Class and Risk: Nirvana's In Bloom

At the inception of what might be called the “Rock Era,” the period of time during which rock music occupied (or continues to occupy) a niche as a predominant cultural form, it was taken for granted that rock music was the province of working class men: made by those from modest backgrounds, covering themes dear to working class hearts (sex, poverty, and loneliness, for starters), and which may or may not have been enjoyed by middle-class youths. Variations appeared as rock blossomed into an intermittently major art form in the 1960s: though the Beatles appeared to be working class, shrewd insiders noted that John Lennon had solid middle-class roots; Brian Jones, who founded the Rolling Stones, was also the product of a middle-class upbringing; Bob Dylan grew up middle-class. It became de rigueur for middle-class youths to be as enamored of rock music as working class youths were; the Beatles were touted by denizens of high-culture worlds; Leonard Bernstein himself claimed to derive more enjoyment from rock music than from the classical music that was au currant at the time. Thus, it is no surprise that when rock again claimed cultural center stage in the 1990s, in the context of the Alternative Revolution, alternative performers presented a mixture of working and middle-class backgrounds, concerns, and biases.

Nirvana almost singlehandedly paved the way for alternative musicians who wanted to be successful in a commercial context; it is interesting that their class affiliations, and stated predilections, were almost purely working class ones. However, the situation by which they became successful furnished them with an education in class, so that they not only did not appear to be rubes (as one could say the early Elvis Presley did), but were highly articulate and poised, if also acerbic, self-destructive, and radically ambivalent regarding their commercial success. That the label they were originally associated with (Subpop) was run by men (Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt) with middle-class affiliations goes some way towards explaining this; that Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic had working class roots but were determined bohemians also undercuts a straightforward sense of working class ethos in their self-presentations. One essential truth about Cobain and Novoselic is that they weren’t just working class youths but rural working class youths. Aberdeen, Washington, a logging town once best known for its brothels, gave them a view of the working class with a specific slant away from urban concerns, and towards rural ones— men who hunt, fish, and log, women weaned to be housewives or work retail jobs. Kurt Cobain, the principal musical and lyrical force behind Nirvana, was obsessed by notions of masculinity, and the way rural men thought of their guns as extensions of their manhood— that guns work as an extension of self, and do the dirty business of destruction that the physical body cannot accomplish. When Cobain met the band Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington, he learned that these attitudes are abhorrent to feminists, who espoused men with attitudes more sanguine to kindness, gentleness, tolerance, and respect to women. As the songs that were to comprise the Nevermind album took shape, Cobain sought to reconcile his instincts to mock strident feminist attitudes with his desire to lampoon working class male attitudes towards masculinity and its significations. “In Bloom” is a product of this kind of interior conflict.

The way that “In Bloom” is structured, the verses only hint at their author’s main concerns. The chorus goes directly to the heart of things that the verses only suggest: “He’s the one/ who likes all the pretty songs/ and he likes to sing along/ and he likes to shoot his gun/ but he knows not what it means.” “Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” both include a first person perspective, and function as two distinct types of dramatic monologue; the first interior, held within one protagonist’s consciousness, the second directed at a specific other. The protagonist of “In Bloom” is an implied protagonist; as there is no “I” (which is extremely atypical for a pop song), the listener realizes that this is a conscious lampoon, and that it is conveyed from a viewpoint that is, or seems to be, objective. The “he” of the chorus, of course, is the stereotypical bumpkin, who moves through worlds that he attempts to enjoy but has no comprehension of. Were the song not to contain the line in which it is revealed that the bumpkin “loves to shoot his gun” (which, as in both “Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are,” has phallic overtones), he could be a rather innocent character. As it stands, the inclusion of the gun adds an air of culpability to the subject of this lampoon, as it conveys the sense that he has destructive capabilities. The implied protagonist makes his existence most strongly felt in the last line of the chorus, which asserts that this man “knows not what it means.” We are left with certain multiplications and mysteries: does he not know what it means to shoot his gun (which could be literal or a sexual reference) alone, or does he also both misunderstand the pretty songs and why he likes to sing along to them? The implied protagonist never particularly tells us “what it means”: given the imagery of the verses, in which images of decay and rebirth mix with images of grotesque poverty, what it means is that this character both misunderstands the songs, misunderstands his motivations for singing along, and believes (mistakenly) that he adds to his potency by shooting his gun. The irony is that the chorus of “In Bloom,” which alternates between Bb and G major, forced to function as if it were a minor (mostly because Cobain liked to use chord voicings that omitted major and minor thirds), is one of the catchiest in rock history, and practically begs its audience to sing along.

There are other interesting musical elements to “In Bloom.” The chord progression used for the verses is not only startling, but almost unthinkable for a hit single. Chromatic elements are employed, so that, though the song is written in the key of Bb, both B and A make repeated appearances as passing chords. Like most of Cobain’s best songs, “In Bloom” is so tightly constructed that it is easy to miss these crucial elements. The truly revolutionary aspect of this song, other than the way the chorus brilliantly lampoons rural, working class males, is the manner in which Cobain fits so much unique musical information into small packages. The guitar solo, also, is almost all atonalities, which makes a neat contrast to the manner in which “Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” stick to an echo of their respective verse melodies. The way that the rock press works (and continues to work), these aspects of Cobain’s best songs were hardly noticed; usually, it seems that this happens because so-called “rock critics” have either minimal or absolutely no musical knowledge. They talk in broad terms and platitudes; there is a lack of specificity in their reviews, owing not only to ignorance but by the attitude that what carries great rock songs along is just that, attitude. If there is a fault to “In Bloom” that would rank it considerably behind “Teen Spirit” or “Come as You Are,” it is that the video not only does not follow the chorus’s lampoon through to its obvious conclusions (that the video should be, on some level, a spoof of rural working class male attitudes), but that it is a complete tangent to the song’s lyrical gist. “Come as You Are” does not have an exterior, overt theme; it moves in several interior directions, without stating explicit situations. The video works because it is as impressionistic as the song itself. “Teen Spirit,” of course, is one of the most iconic music videos of all time. “In Bloom,” as a video, spoofs the squeaky clean quality of 1960s variety shows; but it does not satisfy, because it distracts attention away from the song itself. Nonetheless, the song itself does count as a pop masterpiece, both for how acutely the chorus functions and for several music chances it takes that the first two singles from Nevermind do not.

Adam Fieled

Ambivalent Invitations: Nirvana's Come as You Are

It is a subject important enough to be the pivot point for thousands of movies, television shows, and pop songs: how do adolescents relate to each other, particularly American adolescents? The average pop song lyric tends to focus on romantic desires, often skewed towards directly sexualized elements. In the 1960s, many rock songwriters began to investigate other realities: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Lou Reed, and others wrote songs exploring memory, complex situations, aging processes, societal mores, and voyeuristic instincts. By the time Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991, a kind of reversion had taken place. Most pop music, specifically commercially successful rock music, was stuck, thematically, where it had been in the early 1960s. The first single from the album, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” had given the world a fresh glimpse into the darker aspects of the American adolescent psyche; it functions, lyrically, as a dramatic monologue, not directed at any specific other. It is more like a snapshot of an adolescent mind, talking to itself, trying to balance different kinds of interactions and experiences. The second single taken from Nevermind, “Come as You Are,” is more directly a relationship narrative. The lyrics are directed entirely towards an unnamed, gender neutral other. The ambivalent invitation it sends is worth investigating, as a possible synecdoche of how adolescents in America comingle.

