PRE-DURST
The Breeders: “Saints”
You probably had a game like The Hat Game when you were in eighth grade. The one rule of The Hat Game was: My girlfriend stole my hat a lot, and most of the time it would wind up in her bra, and then I would have to go get it. The hat in question was a winter hat (what Canadians might call a toque, I gather) with some trains on it, and being 1996, I considered it the height of alternafashion. (Especially after I saw a picture of Thurston Moore wearing something sort of similar.) As a result I got way defensive of the train hat and way, way butthurt whenever people yanked it off my head. On top of this, the girl who invented The Hat Game was liable to scratching and biting — not the male-gazey porny kind you can sell stereos with, but in that very specific “awkward-about-ones-own-body” way that resembles nothing so much as a cornered opossum. The “down the bra” gambit, rather than being a coy highway to third base, was, in actuality, a clever ruse designed to get me within a clawable range. The Hat Game was not very fun, I guess is what I’m saying.
A summer later, she and I broke it off — I maintained custody of the train hat — and I started dating a girl who liked soccer and Everclear and wasn’t so much into needless physical violence. One of the first weeks into this new relationship, we were lying in a hammock at a party, and this song came on, and I had a little bubble of accidental wisdom: “Wow, it is so much more fun to date somebody who isn’t constantly trying to draw blood from my face.”
The Cranberries: “Dreams”
Oops, I just tried (again) to imagine marrying somebody who didn’t know how good this song was when you were a little drunk and (again) I couldn’t.Weezer: “El Scorcho”
One of the most lasting criticisms I’ve heard of Weezer goes something like: “Their current output is so bad as to actively discolor my fond memories of their first two records,” which is pithy enough to be an effective jab, but is probably only true if you weren’t a walking rock tumbler of horomones when Pinkerton came out. I was in seventh grade when I bought the first Weezer album and was neck-deep in girl trouble by the time the second arrived, which means that Weezer’s inversion from “major-key songs about hanging out” to “minor-key songs about girl problems” synced up exactly with my pastimes as they themselves shifted to accomodate all the awkward sidepipe I was suddenly pushing. To wit:
The first time I heard this song was during a late-night drama club rehearsal in middle school; somebody had come to school with a first-day copy of Pinkerton and was passing a Discman around for everybody who wasn’t blocking scenes to hear. Finally it came to me, and when I put the headphones on, two extremely important things happened. The first of those things was “Tired of Sex,” which might have the best bratty keyboard part on the planet — better than “Just What I Needed;” better than Brainiac’s “Nothing Ever Changes” — and whose title was actually shocking to me, probably in the way BrokenCYDE is shocking to 30 year-olds now: You can get tired of sex? You — no you can’t! And at that moment, as in some sort of karmic call-and-response, the second thing that happened to me was the bare foot suddenly curling up my leg, courtesy of the person sitting across from me. I looked up, horny to the point of terror, and sure enough — a ridiculously pretty girl I’d been awkwardly flirting at for months was sitting there, giving me the sort of weapons-grade coquettish glance you don’t even know exists until you’re fifteen.
I am sure that I tried to play it off cool, which must have been like watching a dog try to rap. It’s hard to reciprocate something as ungainly as a leg rub, especially when you’re wearing sneakers and don’t want to jam an eyelet into somebody’s thigh meat, but it’s even harder when your second-period English teacher is scanning the room for insolence, and then doubly so when said leg is attached to somebody whose eyeballs are somehow handing the word “blowjob” directly to your cerebral cortex. Finally — probably something like ninety seconds later — my choices were split between “ejaculate immediately” versus “take this party somewhere else,” which is when I stood up, oh-so-carefully held my book bag in front of my waist, and asked the girl if she’d like to accompany me to my locker. And she accepted.
