Republican Music Police
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Keep in mind I wrote this while incredibly hungover
1. Guns ‘N’ Roses - Appetite for Destruction (1987)
I already wrote about this album:
appetite
2. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
The debate could go on for about forever: What’s Bob’s best opening track? Is it All I Really Wanna Do off Another Side of Bob Dylan? Is it the title track off The Times They Are A Changin? Is it Subterranean Homesick Blues off Bringing It All Back Home? Is it Hurricane off Desire? Most likely these undoubtedly great tracks are merely red herrings, calling attention from the two great album openers of all time, the two greatest in the entire genre of popular music - Tangled Up in Blue and Like a Rolling Stone. Give Rolling Stone the nod for the way it redefined pop music. For this, a track with a complex rhyme structure, puzzling storyline, and an organ that comes in JUST late, to chart as high as it did is mind boggling. This wasn’t the first electric album Dylan ever made (give that nod to Bringing It All Back Home) but it was the first time he really exploded off the vinyl (with apologies to the, sigh, chrysalic Subterranean). And the electric sound wasn’t the only thing perfected on Highway - as he began moving away from expository lyrics on Home towards the obtuse, he still had tendencies to bog the listener down in what’s not understood. On Highway, it’s all unapparent, an unapologetically so - that is, listening to this album is like having your ear against the door of some secret meeting of some secret people who understand some secret you never will.
Take, for instance, Ballad of a Thin Man, where Dylan sings to some third party (not US, how COULD it be?) “You know something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” The implication is that the aforementioned Mr. Jones must be a royal moron not to know what’s happening. You would not likely want to face the same disdain but wait - what in the fuck is going on in the song? Dylan sings “You walk into the room/ With your pencil in your hand/ You see somebody naked and you say/ Who is that man?/ You (ha) try so hard, but you don’t understand/ Just what you will say when you get home.” Was there a time when you’d have to be a square to be as surprised as Mr. Jones? But this feeling of the outsider (by, ironically, being a part of mainstream society) is what the album accomplishes. Take Queen Jane Approximately, reportedly about Joan Baez’s disgust at Bob’s goodbye to the folk scene. The kiss-off of the song makes you feel like an eavesdropper, listening to a very private conversation, filled with inside jokes and outside references. But as good as Bob is when he’s saying confusing things, he’s even better when he’s saying very simple things, like on the spectacular It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, where he sings wholeheartedly, “I wanna be your lover baby, I don’t wanna be your boss.”
Really, the only thing you could possibly take issue with on this album is how long Desolation Row is. Trim it to 6 or 7 minutes and this would be the most perfect piece of music ever recorded (though still not quite as good as Appetite)
3. Jawbreaker - 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993)
Read AMG’s review of this album and let it sink in how flippantly it’s praised. It’s compared to a goddamned episode of Melrose Place for chrissake. I would contend that this is the ultimate fulfillment of punk rock, and most people who have listened to this album, I mean, really listened, would be hard-pressed to argue, no matter how much they worship at the church of Joe Strummer or Joey Ramone or Paul Westerberg or Henry Rollins or Bob Mould or (sigh) Johnny Rotten. As many wrinkles as those artists had, and as much as those wrinkles were part of the ethic, Blake and Adam and Chris understand it all, I think. They combine everything good about punk rock and get it right for just one album.
What is most impressive about Jawbreaker is how ultimately literary Blake Schwarzenbach’s lyrics are, but how conscious he is not to let them undermine the music. Yes, Condition Oakland culminates in a 2 minute interlude punctuated by Kerouac quotes, but at the same time the band can rip off three chord screamers like Indictment, where he sings, quite wryly, “I just wrote the dumbest song/ It’s gonna be a sing along,” then goes on to say, “So crazy it just might work/ Then we’ll quit our jobs/ we could be the next group that you rob.” You almost are tempted to point out how self-fulfilling this was with the stink of Dear You still on his breath even 3 Jets To Brazil albums later. But then you realize they didn’t make too much money off that LP and you can’t even use context to bring the song down. Boxcar’s become a punk staple, with its chorus of “1,2,3,4 who’s punk what’s the score?” but most scenesters covering this song forget that Jawbreaker was a band that played in t-shirts and jeans with nary a mohawk among them.