If there is an overwhelming message that the lyrics of this piece send, it is this: that American adolescents, despite their youth, often experience pangs for an innocence that has more or less been lost. The narrator wants the other that the song puts forth to come back “as a memory”: in other words, to come back the way he or she used to be, but can never be again. In the dichotomous word games that constitute the verses, we get the sense of an adolescent mind waffling, not quite knowing what it wants. One of the most fascinating bits presents the notion that the protagonist wants this other to arrive “doused in mud/ soaked in bleach/ as I want you to be.” Lyricist Kurt Cobain’s allusiveness makes definite meanings difficult to pinpoint, but this allusion could certainly have sexual connotations: it is the narrator’s way of saying that he/she is interested in having sexual relations (being in the mud), while also wanting to maintain cleanliness that augurs against the notion of sexual interaction (soaked in bleach, which equates flesh with clothing, in another juxtaposition between surfaces and depths which is one of Cobain’s lyrical signatures). This ambivalence, specifically as regards sexuality, is a key facet of this song’s conceit: the fact that sex is dirty, dirtiness implies a loss of innocence, innocence is what is desired, but that in the two time zones that constitute this song’s temporal landscape (how things are/ how things used to be), it may be the most efficacious way of achieving intimacy. The bridge features a lyric that heightens this impression, while adding darkling hints that give the song an edge that “Teen Spirit” doesn’t have: the narrator “swears” that he doesn’t “have a gun.” This language is (we hope) metaphoric; if the gun is a phallic image with destructive potential, the narrator must state with some vehemence (swear) that he not only will not bring but does not have a gun. Emasculation may be the only way to retain innocence; the narrator is so desperate to make a connection, and to preserve his memories in the context of new experiences, that he effaces his own ability to display sexuality, even if the “muddy” aspects of what could be male or female sexuality intrigue him, or taunt him with his own immaturity.

Musically, “Come as You Are” establishes a kind of impressionism, both more muted and murkier than “Teen Spirit,” but also with more depth. Unlike that song, this is based on a riff that repeats for the duration of the verses. It is the rock equivalent of a question mark, as it hinges on three chromatic notes that tumble forwards and backwards again, creating a see-saw effect. The guitars during the one-word chorus (“memory”) and the bridge that alternates between B and D are treated with echo boxes so that they shimmer more than they pound. What carries the song along, and gives it some of the punch that made “Teen Spirit” so effective, are Dave Grohl’s drums: the drum-rolls, cymbal smashes, and other punctuations sharpen the muted, watery quality of the guitars, which again give the pop elements some thrash to satisfy an audience that wavered between punk, heavy metal, and pop tastes. There is also a plaintive quality to Cobain’s voice in the context of this track that is not in “Teen Spirit”; the way the chorus hinges on one legato phrase, the way he strains to hit “want” and draws out “you to be” in the verses. The protagonist of “Teen Spirit” expresses things in a clipped manner; rage and violence have more to do with staccato “punches”; the fact that this particular protagonist is actively seeking an emotional connection makes it more imperative to convey emotion in the vocal performance. Hard/soft dynamics are still present, but stand out with less intensity than they do in “Teen Spirit”; “Come as You Are” is less shocking, more touching. The ambivalence seems to be less about a desire to reach out and connect than about the protagonist’s level of self-belief, his feeling that he may or may not be able to reach out and connect. All this ambivalence manifests itself in the video as many strains of phantasmagoric imagery: guns, sperm cells, molecules, waterfalls, Nirvana playing the song in near-darkness (again, highlighting qualities of self-effacement not particularly consonant with rock star poses), Cobain swinging on a chandelier. There are no raging moves and no crowds; this video is a self-contained world without the obvious social overtones that buoyed “Teen Spirit.”

Unlike “Teen Spirit,” which has R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” as an obvious predecessor, both in terms of its thematic elements and in terms of its “break out” quality as a massive hit single, “Come as You Are” is more sui generis. There are no other tracks on Nevermind that have a distinct similarity to it, and the only obvious antecedent in indie rock is The Replacements “I Will Dare,” from their 1984 album Let It Be, which was lauded by major critics but failed to do significant commercial damage. Like “Come as You Are,” “I Will Dare” riffs on the scenario behind adolescent relationships: that ambivalence is the name of the game, as a protagonist balances curiosity with moments of discouragement and cowardice. Paul Westerberg crafted this song in such a way that it sounds very much like a certain kind of classic pop-rock: sharp vocals, catchy hooks (in this case, they underpin and mirror vocal inflections), a slight punkish quality to the vocals, which have the hoarse quality that Cobain often employs. However, Cobain’s compositions from this period have a drastic, dramatic quality that Westerberg’s do not: besides having a surer dramatic sense, Cobain is able to craft songs that combine more elements, which stake out more ground. Westerberg and Cobain are both truthful, direct, and, in their ambivalences, quintessentially American: Cobain achieved greater commercial success, not only because Westerberg was ambivalent about putting his songs into a commercial context, but because Cobain was far better at conveying complex emotions. If “Come as You Are” is to take its place as another masterpiece, next to “Teen Spirit,” it is specifically because there are more emotions on display here. They make interesting companion pieces, specifically because what “Teen Spirit” lacks is, for want of a better word, heart. The adolescent presence in “Come as You Are” actively cares about others; thus, his world is not strictly nihilistic. As bleak as these musical textures are, and the images of the video right alongside them, this caring is something that millions responded to with as great fervor as they did to the malignant overtones in “Teen Spirit”; “Come as You Are” may not be another self-contained revolution, as “Teen Spirit” was; it is, however, just as rich as a work of art.

Adam Fieled

The Rolling Stones: "Sway"

If ever a group of popular artists created the impression of leading a “demon life,” it is the Rolling Stones. The Stones most well-known songs have become so ingrained in most of our minds that they often feel badly overexposed. If an original piece is going to be written about the Stones, and if it isn’t to be a puff piece (almost everything written about the Stones, with the possible exception of Stanley Booth’s book, having been a puff piece), it would seem imperative to develop an angle that hasn’t been used. The Stones, fortunately, do have some hidden gems in their large body of work— “Sway,” from 1971s Sticky Fingers, is one. In those days, the dichotomy still seemed to be holding in place— the defunct Beatles still represented light, the Stones darkness; the Beatles communal spirit, the Stones rebellion; the Beatles love, the Stones sex. “Sway” isn’t really about sex or rebellion, but it is about a kind of darkness— as the chaos of the 60s began to dissipate, the 70s engendered a new kind of alienation. It was an alienation born from disillusionment— that behind the ideals that carried the 60s along lurked the same laziness, selfishness, and addictions that have always characterized the human race. This alienation, when manifested in individuals, could take the form of nightmares; the lyrics to “Sway” begin, “did you ever wake up to find/ a day that broke up your mind/ destroying your notion of circular time?” For a notion of circular time to be destroyed, it would first have to be created— notions of “circular time” do evoke certain kinds of Eastern mysticism that achieved currency in the 1960s. Circular time also means that there should be something recognizable in each moment; you are enclosed in time as in something warm and comforting. To wake up (into a kind of nightmare) with this illusion broken means to be completely beyond the pale, severed from anything recognizable or, as the Stones themselves put it, 2000 light years from home.