There are scores of anecdotes that start like this and end with the phrase “up against a locker,” and if I were a different person this would certainly be one of them. But instead, somewhere between the lunchroom and my earth science textbook, I completely and totally chickened out. I’m sure it was a combination of things — a fear of getting caught by a custodian with my paws up somebody’s shirt; the improbable chance that I had somehow misread her signals — it’s also entirely likely that I was dating somebody else at the time and good sense hadn’t been able to scream louder than my balls until I’d walked off the footsie a little. Whatever the case, when we got to my locker, I kept my head down, opened it, pretended to look for something, and then, unable to look her in the eye, walked her back to drama club. And there, putting the Discman back on, feeling like an oily, hamfisted ape, simultaneously wishing for sex and death — that’s when I hit “El Scorcho.”
This is what “El Scorcho” and Pinkerton at large get right, moreso than any songs which have followed in their footsteps: They’re laments, and they’re a little whiny, but they’re also a little funny. Being a human being is a ridiculous proposition, and even when we want to lie down in traffic, we’re usually also laughing at ourselves a little. Excepting real tragedy, nothing is so bad when you’re fifteen that you can’t turn around and clown your friend a minute later, and having a narrative voice which acknowledges how bad it is not to kiss who you want to kiss as well as the patent humor of being alive and tender is far more useful than one which just amplifies the two poles of “horrible” and “wonderful.” That’s what’s so valuable and so lasting about this song, and this record, and this band; that when you get back from making a colossal ass of yourself, something is there to say, “Jesus christ — that was ridiculous!”
Rusted Root: “Send Me On My Way”
If you were really lucky at sixteen you managed to date somebody older who could drive, and all of a sudden your life after school kickflipped itself into a newer, more perfect shape. Almost like you’d Gamesharked your actual life, as soon as the clock hit three you suddenly had the power to go anywhere and do anything with somebody who would let you kiss on them. You didn’t have to wheedle your parents to lug you across town every time you wanted to make out for more than two minutes (and you knew they knew that’s what you were doing) and you could take weekend trips to go record shopping and bum around college towns. I don’t want to wax too reminiscent about this but the divide between being a high school shithead-about-town with and without a car is so massive if you grew up someplace tiny and boring that I actually don’t think I could overstate its importance. And you know how much I love overstatement.
On top of that — and here’s where I loop this back around to the topic at hand — this was the first chance some people had to really lash cars and music together. Don’t pretend you don’t know how important playing music in the car is when you’re colt-legged and fresh to the highway, because you do. Dating older people usually affords an opportunity to hear something new and exciting, and I’m sure there are people who have stories about their night-school-busboy dropout boyfriends cranking “Bastards of Young” or their second-year-senior girlfriends digging a Christian Death tape out from a pile of black jeans. Well, not me, friends; I got Rusted Root. Coming back up from Noho on Rt. 9 through Ware, Rusted Root was there. Driving blind and kissing on the back roads behind the high school, Rusted Root was also there. Parking behind the textile mill and trying to fit two bodies in one seat: Rusted Root held court over my shirtless, trembling form. Carfaxing the Volkswagen Fox in question probably brings up a line item like “CAR PASSES INSPECTION, BUT DRIVER MAY BECOME SUSCEPTIBLE TO BUYING TABLAS AND ANDEAN PONCHOS.”
A decade later, pawing through the wistful mists of time, here’s what I’ve decided: I don’t like this band, and I don’t like this song, but I love listening to this song. Which is to say: I dislike it in the abstract, and I dislike its consituent parts, but I love when it’s actually put in my ears. Watching these guys raindance around somebody’s backyard in Arizona and wiggle their little panflutes makes me want to headbutt them all, but I’m on listen number eleven of this song and I don’t want it to end. So this is a reminder to myself that songs and bands (and &c.) can play various roles in our lives — sometimes oppositely so; sometimes simultaneously so — and also a reminder to myself that the most unlikely things can become meaningful to us if we’re honest with ourselves and we keep our senses alert. It’s easy to get jaded and ornery and pretend like we’re the arbiters and keepers of our own taste, but it’s so much more useful and interesting to a step back and self-assess. Here: “The worst single of 1995 makes me feel young and excited and weirdly horny.” OK, now you go.