What this album does best, however, is not in its self-referential ribbing. It’s in the endlessly dense metaphors and sincere storytelling. One of my favorite songs in the history of pop music (up there with Buddy Holly’s Rollercoaster and The Zombies’ She’s Not There, oddly), West Bay Invitational, tells the simple story of Blake and his friends throwing a party so he has an excuse to invite and hook up with a girl. As much as my friend Joe claims this is an excuse for intro to creative writing level prose, I contend that some of the lyrics are as amazing for their simplicity as for their earnestness. For instance, when Blake sings, “I bought a rose and suit with the pants pegged/ you said you smelled me twice today/ someone was passing out somewhere,” the devil is in the details. When he howls ever so breathlessly, “We kissed a shot of Kentucky straight/ I swore this life was worth the wait,” it’s one of the greater moments in pop music. The closing chorus is a stroke of genius too,conveying the desperation of the invitation by repeating, “we’re having a party, please come,” ad nauseum.
And this album is full of great moments like this. The track listing, like on After the Goldrush, reads like the album highlights list - Do You Still Hate Me, Ashtray Monument, Jinx Removing, Ache,Outpatient, Condition Oakland, and on and on. Nearly a 1.000 batting average. A phenomenal album. A sentimental favorite, if not as good as the other two ahead of it.
4. Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
I just now realized I left The Bends off this list. I can deal with that. Really I can. The album is enjoyable but has its shortcomings. Not so for OK. Forget Nirvana, none of their albums defined their generations the way this one did. Am I overstating or revisionist historicizing? Perhaps, but what this album did was legitimatize alternative rock (and also signal its death). While Nevermind and the other grunge albums, along with Definitely Maybe, and a few other seminal 90’s albums, were critically lauded, they were looked at as interesting curiosities - as small wonderments that little teenagers who had heard the great rock stars could copy them (in Nirvana’s case, the Pixies and the Beatles, in Pearl Jam and Soundgarden’s case, Led Zeppelin, in STP’s case, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, in Oasis’s case…well…) etc. etc. but never as great works of rock and roll judged on their own merit. Even Nirvana, who was seen as a great rock band, was always lauded for the fact that they defined the subsequent genre of music rather than their own individual accomplishments. But OK Computer immediately took its place among the great albums of all time.
I read an interview in Rolling Stone a long long time ago where one of Pearl Jam’s guitar player ( I forget if it was Stone Gossard or the other guy, McCready or whater?) railed against classic rock format radio stations, saying if they had any balls they’d start playing songs from this album and forego the 20 year buffer period generally accorded songs. Sure. As excessive as that statement seems, songs off OK Computer belong aside songs by (ugh) U2 and Zeppelin and for God’s sake The Beatles. Radiohead, despite being influenced stttttrongly by, among other bands, the Cure, the Pixies, Pink Floyd, and REM, you could never say Radiohead SOUNDS like any of them. Thank Thom Yorke’s incredibly unique vocal style for that. The best comparison you could make would be to say he sounds like a keyed down Freddie Mercury. Or in other words, Freddie Mercury without the self-parody. But it’s not quite fair to give Yorke all the credit - Johnny Greenwood’s guitar work is unlike most anyone’s in the music industry…David Gilmour without the manufactured sound, perhaps. Or in other words, David Gilmour without the self-parody. Nevertheless, I’m sick of talking about the ethos of all these fucking albums. Let’s talk about the songs.
Airbag has one of the best low-e string guitar riffs I’ve ever heard, putting Day Tripper and Whole Lotta Love to shame. Paranoid Android makes something useful out of Happiness is a Warm Gun and transcends the IDEA to become one of the most moving songs ever written about Gucci little piggies. Subterranean Homesick Alien is a subtle, virtuoso piece of songwriting. Exit Music makes something useful out of Baz Luhrman’s R&J, culminating in one of the most soaring pieces of vocal instrumentalization since, God, I can’t even think of anything to rival the “now we are one,” segment. We hope that you choke is one of the most ridiculous lines ever penned to sound as legitimate as it does. Let Down blends REM and emo somehow making it clear that these are two very separate distinctions. Karma Police is, gasp, a single that actually did something on the charts (go figure) despite talking about Hitler hairdos and buzzing like a fridge(whatever the fuck that means). Fitter Happier succeds extraordinarily well given the nature of the “song” (computer voice reading beat poetry while Greenwood’s guitar makes horrible horrible noises). Electioneering falters, but Climbing Up The Walls, No Surprises, and Lucky rescue the album in tremendous fashion. I might have wished for Lucky to end the album, or even No Surprises’ “Siiiiilent” to be the close, but you could do a lot worse than The Tourist.
This album got me through the wretched period of music that typified the late 90’s and early 00’s (which continues to this very day). For that, and for everything it does so goddamned well, it merits mention among the best records ever made.
5. Jeff Buckley - Grace (1994)
It is my opinion that Jeff Buckley has the best voice in pop music and this album has so many powerful songs that it carries whatever shortcomings it has along with it to the top 5.
