironic way, but no, I don’t think I do, and I also don’t think its complicated place in history really adds or detracts anything; it’s just a killer song, its innate dorkiness included. It just builds, you know? I am STRONG (strong!!). I am INVINCIBLE (invincible!!). Even if you are not woman, it’s pretty easy to feel that. It’s not surprising to me that “I Am Woman” has become an irrelevant historical relic; the early optimism of women’s lib died out against an ugly backlash in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and most of the feminist anthems since then have been a lot more confrontational than the corny uplift of “I Am Woman.” Also, its production just hasn’t aged well. But “I Am Woman” imagines victory over the glass ceiling as not something to be fought for so much as something inevitable. “I Am Woman” failed in its attempts to be universal, not through any fault of its message but just by being cheesy and dated. There are worse crimes. I don't know if "I Am Woman" is a good song, but it is a perfect song -- a song that absolutely needed to exist.
Ugh, getting back into the groove after those exhausting top tens is always hard. I'm back, all right, I managed to finish a video. (This one is also a gift to someone who found me part of a missing Behind the Music.) As always, if you see any errors, lemme know.
I hate putting up the poll when I don't have a new video out yet but this one is IMPORTANT. It's our 100th episode!!!! We're doing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" vs. NIN's "Closer" so please please please vote now!
Martin Johnson is the frontman of Boys Like Girls, one of many emo-pop also-rans who lit up the mid-to-late 2000s with high-pitched vocals and lyrics about getting out of “this town.” Kirin J. Callinan is a musical shitposter from Australia most famous for “Big Enough,” the source of that meme with the screaming cowboy shrieking across the Australian landscape. Together, they are The Night Game… maybe. This is definitely not the kind of high-profile act I usually talk about, so I have scarce info since they’re not a very buzzed-about band (or even a band at all, from what I can tell; Callinan has since left to focus on his own career, leaving The Night Game as a solo project in all but name.)
But it might interest you to know that in the thirteen years since Boys Like Girls bit the dirt, Martin Johnson’s day job has been as an on-demand songwriter who has made some middling to decent radio hits, including such highs as Elle King’s “America’s Sweetheart” and such lows as Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty.” So he’s a music machine hack who used to be the singer for the poor man’s All-American Rejects. What music could he possibly make with Kirin J. Callinan, a wild and wacky artist who performs in his boxers and who I instinctively group with 100 gecs? Where do these two men intersect?
The Night Game proved itself as Martin Johnson’s baby immediately, because their first song was extremely commercial…. or at least, would have been once upon a time. Styles that are too mainstream often go unnoticed and unnamed, and thus the sound that The Night Game hearkens back to has no label. It’s related to new wave but it’s not new wave; it was self-serious, yearning, filled with glittering synths and clean guitars. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan once described the purveyors of this non-genre as men in “artfully billowy trench coats and lightly floofy haircuts” who “wanted to be Sting but had to settle for […] being vaguely reminiscent of Sting.” And indeed, Martin Johnson seems to have altered his singing style away from the ‘00s emo whine and towards a keening Sting imitation – or more accurately, an imitation of a Sting imitation. The Night Game’s first album sort of reveals them as a poor man’s The 1975, but The 1975’s nostalgia settles around a hipper brand of crossover ‘80s alternative, bands like Tears for Fears and INXS. “The Outfield” reminds of a more anonymous, much less cool scene, filled with nameless and forgotten bands like the Cutting Crew, Glass Tiger, and of course, The Outfield. The name of the song surely can’t be coincidence – not anymore than Mariah Carey jacking the entire vibe of “Best of My Love” by The Emotions and naming the song “Emotions.” It’s not like the song has a lot of baseball metaphors beyond the title. The guy from Boys Like Girls straight up made a loving tribute to The Outfield, of all fucking bands.
The Outfield’s most (and only) famous song, “Your Love,” may be the least interesting beloved song of the ‘80s. I run a whole show about one-hit wonders and I’ve never once considered covering it on there, even though I love that song just as much as everyone else. VH1 did not put it on their list of 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders, and when they narrowed the scope to 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of just the 1980s, they only put it at #59. “Your Love” is dated but not quite dated enough to be retro; it has no gimmicks, no particularly noteworthy lyrics, not much of anything that makes it a part of any nameable trend – it’s just a fucking bop and a half. I first heard it as a radio staple on the variety stations like Bob or Jack FM, a nice little tune that sounded catchy on the radio but merited no further thought. And yet, as ‘80s nostalgia overtook the world, “Your Love” slowly but surely surpassed the flashier hits of the decade like “I Ran” or “Too Shy” in people’s hearts.