The song begins to play its games and do its dances with the chorus— “it’s just that demon life that’s got you in its sway.” This line has its cryptic elements— “demon life” could signify fast-living youth (promiscuity, drugs), celebrity (the Stones were well-established as celebrities by this point) or even riding along some spiritual edge attendant on these states. Whatever it is, the speaker of the chorus (whose identity remains unclear) presents himself as a survivor, someone whose illusions have already been broken. It could be that the demon life does mostly consist of maintaining these illusions— and that once the illusions have some sway over you, the possibility of nightmare expands. But it is revealing that the speaker of the chorus takes pains to minimize this syndrome; it is “just,” or merely, this demon life, which suggests both that the syndrome is known and that it will pass, after the initial alienation wears off. However, the pronoun games the lyrics play suggest that the person who speaks the first chorus also narrates the second verse, which takes us deeper into nightmare territory— “ain’t flinging tears out on the dusty ground/ for my friends out on the burial ground/ can’t stand the feeling getting so brought down.” Mick Jagger, who composed these lyrics, has publicly attested how violent the 60s seemed to him. Though the 60s are not often thought of as a charnel ground, this may be how Jagger perceived them. The first verse demonstrates the atrophy of 60s mysticism; the second demonstrates how this atrophy can be emotionally damaging. This character is devastated but cannot cry; surrounded by intimations of mortality he cannot accept. The Stones had personally suffered a devastating loss; Brian Jones, who founded and established the band, died in 1969. The fact that the circumstances around Jones’s death remained (and still remain) mysterious heightened and consolidated the Stones’ aura of transgression and danger. But both of the first two verses feature characters that have not come to grips with loss; characters for whom, one may interpret, the 60s cast a large, confusing shadow over the 70s. The bridge, which brings love into the picture, seems like a red herring. The third verse offers a sense of genuine human consolation, extremely rare for the Stones— “one day I woke up to find/ right in the bed next to mine/ someone who broke me up with a corner of her smile.”

If “Sway” is generally about awakenings, this final awakening suggests that the two characters can begin to heal each other’s disappointment and disillusionment. They are both under the sway of what Jagger calls a demon life; that a slight smile can be significant on both sides suggests frailty and vulnerability, but also emotional aliveness. The landscape of “Sway” then coalesces into a kind of balance. That the bed is not “his” but “next to his” even adds a significant detail— that the situation may be transpiring in a hotel room. If it is, and if both characters share the same malaise, the transience of this encounter gives it a sense of shock and purpose. It has the reciprocity of real dialogues, a quality missing from most of the Stones’ great songs, most of which represent moody outlaws. As such, this may be the most intimate song the Stones ever recorded— “Wild Horses,” from the same album, falls too much into narrative incoherence. Intimacy is associated with brokenness; first the initial character (the context suggests it is a woman) having her mind broken by changing circumstances; then her own smile breaking up, as in softening and moving, her companion. The 70s did break from the 60s, but in such a way that the sexual dynamics of free love were reinforced; sexual promiscuity remained rampant. The “Sway” lyrics are not overt in addressing what could be a sexual facet to this relationship; what is overt is that little encounters (whether in hotel rooms or elsewhere) could be windows opened onto real, tender human connections. Jagger’s lyrics have never been known for their tenderness; even Stones’ ballads like “Lady Jane” and “Back Street Girl” have a sinister subtext. What makes “Sway” remarkable is not only that it is anomalous in the Stones’ catalogue; there is probably no other rock song that documents so movingly the end of an era, and the collapse of generational innocence (John Lennon’s “God” attempts the same thing, but with a more heavy-handed, arguably excessively blatant, approach).

The next thing the Stones’ released, 1972’s Exile on Main Street, extends both the nightmarish dissolution and the tenderness of “Sway.” Exile is generally considered among rock critics to be the Stones’ masterpiece; however, I would argue that, song for song, Sticky Fingers actually beats Exile. Jagger has a habit of swallowing his lyrics; on “Sway,” most of them are at least decipherable, on Exile only phrases jump out. It is also worth noting that “Sway” comes off as good, solid rock and roll, no more and no less. It isn’t presented as a ballad or a rabble-rouser. Other than Jagger’s lyrics, the most noticeable element is Mick Taylor’s gorgeous lead guitar work. He makes the best of the two lead breaks he is given; his vibrato has the sting of Clapton’s and Hendrix’s, but there is an understated fluency to Taylor’s playing that takes the song to a new level. “Sway” is placed between two Stones’ standards, “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses,” and manages to best them between these elements. In their prime, the Stones had a way of loading on album tracks that were as strong (or stronger) than their singles. While I would have to rate “Sway” as the Stones greatest album track, “Live with Me,” “Monkey Man,” “Stray Cat Blues,” and the handful of great Exile tracks would be strong contenders. The Stones best work is bleak, and paints a picture of a fractured world. “Sway” is one of the few moments in which the possibility of healing is addressed. Because consolation other than sex is rare to find not only in the Stones’ songbook but in rock generally, this is an oasis of humanity in a desert of greed, lust, anger, and strife.

Adam Fieled

Static Movement: Big Log by Robert Plant

Travel has always been one of the great themes of rock music. The “urge for going,” as Joni Mitchell calls it, is an adolescent impulse that often carries over into adulthood. The protagonists of rock songs are often here but want to be there; and movement can be social, romantic, and sexual as well as merely physical. What is not often found in rock songs is the conflation of this urge and a sense of the elegiac; of loss and remorse. In an elegy, as the poet mourns, he or she moves towards acceptance, forgiveness, and consonance with final truths. What inhibits Robert Plant’s “Big Log” from being the rock equivalent of an elegy is that the movement portrayed in the lyrics is circular, beginning and ending at the same place. That this movement is accompanied by vignettes that suggest a long car ride creates an intriguing dynamic. Most rock fans will know that Plant himself did have solid reasons to be elegiac in the early 1980s; having spent the 1970s as the front-man for the most successful band in the world, he had seen the band dissolve, and one of its founding members die. But reading the lyrics of “Big Log” as an elegy on the collapse of Led Zeppelin is too limiting, too reductive. Because these verses read as an interior monologue, a narrator talking to himself, and are not generally aimed at a specific Other, the song comes off more like a nuanced self-portrait that allows for some psychological detail. The expansive pathos of the music heightens the impression, and makes “Big Log” one of the most moving touchstones in the rock canon.