I already wrote about this album:
appetite
2. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
The debate could go on for about forever: What’s Bob’s best opening track? Is it All I Really Wanna Do off Another Side of Bob Dylan? Is it the title track off The Times They Are A Changin? Is it Subterranean Homesick Blues off Bringing It All Back Home? Is it Hurricane off Desire? Most likely these undoubtedly great tracks are merely red herrings, calling attention from the two great album openers of all time, the two greatest in the entire genre of popular music - Tangled Up in Blue and Like a Rolling Stone. Give Rolling Stone the nod for the way it redefined pop music. For this, a track with a complex rhyme structure, puzzling storyline, and an organ that comes in JUST late, to chart as high as it did is mind boggling. This wasn’t the first electric album Dylan ever made (give that nod to Bringing It All Back Home) but it was the first time he really exploded off the vinyl (with apologies to the, sigh, chrysalic Subterranean). And the electric sound wasn’t the only thing perfected on Highway - as he began moving away from expository lyrics on Home towards the obtuse, he still had tendencies to bog the listener down in what’s not understood. On Highway, it’s all unapparent, an unapologetically so - that is, listening to this album is like having your ear against the door of some secret meeting of some secret people who understand some secret you never will.
Take, for instance, Ballad of a Thin Man, where Dylan sings to some third party (not US, how COULD it be?) “You know something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” The implication is that the aforementioned Mr. Jones must be a royal moron not to know what’s happening. You would not likely want to face the same disdain but wait - what in the fuck is going on in the song? Dylan sings “You walk into the room/ With your pencil in your hand/ You see somebody naked and you say/ Who is that man?/ You (ha) try so hard, but you don’t understand/ Just what you will say when you get home.” Was there a time when you’d have to be a square to be as surprised as Mr. Jones? But this feeling of the outsider (by, ironically, being a part of mainstream society) is what the album accomplishes. Take Queen Jane Approximately, reportedly about Joan Baez’s disgust at Bob’s goodbye to the folk scene. The kiss-off of the song makes you feel like an eavesdropper, listening to a very private conversation, filled with inside jokes and outside references. But as good as Bob is when he’s saying confusing things, he’s even better when he’s saying very simple things, like on the spectacular It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, where he sings wholeheartedly, “I wanna be your lover baby, I don’t wanna be your boss.”
Really, the only thing you could possibly take issue with on this album is how long Desolation Row is. Trim it to 6 or 7 minutes and this would be the most perfect piece of music ever recorded (though still not quite as good as Appetite)
3. Jawbreaker - 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993)
Read AMG’s review of this album and let it sink in how flippantly it’s praised. It’s compared to a goddamned episode of Melrose Place for chrissake. I would contend that this is the ultimate fulfillment of punk rock, and most people who have listened to this album, I mean, really listened, would be hard-pressed to argue, no matter how much they worship at the church of Joe Strummer or Joey Ramone or Paul Westerberg or Henry Rollins or Bob Mould or (sigh) Johnny Rotten. As many wrinkles as those artists had, and as much as those wrinkles were part of the ethic, Blake and Adam and Chris understand it all, I think. They combine everything good about punk rock and get it right for just one album.
What is most impressive about Jawbreaker is how ultimately literary Blake Schwarzenbach’s lyrics are, but how conscious he is not to let them undermine the music. Yes, Condition Oakland culminates in a 2 minute interlude punctuated by Kerouac quotes, but at the same time the band can rip off three chord screamers like Indictment, where he sings, quite wryly, “I just wrote the dumbest song/ It’s gonna be a sing along,” then goes on to say, “So crazy it just might work/ Then we’ll quit our jobs/ we could be the next group that you rob.” You almost are tempted to point out how self-fulfilling this was with the stink of Dear You still on his breath even 3 Jets To Brazil albums later. But then you realize they didn’t make too much money off that LP and you can’t even use context to bring the song down. Boxcar’s become a punk staple, with its chorus of “1,2,3,4 who’s punk what’s the score?” but most scenesters covering this song forget that Jawbreaker was a band that played in t-shirts and jeans with nary a mohawk among them.