The main thing that “Your Love” does really right, the reason it became such a big hit, is those soaring harmonies, and that’s something the Night Game nails here too. Really, it’s the thing that marks “The Outfield” as an Outfield homage and not just a song with the same name – the second you hear those wild and free background vocals shouting “Far awayyyyyyyy…” you know instantly what they’re going for. (By the way, those background vocals come from another legendary one-hit wonder, Gotye, in case you were wondering where he’d gotten off to. So Gotye, the guy from Boys Like Girls and the guy who made the screaming cowboy meme are all on a song together, and somehow no one knows about it.)
If it’s not clear, “The Outfield” by The Night Game fucking kicks ass – maybe my favorite discovery of the past few years. You can take it as just a regular pop song and as such it’s superb – immaculately produced, one of the best hooks I’ve heard, a perfect lyric tied up with longing and frustration just like the many songs that inspired it. (The chords never resolve, a surefire way to convey emotional blue balls.) But that’s the thing – the first thing you notice is those songs it’s copying, not the actual lyrics. It’s trying to evoke a style long dead and one that, give or take a few gems, mostly sucked. Why would any band in 2017 want to sound like Mike and the Mechanics?
Part of it is that Johnson is older himself – he can’t hit those screamo high notes like he did when he was eighteen – so naturally he has turned to a style which was distinctly performed by men and not boys (his “whoa-ohs” sound very much like Sting indeed). And of course it’s a vein of ‘80s nostalgia yet to be strip-mined, which are increasingly rare. But part of the reason is that this sound deserved to be resurrected. One of the things I really love about music is how time turns garbage to gold. This was a sound too stodgy to be new wave but not mature enough to be music for adults, not memorable enough to name. It was the middlebrow normie version of something that was actually cool. It was a Members Only jacket turned to sound. And slowly time strips away all but that small handful of gems.
Martin Johnson said he started the band because he just stopped enjoying making music for other people. It was work. The Night Game is for himself. It will probably never take off; Callinan has moved on, and the Night Game has not garnered much attention. Johnson will probably not be quitting his day job anytime soon (and indeed has not; last year he co-wrote Elle King’s “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home).”) Fitting that the band aping new wave’s sellout successors should wind up in the 1975’s shadow. And yet someday, like The Outfield, “The Outfield” will too see a second wind as people recognize for the brilliant song that it is.
The first time I heard Elvis sing “Trouble” it knocked my fucking teeth out. I don’t remember where or when it was – I was a kid, I know that, and I remember it was on TV. Probably one of my parents watching an Elvis retrospective on PBS or something. I’m gonna guess it was from the ’68 Comeback Special, which I’ve never actually watched; I’m watching it now and Elvis only sings it for 45 seconds as the intro of the show. “Trouble” was never a single, it only shows up on the most expansive of Elvis compilations, and its streams on Spotify are surprisingly meager (his 1970 single “I Just Can’t Help Believing,” which I’ve never heard of, puts up better numbers). But as the opening salvo of the greatest comeback in pop history, “Trouble” is indelibly etched into the Elvis legend. And as a little kid, decades after it was released, it blew my mind, largely because of one word: Evil. Evil. Because I’m e-ee-e-vil, my middle name is misery. I’d definitely heard cool characters brag about being “bad” by that point and understood how bad could sometimes mean good. But “evil”? Evil?? My eight-year-old brain was not prepared.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I read within the last couple years the King wasn’t trouble anymore; he was in trouble. Being the King of Rock & Roll meant nothing now that rock music had plummeted in relevance, and the Presley estate was working to move Elvis’s legacy to the more current sounds of pop and rap. Thus, this year’s megahyped biopic added hip-hop beats to his r&b-inflected early work, and mashed up “Viva Las Vegas” with Britney Spears’s “Toxic” (Britney herself performed “Trouble” during her own attempted comeback at the 2007 VMAs; that one didn’t go as well.) Director Baz Luhrmann loves his anachronisms, of course, but you can also see the heavy hand of brand management in it, too. Elvis’s equally deep connections to country music are completely ignored, and rock & roll, the music he helped birth, is all but forgotten.
But there is one scene where Elvis actually is the King of Rock and/or Roll, for my money the best scene in the movie and perhaps my favorite piece of media all year. Tired of the forces trying to water down his sound – the angry voices of segregation; his gun-shy and tasteless manager – Elvis violently and angrily shakes off his shackles at his 1956 concert in Russwood Park. All the cliches of the New Rock & Roll – the revolutionary rebellion of youth, the riotous mobs of screaming girls inspired by this new sound – are given new life through Baz’s shameless energy. The song that Elvis sings during this? Naturally, “Trouble.” Because he’s evil. Eeeeeeeevil.
This is not how the actual version of “Trouble” by the actual Elvis went. It wasn’t recorded and released until a couple years after his Russwood Park concert, by which point Elvis had already been drafted by the army. I’m no Elvis-ologist, but I think there’s a good chance that Elvis ’68 was literally the only time Presley performed it live. Before then, its only noteworthy appearance was its debut in the 1958 movie King Creole; a craggy gangster (played by an already-crotchety-and-old Walter Matthau) orders busboy Elvis, as an intimidation tactic, to get on stage and sing a song, and Elvis tears the place down with “Trouble” while Matthau glowers, upstaged.