The song begins and ends with the line “my love is in league with the freeway,” and the parallel structure carries over into the second verse, which begins “my love is exceedingly vivid.” We imagine this protagonist speaking these lines to himself as he drives. Yet, because we never learn anything about this “love,” it could be construed as a figment of the protagonist’s imagination, someone he has created. It could be that he is doing this to lull himself, so as not to confront or notice his own loneliness. But there is also the shaky sense that this construct, “my love,” may be partly real. The vagueness of “my love” mirrors the vagueness of what and how we see when we are traveling, and the “travel sense” we have at times during which we experience ourselves as being between things— between two places, between two states of consciousness. Thus, as vague as this traveler is, he has a strange integrity— he is traveling inside himself, as well as in his vehicle. But the “questions in thousands” must, we feel, be connected to some past experience, and what is “leading him on” into forward motion are the same feelings that are driving him backwards. Most rock songs only delineate the feelings of forward motion— the delicate balance between movement and stasis that Plant creates here is uncommon.

The sense of stasis is amplified by the presence of loss, that “when the journey is done/ there is no turning back.” The protagonist knowingly uses “journey” with irony, and in a dual sense— irony, because the journey there is no turning back from is inward, and psychological, rather than the car journey he is on; and dual, because once any journey (outward or inward) has been undertaken, it can never be retraced. The “you” that appears in both verses (“and it’s you once again,” “your love is cradled in knowing”) add a further layer of mystery. The first “you” seems to refer to the pain that animates the song, which he chooses to personify; the second seems to be some person, who may or may not play a central role in the protagonist’s journey and the sense of loss it entails. There is a sense, not only of vagueness to this protagonist but of confusion. Between all the levels and layers of coming and going, he seems to have lost his sense of rootedness. Whatever loss he has endured may have struck deeply, in fact, at his roots. What binds the lines of the verses together is just this sense— that roots have been effaced, leading the protagonist to a limbo state on every level. Because the complex emotions that accompany a limbo state are infrequently addressed in rock music, there is a dearth of comparisons to be made to this piece. Limbo states often take hold with the “thousand questions” that are attendant on the losses of age. As has been stated, the piece ends with the line that began it which, if read closely, can come to seem like a red herring. What if there is no love? The freeway is a place associated with restlessness, boredom, and irritation, but not usually love; and if having a love “in league with the freeway” is having no love at all, then the protagonist is far more isolated than he wants to admit. That isolation gives this protagonist just a tinge of desperation, and it is a compelling tinge. Nonetheless, it is ironic, and not in a dual sense, that rock purists have never particularly fetishized this track. It is seen as Robert Plant’s first solo hit— no more, no less.

“Big Log” is musically ambitious, and exquisite. Rather than employing the “guitar army” that was Jimmy Page’s forte during the Zeppelin days, Plant uses guitars sans distortion, along with the synths that characterize so much 80s music. As in Zeppelin, it is the guitars, rather than the melody line, that grant the song its hooks. The one repeated arpeggio that stands out the most has the bittersweet longing of Spanish folk music in it. When this arpeggio, which is played in the Dorian mode, is put into this novel context (synths, drum machine, and a descending, minor key chord progression), it makes palpable the feeling of the open road which is one topos the song builds from. There is a final, circle-closing lick, less expressive than the Spanish arpeggio, played on the low E and A strings of the guitar, that seals the song off into mournfulness. The way the song is mixed, Plant’s vocals are not especially elevated; he is submerged into the texture of the piece, enough that it is easy to get lost in the sound, without especially noticing the lyrics. What is magical about “Big Log” is that, like the narrator himself, it has its own integrity— the perfect mesh between sound and sense in the piece is something not often seen in popular music. This is especially true of the early 1980s, in which synths were often used to sugarcoat vacuous sentiments and hokey contrivances. Even the monotony of the programmed drums works; they reinforce the hypnotic quality of the trebly guitars and Plant’s voice. The understated quality of the video made for the song enhances its aura of stasis and isolation. Plant pulls into a gas station, wanders around some kind of adjacent abode, and we see him shredding pictures (we don’t know what of) and sitting in a classroom. The images are disconnected; while there is no obvious hinge between the lyrics and what we see, they emphasize the confusion, vagueness, and isolation of the protagonist in the face of losses and endings. It may seem strange to say that there is more consonance between “Big Log” and the Zeitgeist of 2010 than of 1983, but I believe it to be the case. America, and the entire Western world, has lost a certain amount of innocence in the last ten years. We are coping with big losses; the acceptance, forgiveness, and consonance with final truths are hard-won, if they happen at all. Because the American populace is obsessed with movement, we often forget that genuine movements are usually interior. It is not just for philosophers and scientists to say what moves— individuals need to measure these parameters for themselves. A solid work of art is as good a place to start as any.

Adam Fieled

Van Morrison: "Cyprus Avenue"

Though Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks has assumed the status of a sacred cow in the rock canon, this status is usually attributed to its musical innovations rather than its lyrical (or, arguably, literary) incisiveness. Yet it is impossible not to be touched, when listening to a song like “Cyprus Avenue,” that one is meeting a protagonist right out of James Joyce’s Dubliners. The musical texture of “Cyprus Avenue” is, in comparison to the rest of the album, deceptively simple— three chords (the standard I-IV-V that many popular songs are based on), strings, harpsichord, bass, and little else. But the narrative of the song raises it to literary heights— a nuanced protagonist, caught in a particular place at a particular time, acting out of both seen and unseen motives, revealing himself while creating mysteries that the song doesn’t solve. What makes the song glorious is the protagonist’s epiphany, and the fact that, as in Dubliners, it is an anti-epiphany— an unfulfilled desire that remains unfulfilled but nonetheless delivers a state of grace. As in “The Dead,” yearning itself expresses a kind of holiness— it is a means by which the soul can exceed its bounds by moving outside itself. This kind of transcendentalism is often associated with Irish writers and artists— it is in Yeats’ poems to Maud Gonne, and in Wilde’s “De Profundis.” Van Morrison’s particular version of this involves perversion; specifically, pedophilia. In his early years, Morrison did show a kind of perversity that led him to write about drastic situations— “T.B. Sheets,” a song in which a protagonist visits a woman dying of tuberculosis, demonstrates this. But sanctity and perversity make strange bedfellows, and to the extent that we can both like and identify with a pedophile protagonist, we are encouraged to do so here. The lyrics bear out that this protagonist has a strange nobility— because he achieves his epiphany just by looking, and doesn’t attempt to touch, and because his sense of (possibly Catholic) guilt necessitates that he hide himself, we feel his shyness and his awe of natural beauty more than we feel his perversion. As the song progresses, we see how he is crippled by doubts— to get through this experience, he must drink and can’t speak. Yet Morrison demonstrates an eye for detail that brings what could be a dry situation to life— cherry wine, rainbow ribbons, falling leaves. As in Joyce, the tactile balances the spiritual, and in the reciprocity of their relationship different ecstatic states are created. The ultimate mystery here is love— does this protagonist really love this girl? Can you love someone just from seeing them? The world transparently opened by these lyrics is caught between romanticism and realism.