Natalie Merchant: “Carnival”
Forget how ubiquitous this sort of bongo-heavy overproduced convertible-rock used to be at your own peril; this sort of song was absolutely everywhere back in the day and the fact that you aren’t immediately agreeing with me is a factor of how wonderful our memories are at cherry-picking. The clutch thing about Natalie “Plus 9,999 Other Maniacs, I Guess” Merchant was how easily it fit her; you could tell Jakob Dylan always wanted to do a bump and kick over a Sovtek fullstack instead of riding a bass groove and speak-singing about car problems, but Natalie Merchant definitely owns an entire cupboard full of different types of tea and definitely knows all about how to use interlibrary loan.
And I’m not even really being fair because this song is alright. This song plus “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone” and “One Of Us” and “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” and “Roll To Me” was total fucking overload and no wonder we yanked the radio volume way up as soon as we heard a DoD grunge, but by itself it’s making me feel less stressed out and now I want a collection of Gogol short stories and a coffee that costs six dollars and a nap. Not that correlation is causation but you know what I mean.
Either way, I know this one thing: There certainly were a lot of songs in 1995 about hating your parents, your authority figures (e.g. the math teacher), and most of all, yourself — but there weren’t that many songs about straight up liking someone, at least not undraped with histrionics. So when you thought about a nice girl with twinkly eyes and the jitters started to float up in your stomach you might well have thought about this song as accompaniment, especially if she was into team sports and not Manic Panic and therefore uneligible for a mixtape leading off with Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bodies.” Therefore I guess I’m making the completely insubstantiatable claim that this song means more to you than you yourself remember. How’s that for some Wednesday sass.
K-Ci & JoJo: “All My Life”
Put this on and try not to immediately feel like you’re getting passed over at the winter formal. This thing is so treacly I don’t think I could sit through it on the regular, but it’s custom-made for trying to encircle a babe’s waist with sweaty ham paws, so much so that I have an irresistable urge to slug some Fanta out of a plastic cup and go get bummed out in front of some stowed-away bleachers. Listening to it on headphones at work I can’t stop thinking, “can this song actually be four whole minutes long?” Which is funny, because in every single other memory I have of this jam it goes on forever, my fingers digging a knot of tulle into the small of an electric back, as I pray, pray as devoutly as I can, to keep from seesawing the world’s biggest hard-on into a poor girl’s solar plexus. Aw christ now I’ve got a half-chub at my desk. BRB I gotta deal with this.Mark Morrison: “Return of the Mack”
I was going to talk about how if Kermit the Frog were to do a rendition of this song, I’d have a very difficult time differentiating the two, I imagine. But in lieu of offering my own extended commentary on this song/video, I want to simply let the users of MySpace.com have their voices heard because they sum it up pretty well:
“Gumby”: If ya fall in love & she brakes ya heart don’t let it keep ya down, let her know you were a man all along. Just keep ya head up & mac up ya life. She’ll see all she missed out on. Every dream you said you wanna have made come true… Accomplish them, she’ll see how hurtin you only hurt her.
“Daniel”: reminder when shit gets rough, man tha fuc up, grab life by the balls, and proceed wit the mackin. one
“Mr. Frausto”: Any bad times this song will always cheer me up.because i am a mack and i will return
“Ceaz”: a yo dis shit rad
The youth of America, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Downset: “Anger”
In the early days of pining for girls I thought it so improbable that I’d ever actually land a girlfriend that I started making in-jokes about it in my diary. As a result, when I hit junior high and actually started to date a girl from my science class, I was completely dumbfounded about what to do. “I guess I should take her to a nice restaurant,” I thought. “Maybe I should get her a… a necklace?” So we sat together at lunch and awkwardly ate sandwiches at each other, until she got sick of it and asked me if I’d write her a note. A note! Shit, I could do that. I loved to write! I was twelve pages deep into a fantasy novel about a talking stick and a space goat; a note would be no problem.
But then I sat down and realized: I didn’t know anything about this girl. I knew that she was pretty and liked soccer — wait, I think it was soccer. Maybe it was floor hockey? Shit. Maybe the note should be about what she likes? No, no, I didn’t want to come off totally clueless. I’d been dating her a week; there were things I should probably have picked up on by then. Staring at the blank page, I turned on the radio, which was somehow playing Downset’s “Anger,” a song I don’t think I’ve heard even once since then. The stupid little chorused vocal part started up, and it somehow managed to serve as momentum, and I started writing the note.