In a lot of ways, the scenes from the two movies – “King Creole” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” – use the song the same way, Elvis embarrassing his antagonists with his sheer charisma. But the attitude is entirely different. The original “Trouble” is loose and funny, with a Dixieland jazz band swinging behind Elvis who puts on a goofy face and does a silly dance during the second-half breakdown. The version in the biopic is blues-ier, angrier, and Austin Butler as Elvis takes it in a much different direction. One writer called “Trouble” a proto-punk song, a take that I have real trouble (ho-ho) accepting. Elvis was so much of a threat because he didn’t seem to care who he pissed off; he was cocksure, swaggering, and too busy feeling himself to worry what any uptight squares thought of him. The man certainly inspired the punks, but he was no punk; he was a golden god.
That is not true in the movie, where Austin Butler performs the song with as much menace and venom as he can. Sure, the song is sex; Butler extends his mic stand suggestively and then drives the girlies crazy with his swinging hips. But towards the end, his thrusting somehow becomes less about sex and more about offense. Screeching feedback overwhelms the track. Butler grips the mic and screams, looking for all the world like Johnny Rotten rather than Elvis Presley. This is the rock & roll not of Elvis’s day but of the decades after; furious, violent, almost pleasure-less but cathartic in its rage.
It's exhilarating. But I struggle to square it with the actual man; of all the movie’s fictions, this is by far the least accurate to the spirit of Elvis. Elvis was never an angry performer; from his dynamic beginnings to his bloated tragic end, he was always a man enjoying himself on stage. “Trouble” is basically a song about how Elvis is a bad motherfucker you don’t mess with, but Elvis was always enjoying himself way too much to be threatening, or at least not threatening in that way. He’sevil, evil, evil as can be – the song is written to mean evil in the sense of violence and destruction, but that’s not how he sings it. He’s evil, meaning sinful; he won’t kill you, but he will corrupt your soul, and you’ll love it.
The way I reconcile it is by thinking about how David Milch had intended Deadwood to use only period-accurate language, but had to rewrite it into the legendarily profane show it was because the cursing of the 1870s no longer held any power to a modern audience, consarn it. “My daddy was a green-eyed mountain jack”; what the hell does that mean? There's a reason that Elvis led off the Comeback Special by announcing that he was trouble, evil, not one to mess around with; he had to put that killer's snarl back into his image after years as a simpering Hollywood phony. Perhaps Elvis had to become a snarling punk rocker for the audience to understand how dangerous he was. I heard one critic says that Elvis is a bad movie that some critics only liked because it gave them a chance to talk at length about Elvis. Maybe so. (The counter-takes about Tom Hanks’s performance being Good Actually is a road I can’t follow.) But the fact that the movie was such a big hit, and revitalized the Elvis legend so successfully, surely indicates something about what the movie does right. Arguably the song itself – both versions of it – devolves into ridiculousness, the band just going nuts while Elvis shouting the word “evil” over and over again while doing a touchdown dance over his haters. Who better to capture that chaotic energy than Baz Luhrmann?
/edit: Now with ending! As most of you pointed out, it ended up abruptly about a minute early. I am fixing this as we speak. If the video is not working right now, that's because it's still converting; just check back in ten or twenty minutes, or possibly a little bit longer because the video is humongous and will take a bit to upload
I am very tired. I have to fly to Virginia tomorrow from California. Please check for my errors, and any at all that you see I will try to fix before I leave tomorrow afternoon. If there are things I cannot fix before I leave, then this video won't be uploaded to YouTube for a week.
Especially, especially, if you see weird cuts where i cut a frame too early or an audio level that's too low or too high, please say something
As always, I will need your help in getting the votes up for SvS, where we are doing a doozy, "As It Was" by Harry Styles vs. Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero." Is this a hint for the best list or worst list? Who knows? https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-as-it-75544478
Anyway, yes, I am working on the worst list. These are always the hardest videos of the year (and they happen during the most stressful time of year!). If you want to know why, it's because I have to pick ten songs and for some of them I haven't really thought about them except "I really like this one" or "I don't really like this one." There's always a couple of them in there! But I think this one's coming along a little quicker than last year's, which was a bit of a tortured process. I've decided to be a little more expansive in what I consider a "hit" this year, which does make it a bit easier. Anyway, I'm working on it fast as I can! Be done soon, hopefully.
Fun fact: I don't give out requests anymore, but someone found me a copy of an obscure hip-hop documentary I'd been looking for, so I gave them a request out of gratitude. Here we go!
Anyway, please catch any mistakes I made, because stupidity is no excuse for sloppiness. And as always vote in the Song vs. Song poll, where we're doing "Footloose" vs. "Flashdance... What a Feeling" https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-vs-what-74447416