How does this protagonist experience himself? Because no one else actually speaks in the song, this is an important question. He experiences himself as put in place by forces beyond his control, and paralyzed— “caught one more time/ up on Cyprus Avenue.” Because he throws in “one more time,” we get the sense that this voyeuristic impulse is compulsive. A slave to his compulsion, “conquered in a car seat,” he never, at least in the song, reckons that he has volitional power to change or modify his behavior. He may want to be caught. There’s not much we can infer about his life situation— he may or may not have a normal job, friends, or even a wife and family. He worries that he “may go crazy/ before that mansion on the hill,” but he hasn’t gone crazy yet; he drinks, but not so much that it obliterates his faculties. What he reveals needs to be parsed carefully— while he is clearly socially anxious, it may be context-dependent; it could hinge on his deviance, and not be present elsewhere. But his social anxiety does not make him particularly repentant— he enjoys that “the little girls drop something/ on the way back home from school.” That the next line directs his attention to falling leaves suggests a man of age— that the little girls’ youthfulness (and his attraction to their nascent sexuality) reminds him of his own impinging obsolescence. It is curious to note that Morrison wrote and recorded this song in his early twenties— like Ray Davies, he was attracted both to age and to deviance. One central mystery of the song is that the protagonist’s attention is compelled by one particular girl, who he calls a “lady.” He dotes on her from a distance, and his epiphany begins when she arrives, “rainbow ribbons in her hair…returning from the fair.” Much of the protagonist’s ecstasy is conveyed by Morrison’s vocal mannerisms; the ecstatic crescendos he builds into his performances, especially on “rainbow ribbons,” makes clear both the protagonist’s agitation and his transport. That the two are so interlocked as to be indistinguishable is a possibility; it can be taken as a tension/release dynamic. Yet we wonder if this release is really what the protagonist wants— guilt, Catholic or otherwise, may dictate that he can’t even bear the thought of having sexual intercourse with his lady. It is difficult to distinguish ecstasy from agony here— from the vocal striations to the tightness of the three-chord structure, Morrison makes us feel how tightly wound the scenario is. That his voice conveys genuine release makes the song one of the few instances in the rock canon in which we feel what “humanity,” as a complex entity, really is, sans postures. Exquisite tensions are not undercut by an impulse to entertain; the song demonstrates the seriousness of solid high art.

It is significant that the protagonist waits until the end of the song to reveal his lady’s age— fourteen years old. He acts like an abashed child in a manner that mirrors her own youth. There is nothing mature about his approach, or lack thereof; but there is nothing abusive in it either. To the extent that a male gaze can be harmless, his is. As the song begins to fade out, he repeats “baby” over and over again, like an incantation. It is the first direct hint in the lyrics of a religious overtone, and is not especially overt as such. The song also does not give too many clues about what else happens on Cyprus Avenue; the song is tightly focused on this incident. But it must be significant that the other song on Astral Weeks centered on Cyprus Avenue, “Madame George,” also features a deviant character. The difference is the kind of voyeurism involved; in “Cyprus Avenue,” a protagonist watches a young girl; in “Madame George,” a young male protagonist observes a drag queen. That “Madame George” is more stately and less rapturous than “Cyprus Avenue” can be attributed to a different subtext; rather than love and longing, the protagonist of “Madame George” learns a kind of respect for his Madame’s difference, and pity; he watches as she is abandoned by her friends. Both Madame George and the protagonist of “Cyprus Avenue” have a certain amount of nobility in their thwarted hopes; neither one imposes on the people that surround them, or that they desire. Deviance, on Astral Weeks, does not diffuse kindness; differences do not have to create hostilities. The whole album is wrapped in an ambience which can only be described as spiritual; because the ethereal musical landscape doubles the lyrical content, there is a sensation of floating, of ascension. But we never learn the ultimate fate of Madame George, or of the humble protagonist of “Cyprus Avenue.” This enhances the ethereality of the songs; no mysteries solved, nothing closed, situations left in a state of suspension.

Does Astral Weeks deserve its sacred cow status? Especially for these two great narratives, I would say that it does. While the jazz accompaniment does enhance the ambience, and reinforce that Astral Weeks is a great musical hybrid, if anything seals the deal it is Van’s voice. Modulated somewhere between baritone and tenor, rich in grain in a way that Roland Barthes might approve of, Morrison improvises scats, does repetitions of certain syllables and phrases, and lets his voice at times sail over the crescendos built into the songs. Because the grain of a human voice can convey things that a text cannot (what might, perhaps, be called the ineffable), Morrison actually has an advantage that James Joyce does not. Because he parlays this advantage into transcendent territory, the whole album, even the lesser narratives, sticks as an edifice potentially as permanent as anything in the canon of popular music. And, along with “Madame George,” “Cyprus Avenue” stands out as an example of what can be achieved with three chords, a voice, and a story.

Adam Fieled

Hitting the Big Themes: The Kinks' Big Sky

What are the thematic elements least likely to be found in a rock song? At the top of the list would probably be subjects more often associated with philosophy: man’s place in relation to the cosmos, the existence or non-existence of a conscious deity, any kind of ultimate reality, freedoms engendered by accepting humanity’s relative smallness. Indeed, there are not too many songs in the rock genre that assay these themes directly. One of the few that does, and does so with authority, is the Kinks’ “Big Sky,” a track off of their 1968 album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. This record itself is famous for its legendary status as a cult classic: released with little fanfare, and on the same day as the Beatles White Album, it has gradually made its way into a prominent position in the rock canon. By 1968, the Kinks resident auteur, Ray Davies, had written a handful of timeless classics that easily equaled anything produced by a songwriter of his generation, working in the confines of the rock song: “Waterloo Sunset,” “Dead End Street,” “Sunny Afternoon,” “Two Sisters,” “Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home.” Not one of these songs display any consonance with the themes typical for popular music: rather than handling desire in its crass form, they present character sketches, social commentaries, vignettes, and slices of life that shed light on class structure, governmental incompetence, and the state of the individual in an uncaring society. Many of these songs were substantial commercial successes; however, the Kinks had been banned from touring the United States, so this commercial success was mostly limited to the UK. By 1968, this commercial success had dwindled, and, as Davies’ winning streak seemed to be over, he reacted by burrowing deeper into themes that appealed to him, rather than by redoubling his efforts to reclaim lost commercial territory.

According to “Big Sky,” what is man’s place in relation to the cosmos? First off, it needs to be said that many may find this inquiry pretentious; rock critics, even the few that lean towards profundity, do not tend to bring philosophy into their equations. So, I write enjoining the caveat that I will be treating Davies’ lyrics with the same respect that I treat Milton or Blake. The premise of “Big Sky,” stated in simple terms, is that if there are higher powers that govern human existence, they are powers that do not have an active interest in human existence. Whatever Gods rule over us (and the song does not rule out a pantheistic perspective) are either not aware of us, or, even more likely, are too occupied with their own business to offer us much help. Davies also suggests that our relative, ant-like smallness makes it difficult for what he calls the big sky to feel motivated to intervene on any of our behalf. The image of the big sky as a non or semi-conscious deity, too vast to be concerned about us, has consonance with certain kinds of existentialism, that tends to deny the existence of God outright; however, Davies’ wrinkle suggests not that we live in an empty universe, but that we live in an active universe in which we play a miniscule part. The drama of the song is that it begins with the consideration of intervention on our behalf of some kind of celestial force: “Big sky looked down at all the people looking up at the big sky/ everybody’s pushing on another around/ big sky feels sad when he hears the children scream and cry/ but the big sky’s too big to let it get him down.” These are stunning, and stunningly pessimistic, ideas; their ambition is also stunning; a complete, if miniaturized, account of one of philosophy’s most persistent questions. What grants “Big Sky” its peculiar genius is that Davies’ several times shifts perspectives, so that two other perspectives are included: some “I,” discussing these facts with another, and an “I” that ruminates these theories to itself.