And here’s where I made my mistake; I mistook the easy buoyancy of a song with an old-fashioned 4/4 jud jud for a way into my girlfriend’s favor. “Well, I’ll just write these lyrics down on the side so she knows I’m a cool dude who loves music,” I must have reasoned. And so, amidst two pages of absolute nothing, jotted in the margins and inserted inline, decorating the whitespace around the paragraph where I inexplicably asked her to call me by the nickname “Sugar,” I wrote the lyrics to this song. And, as is the case even today, the only lyrics I could make out were:
ANGER!
HOSTILITY TOWARDS THE OPPOSITION!!!!
AAAAANGEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The next day, I handed her the note (carefully folded into a paper football, a trick I had learned from one of my female friends). A few days later, she lied and told me her mother wasn’t allowing her to date anyone. Three years later, my friend Scott, who played junior varsity hockey, told me she had asked him out the same day. And now, thirteen years later, I’m listening to this song for maybe the second time ever in my life, and all things considered, I only have one question: Why did I think this song would make me seem cool?
Juliana Hatfield: “Universal Heart-Beat”
Music might have been the first thing outside of my own immediate life I ever gave myself over to — up until I discovered the radio, the things I was really into were things that were introduced to me (e.g., all the games on the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo we had kicking around) or things which I had created myself (e.g., the 400 comic books I drew during 4th and 5th grade). We didn’t have cable in my house and never really went to see any movies, so I guess that was my first and most significant experience with allowing an outside force to imprint itself on my fresh little brain. So with this in mind I guess my question is: Is it significant that, during that period, every single good song hitting my tender brain — and the brains of countless others — was about being miserable?
Now that I’ve said that, let me yank the wheel away from Rob Gordon-level sophomorism before this starts to look like a bad Livejournal. I don’t mean to imply that, Pavlov-like, a generation of people in the working world snap to bummers whenever we hear an Am7, and I don’t mean that the Me Generation is predisposed to showing up to work without having showered because, like, the music made us that way, man. As youth once held dear to the Stones or Zep or Sabbath or Depeche Mode so did they to Alice in Chains. But a whole bunch of us learned how to sort out what being straight bummed out was with authorial voices that all shared similar traits — the canonized musicians from the early-to-mid 90’s all tended to be frank and upfront about feeling wrong, and then why they felt wrong, without feeling a need to offer a solution or discuss redemption. The climaxes of songs-as-narratives all happened musically; rare’s the lyric that didn’t chase its own tail until it had purged to satisfaction, and then ended. Wide brushes and wide strokes here, I know, but I don’t think I’m wrong.
So I’m wondering how that impacts how people my age react to feeling low themselves. When you observe a toolkit being used by others, I think the urge, counter to what groups of concerned parents might have you believe, is to ape the use of that kit, rather than to subscribe to its product. I don’t think it’s accidental that everybody in my age range is interested in the Internet as a tool for data propogation — and I certainly don’t think that its mere existence is explanation enough. When we have a strong feeling, the impulse is to take it out of ourselves and put it somewhere it can be shared. Take A Bummer, Leave A Bummer.
I guess I say all that to say this: I loved this song when I was fifteen. I loved it so much, and then I got dumped, and my immediate reaction was to make a t-shirt with the chorus on it and wear it around. And that’s part and parcel of the experience of being fifteen (although the Sharpie-on-Beefy-T might itself be distinctly of an era), no harm, no foul; I’ve worn dumber things in my life and I’m sure the unwashed shoulder-length hair was already doing its own part to typify me as somebody who needed to relax a little. But I’ve had such a bad month this month, as an adult with a job and an apartment and bills, and I woke up this morning with the dun yaw still in my chest, and I swear to god, upon rising I went to my closet to look for that shirt. And now I’m writing about that experience on the internet, tacking the chorus at the top like a slogan. So either I’m onto something here, or I really need to get over myself. Either way.