What this album does best, however, is not in its self-referential ribbing. It’s in the endlessly dense metaphors and sincere storytelling. One of my favorite songs in the history of pop music (up there with Buddy Holly’s Rollercoaster and The Zombies’ She’s Not There, oddly), West Bay Invitational, tells the simple story of Blake and his friends throwing a party so he has an excuse to invite and hook up with a girl. As much as my friend Joe claims this is an excuse for intro to creative writing level prose, I contend that some of the lyrics are as amazing for their simplicity as for their earnestness. For instance, when Blake sings, “I bought a rose and suit with the pants pegged/ you said you smelled me twice today/ someone was passing out somewhere,” the devil is in the details. When he howls ever so breathlessly, “We kissed a shot of Kentucky straight/ I swore this life was worth the wait,” it’s one of the greater moments in pop music. The closing chorus is a stroke of genius too,conveying the desperation of the invitation by repeating, “we’re having a party, please come,” ad nauseum.
And this album is full of great moments like this. The track listing, like on After the Goldrush, reads like the album highlights list - Do You Still Hate Me, Ashtray Monument, Jinx Removing, Ache,Outpatient, Condition Oakland, and on and on. Nearly a 1.000 batting average. A phenomenal album. A sentimental favorite, if not as good as the other two ahead of it.
4. Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
I just now realized I left The Bends off this list. I can deal with that. Really I can. The album is enjoyable but has its shortcomings. Not so for OK. Forget Nirvana, none of their albums defined their generations the way this one did. Am I overstating or revisionist historicizing? Perhaps, but what this album did was legitimatize alternative rock (and also signal its death). While Nevermind and the other grunge albums, along with Definitely Maybe, and a few other seminal 90’s albums, were critically lauded, they were looked at as interesting curiosities - as small wonderments that little teenagers who had heard the great rock stars could copy them (in Nirvana’s case, the Pixies and the Beatles, in Pearl Jam and Soundgarden’s case, Led Zeppelin, in STP’s case, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, in Oasis’s case…well…) etc. etc. but never as great works of rock and roll judged on their own merit. Even Nirvana, who was seen as a great rock band, was always lauded for the fact that they defined the subsequent genre of music rather than their own individual accomplishments. But OK Computer immediately took its place among the great albums of all time.
I read an interview in Rolling Stone a long long time ago where one of Pearl Jam’s guitar player ( I forget if it was Stone Gossard or the other guy, McCready or whater?) railed against classic rock format radio stations, saying if they had any balls they’d start playing songs from this album and forego the 20 year buffer period generally accorded songs. Sure. As excessive as that statement seems, songs off OK Computer belong aside songs by (ugh) U2 and Zeppelin and for God’s sake The Beatles. Radiohead, despite being influenced stttttrongly by, among other bands, the Cure, the Pixies, Pink Floyd, and REM, you could never say Radiohead SOUNDS like any of them. Thank Thom Yorke’s incredibly unique vocal style for that. The best comparison you could make would be to say he sounds like a keyed down Freddie Mercury. Or in other words, Freddie Mercury without the self-parody. But it’s not quite fair to give Yorke all the credit - Johnny Greenwood’s guitar work is unlike most anyone’s in the music industry…David Gilmour without the manufactured sound, perhaps. Or in other words, David Gilmour without the self-parody. Nevertheless, I’m sick of talking about the ethos of all these fucking albums. Let’s talk about the songs.
Airbag has one of the best low-e string guitar riffs I’ve ever heard, putting Day Tripper and Whole Lotta Love to shame. Paranoid Android makes something useful out of Happiness is a Warm Gun and transcends the IDEA to become one of the most moving songs ever written about Gucci little piggies. Subterranean Homesick Alien is a subtle, virtuoso piece of songwriting. Exit Music makes something useful out of Baz Luhrman’s R&J, culminating in one of the most soaring pieces of vocal instrumentalization since, God, I can’t even think of anything to rival the “now we are one,” segment. We hope that you choke is one of the most ridiculous lines ever penned to sound as legitimate as it does. Let Down blends REM and emo somehow making it clear that these are two very separate distinctions. Karma Police is, gasp, a single that actually did something on the charts (go figure) despite talking about Hitler hairdos and buzzing like a fridge(whatever the fuck that means). Fitter Happier succeds extraordinarily well given the nature of the “song” (computer voice reading beat poetry while Greenwood’s guitar makes horrible horrible noises). Electioneering falters, but Climbing Up The Walls, No Surprises, and Lucky rescue the album in tremendous fashion. I might have wished for Lucky to end the album, or even No Surprises’ “Siiiiilent” to be the close, but you could do a lot worse than The Tourist.
This album got me through the wretched period of music that typified the late 90’s and early 00’s (which continues to this very day). For that, and for everything it does so goddamned well, it merits mention among the best records ever made.
5. Jeff Buckley - Grace (1994)
It is my opinion that Jeff Buckley has the best voice in pop music and this album has so many powerful songs that it carries whatever shortcomings it has along with it to the top 5.
posted by Chris W # 11:09 PM 
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