Interestingly, the “I” in “Big Sky” takes solace in the big sky’s omnipotence, omnipresence, and exquisite unawareness: “and when I feel/ that the world’s too much for me/ I think of the big sky/ and nothing matters much to me.” Whatever the big sky is, it nullifies worldly concerns to such an extent that it can make, to a subject that can perceive it, the human world a realm on no great importance. The song has two bridges; this bridge doesn’t repeat, while the repeated bridge tackles similar emotions in relation to the big sky, in the context of an interaction, a “we”: “one day/ we’ll be free/ we won’t care/ just you see/ ‘til that day should be/ don’t let it bring you down.” The subtext is that the end of a human sojourn on earth does not end in an abyss, but is a going upwards, some kind of fusion with the big sky, which Davies’ equates not only with disinterestedness but with freedom. If human life is a slog, if we live in a universe that does not particularly care for us, there is the consolation of an ultimate freedom, if it can be grasped and held in an individual’s consciousness. But it is not simply a meld with God, or with a God-head; it is a meld with an inexplicable, vastly powerful force that is beyond our understanding. These would be incredibly sophisticated ideas to be addressed in a poem, let alone a rock song; and “Big Sky” is sui generis, not only within the Kinks catalogue but in the entire rock oeuvre. What Davies gives us is the universe explained in simple terms, simpler than the terms Blake or Milton used. If it is impossible to do, in three minutes, what Milton accomplished in Paradise Lost or Blake did in his long poems, it is still a height of thoughtfulness and nuanced response to universal powers that few other popular songwriters would dare attempt.

One truly strange thing about “Big Sky” is its primitive production standards; that by 1968, many successful rock artists were using lavish production techniques to beef up their musings. Released that year, The Band’s Music From Big Pink was credited with initiating a “back to basics” response to all this grandiosity. However, the Kinks managed to outdo The Band (though few noticed), and not only is “Big Sky” not a grandiose production, it is comparatively “lo-fi.” There is immediacy and an earthiness to the songs on Village Green simply because the Kinks were working in low budget circumstances. Davies also innovates formally; most of the key lyrics in “Big Sky” are spoken rather than sung. There are artful cuts between spoken parts and sung parts, so that when each narrated bit of the big sky’s perceptions ends, Davies brings tunefulness in again to intone “big sky too big to cry/ big sky too high to see/ people like you and me.” The song also changes keys for the bridges, which feature slight variations in chord changes, though the two distinct bridges are in the same key. Much of the ambience in this track is owing to the hazy miasma of background vocals, which dart back and forth in the mix. The track mixes ethereality and earthiness, and in such a way that Davies’ lyrics are the clear focus; no solos, no long instrumental passages, nothing “progressive” where the chords or the riffs are concerned, no strings. It is clear from the way the track is produced that Davies knew he had something to say, and wanted to make his point as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Do most rock critics dote on Ray Davies’ achievements? They do, but it is usually in the context of positing Davies as an underdog. When a grouping of great songwriters is required, you will often see Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and others before you see Ray Davies. The truth, however, is that a song like “Big Sky” is not only nonpareil, but takes the rock song into an undreamed of realm. Because the rock press is present-minded and intellectually shallow, Davies has never been properly credited for this stunning achievement, which easily betters anything on Blonde on Blonde. Davies coheres in a way that Dylan never (or rarely) coheres; everything cleaves around a nexus of stunning ideas. Where Dylan is diffuse, Davies is coherent; where Dylan’s lyrics cannot stand minute analysis, Davies best songs become more stunning the closer one looks at them. “Big Sky” has never (to my knowledge) been particularly singled out before; but, after forty-odd years, it seems that now might be a fertile time to re-open certain classic albums once again to see what sticks and what doesn’t.

Adam Fieled

Nirvana and the Sense of Revolutions

Rare are moments in the arts in which the presence of revolutionary energies make changes possible. Because the arts, like most other human endeavors, have static and dynamic periods, and because not all artists are interested in growth processes, long periods of stasis can efface the notion of progress towards greater force, vivacity, and growth and/or breadth of vision. In the early 1990s, the rock band Nirvana, based in Seattle, signed a major label record deal with Geffen Records, left their independent label (Subpop), and released an album called Nevermind. The album was a bold leap forward for rock music, on many levels: musically, it combined the ferocity of punk and heavy metal with a pop sensibility; lyrically, it shied away from narrative and chose instead to present its themes abstractly, with word games, puns, allusive tangents, aphorisms, and images of decay substituting for the more straightforward, primitive content usually found in rock lyrics. Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, and was almost immediately an enormous success. The most salient reason for this early success was the first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which was (and remains) by any standard, a milestone for rock music. The sense of revolution in this particular track alone was enough to nudge rock towards the heights it attained in the 1990s.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” developed slowly, and via a period of accretive gestation. Kurt Cobain, the singer and songwriter whose presence dominates Nevermind, had been spending time with the leading lights of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill. One of their recreational activities was leaving graffiti on the walls of their friends apartments (in the bohemian circles that constitute indie rock subculture, this is and remains de rigueur). Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on a wall; she was referring to Teen Spirit, a deodorant marketed to teenagers. The phrase suggests both different kinds on insecurity and bodily awareness, and it stuck in Cobain’s mind. Cobain, along with Krist Novoselic and newly-added drummer Dave Grohl, went to Los Angeles to record Nevermind in the spring of 1991. It is here, in the studio, that Cobain initiated the musical and lyrical ideas that led to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The musical elements of this song are deceptively simple: a handful of chords, all major, a sense of alternation between loud and soft parts (often thought to be inherited from indie rockers The Pixies, who had their heyday as Cobain was coming of age), a tight pop song structure (verse-chorus-verse, with a guitar solo that echoed the melody of the verses), and an addictive melody. What set “Teen Spirit” apart immediately was how ominous these chords were, and how skillfully Cobain had interwoven a melody catchy enough to fit into a Beatles tune.

As compelling as these elements were, they wouldn’t stick as a sort of popular musical handbook for revolutions if the lyrics didn’t also present extraordinary qualities. The lyrics are extraordinary, for in them we find one key to the psyche of the American teenager in the early 1990s. In a kind of dramatic monologue, we find a protagonist who wavers between diffidence and aggression; who attempts to define himself and then hide himself from being defined; who wants to join into social situations but mocks others who join in; and who ends his monologue with what could be called an “affirmative denial,” which seems to point fingers at all of those around him, exposing weaknesses, expressing deep self-hatred and a need to abase whatever crosses his path. It is an ominous monologue, with threats and overtones and undercurrents of violence that make themselves clear as soon as the lyrics kick in. Combined with ominous chords, and a slithering bass line that dominates instrumentally during the verses, “Teen Spirit” unsettles preconceived notions of normalcy among American adolescents. It is a song that cuts across lines, specifically sub-cultural lines, because it had (and has) something for everyone— melody for the nicer kids, grunge for the metal-heads and stoners, interesting lyrics for bookish nerds, etc. The video extends all these facets by presenting Cobain and his band-mates in a high school gymnasium, dimly lit, with a crowd of angry teenagers flailing away to the song. Sam Bayer, who directed the video, was careful to hide Cobain’s face for most of the video; Cobain is dressed casually; the whole video is geared visually from sepia to black, and with cheerleaders also dressed in black, and with anarchy signs pinned to their outfits, it is clear that, despite the song’s extreme catchiness, we are not meant to be comforted. Confrontations often beget revolutions; this confrontational moment was so effective on so many levels that the floodgates opened, a sea of bands, often from Seattle, became overnight successes, and Alternative Rock, that dominated the popular music landscape of the 1990s, was born.

It needs to be iterated, however, that the mores and structural apparatuses of indie rock were more or less in place by the time Nirvana took center-stage in 1991. The most obvious precursors to Nirvana were R.E.M., a pop band based in Athens, Georgia, who reaped considerable critical acclaim for their music before 1987, when “The One I Love,” which shares certain thematic elements with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” became a bona fide pop hit. R.E.M. were the quintessential indie band of the 1980s; loners who almost immediately received major label attention, but who nonetheless progressed gradually into the higher echelons of the music business, all the while staying true to their roots. Because their music was enormously successful on college radio stations before it was heard on major radio stations, because they put out several successful albums on indie labels before signing to a major label in the late 1980s, R.E.M. were seen to be paragons of indie integrity; good guys who had a healthy disdain for the machinations of big record labels; mavericks whose gradual upward movements set precedents; and genuine artists, who evinced a sense of responsibility towards several worlds at once every time they made an aesthetic decision. “The One I Love” has many constituent elements of what came to be called, in the late 1980s, “classic rock”: a sound dominated by guitars, melodious vocals, and tight pop song structures. However, the mood of this particular song is foreboding: singer Michael Stipe’s lyrics express alienation, frustration, and a sense of irony about the possibilities inherent in relationships, rather than faith, inspiration, and moon-in-June dreaminess.

All the same, “The One I Love” was not quite strong enough to start the revolution that “Teen Spirit” did. “The One I Love” was, however, a kind of interior revolution within the confines of the indie rock world. Bands like Nirvana realized that they could be successful in a competitive marketplace; that pop song structures did not have to be inimical to indie instincts; that being content to grow gradually was the best survival strategy for indie bands; and that there was, in fact, a substantial audience for songs with dark, brooding subtexts, and for lyrics with multiple meanings. By the time Kurt Cobain and Nirvana became famous, genuflecting to R.E.M. had become another de rigueur move. The sense of revolutions dictated that Cobain had to respect and venerate those that had cleared the path for him, his band, and his songs. Nevertheless, the dynamic progression Cobain made took him far beyond the bounds of what R.E.M. had achieved. The world of “Teen Spirit” is a realm of almost total darkness; but it is a realm of well-articulated darkness, with many layers of lyrical meaning creating a sense of Dantescan rings around characters like his most famous, and famously unnamed, protagonist. It is ironic that many older listeners claimed not to be able to hear Cobain’s lyrics; many generations of kids, and around the world, have understood these lyrics only too well. I was fifteen in 1991; what Cobain had done was to take my alienation, and the alienation of the kids around me, and to put it into palpable form, without sugarcoating it or turning it into hokey, facile rebellious moves, as so many other rock lyricists have done. The Alternative Rock that followed in the 1990s mostly tried to articulate the same things, with varying levels of success. It may be that, as far as posterity is concerned, “Teen Spirit” was its own, self-enclosed, revolution: complete, self-sufficient. Perhaps that is the case when any masterpiece breaks through in a meaningful way.

Adam Fieled, 2010

Tears of Rage: Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel

Though some of my favorite songwriters are great story-tellers, it is rare that a set of lyrics tells a complete story. Usually, songwriters, Dylan included, rely on vocal inflections, melodies, chord changes, and instrumental punctuation to fill in the gaps. This is one of the reasons that song lyrics can so seldom stand on the page as poems. I was, however, recently reminded of a song that Dylan co-wrote with Richard Manuel, the tragic, bell-voiced keyboardist for The Band, who committed suicide in 1983. It is the first track on The Band's first album, Music From Big Pink, that was released in 1968 to great critical kudos. The song is called Tears of Rage, and it tells a more complete story than almost anything else in Dylan's oeuvre. It is a story as spacious and as universal as Greek tragedy, and addresses (in the manner of Greek tragedy), love, betrayal, hypocrisy, history, modernity, and national identity. The fact that there is no song quite like it in Dylan's immense catalogue, suggests that the song was as much Manuel's as it was Dylan's. Maybe more Manuel's than Dylan's. The song is sung by a wounded father to an errant daughter:

We carried you in our arms on Independence Day
And now you'd throw us all aside, put us all away
Oh, what dear daughter, 'neath the sun could treat a father so?
To wait upon him hand and foot yet always tell him "No"

Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we're so alone
And life is brief..

The father-daughter relationship presented here is complex. The father-narrator carries memories of his daughter that have great pertinence to him; they are conflated with a sense of national identity. It would seem that, by betraying him, his daughter is betraying her own national identity; yet what the daughter clearly wants is to live out the ideal that this country was founded upon: freedom. This sense of conflicted tradition may be one of the reasons that the narrator is weeping: he cannot reconcile his own ethical code with the way that things have changed. His daughter comes to signify this change, and possibly a new level of national identity, that is beyond his reach. This song was written and recorded in the late 1960s: feminism was just beginning to make its presence felt, and the scenario being enacted in this song was being replicated in miniature all over the country (and the world.) Notice, however, that the father himself is a complex character; far from being a macho he-man, his reaction to his daughter's desertion (which is not physical but emotional, and thus all the more devastating) is to break down and weep. The sensitivity that could allow him to understand his daughter's desire for freedom instead turns to sentimentality and self-pity. This is a variant of Paul McCartney's She's Leaving Home, released a year before and charting similar terrain. The difference is that McCartney's heroine really does pack up her bags and leave; Manuel and Dylan's creation stays near at hand to the narrator, but continually (and often indirectly) denies him. The narrator and his daughter seem to be playing a high-stakes guessing game, and there is no easy resolution of the type that McCartney employs. The second verse suggests that the narrator, his sensitivity aside, takes a condescending view of his daughter's intellectual and social emancipation:

It was all so very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But oh what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?

Notice that this narrator is forced to take shelter behind other members of his clan: insecure about his daughter's pursuits, he asserts that "we never could belive" the "false instruction" that his daughter received, whatever it might happen to be. Given the context in which it appears, "false instruction" could be a reference to feminist doctrine, or atheist doctrine, or some sort of pseudo-religious doctrine. Whatever the doctrine is, it has caused a rupture so that a cherished family member, who used to be accessible and thus subservient to the narrator, is no longer either accessible or subservient. What is interesting about this song is how clearly it demonstrates the faults of this father (his narrowness, his inability to change), and yet how poignantly we feel his pain in the chorus. This is a man that is acknowledging his feelings; rage and grief. Because he can face up to the way he feels, we are able to forgive his condescension, his willful misapprehension, and his aversion towards an ineluctable change in national identity, as embodied in his daughter. It is one of the joys of this song that it picks up and represents a position that is rarely acknowledged in popular music; that of the elderly, the experienced, the humbled. Even more interestingly, in the final verse the narrator shows signs of affirming his daughter's sense of agency, even as he tries to negate it:

We pointed you the way to go
And scratched your name in sand
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand
I want you to know that while we watched you
discover no one would be true
That I myself was among the ones
Who thought it was just a childish thing to do

This family is watching this young women from afar, letting her make her own mistakes. The narrator makes an attempt to step back and judge her objectively; when he does so, he finds her behavior "childish." Yet we, as an audience, do not have to be fooled; there are two sides to every story, and it would seem to be a safe bet that this women would have her own version of events. The narrator's very unreliability makes him even more touching; he wants so badly to be right, and to have his daughter back the way she was. Yet the total impression is that he is rebuffed on both counts; he is unable to convince himself that he is right, and he is equally unable to make his daughter return to her former, innocent ways. It is this sense of a double failure that makes the song so complete, and so heartbreaking. Many other Dylan songs do not have this multi-dimensionality; Hurricane, for example, wants us to feel something, but Hurricane himself never seems like more than a cardboard cut-out. You don't get much of this richness in most Dylan, or anywhere else, for that matter. McCartney's piece, also, is comparatively simplistic. It must also be noted that, as complete as the lyrics are (though the tensions in them remain unresolved), the song has a gorgeous melody and is beautifully sung by Manuel. It also begs another question: why didn't Manuel and Dylan do more writing together? Alas, by the Band's second album Manuel had faded into the background, and Robbie Robertson had emerged as the Band's main musical auteur. A shame. But this song, an anthem of ambivalence, tenderness, and defeated impulses, is a real contribution to the lexicon of popular music, and ought to be around for as long as there are families, which means forever.

Bad Luck: Lou Reed's Street Hassle

When rock and roll established itself as an entertainment business phenomenon in the 1950s, few perceived rock and roll music as a genre that could develop, expand, and take on consonance as a major (and sometimes high) art form. After Elvis joined the army, Buddy Holly died, and Chuck Berry and Little Richard retreated, several years passed in which rock and roll seemed to have been effaced. With the emergence of the Beatles and other British Invasion bands, a revitalization took place that again placed rock and roll at the forefront of the entertainment business. The combined influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles in the mid 1960s (along with the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Byrds, etc.) pushed rock into a new territory; those who wrote rock songs established new contexts, began to view themselves as artists, and rock music became pertinent to poets, sociologists, and others working in seemingly higher milieus and forms. As the 1960s continued, rock songwriters became more ambitious, more intent on establishing the cultural relevance of rock music. Suddenly, there were “concept albums,” featuring interlocking songs meant to fit together like puzzle pieces to form coherent wholes, “rock operas” that attempted to contain and develop entire narratives, and, eventually, “progressive rock,” designed to widen the scope of rock music and tie it to previously hegemonic cultural forms of expression. The great rock writers of the 1960s did, however, flourish the most when not tied to longer formats. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, widely lauded upon its release as a nouveau attempt at sustained narrative, is, in fact, a hodgepodge of individual songs in varying styles. Likewise, the Who’s Tommy, the first “rock opera,” falls down in many places because the characterizations are superficial, the storyline is incoherent, and the whole piece stumbles in search of a unifying direction.

The 1960s rock writers also tried their hand at collages. The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away,” the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” the Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler,” and the Doors’ “When the Music’s Over” all attempt the artful cuts, rapid switching of scenes, time/space leaps, and phantasmagoric viewpoints that made the best Modernist literature so compelling. These four pieces are all more or less successful, but each lacks the sharpness, specificity, coherence, and narrative strength that make T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land the masterpiece that it is. The 1970s were not so experimental or as phantasmagoric as the 1960s were; but it is not until 1978, when Lou Reed released Street Hassle, that rock produced a collage to stand with the Waste Land. Reed had done some of the best songwriting of the 1960s as the leader of the Velvet Underground; an urban realist, and certainly the only American to rival Ray Davies’ own brand of realism, Reed had addressed drug addiction, deviant sexuality, social marginality, and even metaphysics in the context of the songs he wrote. The 1970s were up and down, commercially and artistically, for Reed; as a solo artist, he continued to explore more or less the same themes he had in the 1960s. By 1978, he had enough ambition to try his hand at a collage, and in doing so produced a single song that effaces almost everything in the rock canon. Because rock critics seem not generally well versed in literature, not much has been written about Street Hassle as an individual piece; it may be because it is situated more between Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf than it is between Dylan, Springsteen, and Young. It is worth noting that neither Eliot, nor Joyce nor Woolf were as gritty as Reed; what is consistent between them is the dedication to a certain kind of form, whereby fractured pieces, streams of consciousness, and competing forms of coherence form solid wholes.

The leaps that Reed makes in Street Hassle are not necessarily thematic; he is still creating, as he did in the 1960s, urban vignettes that depict social contexts, different forms of debauchery, levels of desire, death, fear, decay, despair, present-mindedness, and bleakness. The three parts that constitute Street Hassle, “Waltzing Matilda,” “Street Hassle,” and “Slip Away,” do the damage they do specifically because their coherence isn’t overt, and because, unlike the 1960s attempts at collage, Reed leaves the mystery in. What is the mystery? In the first section, “Waltzing Matilda whipped out her wallet/ the sexy boy smiled in dismay/ she took out four twenties cause she liked round figures/ and everybody’s queen for a day/ well, baby I’m on fire and you know that I admire your body/ why don’t we slip away/ although I’m sure you’re certain it’s a rarity me flirting/ sha la la this way.” As the interaction progresses, Matilda takes the gigolo back to her apartment and has sexual intercourse with him. Two important thematic elements stand out about this interaction, which become key to Street Hassle as a whole: contingencies, the sense that arbitrary scenarios play themselves out in an urban context; and what Reed calls, in the eponymous section of this piece, “bad luck.” The two characters in “Waltzing Matilda” are unlucky in different ways: the male prostitute “smiles in dismay” because the woman (we guess) is sexually unattractive, and thus forced to pay for sexual intercourse; that he needs her money allows her to take charge of the situation. His materially destitute circumstances allow extremely unpleasant contingencies to dominate his existence. Matilda’s bad luck hinges on her knowledge that this transcendent (for her) sexual experience (“he made love to her gently/ it was like she’d never, ever come”) probably won’t be repeated, and if it is it will be because she pays for it. That neither of these characters expresses regret (“neither one regretted a thing”) doesn’t efface the artificiality of the situation, or the realities that facilitate it— he’s a whore, she’s unattractive, both are just objects to each other and can never be anything else. It’s worth noting that the ephemeral characters watching the scene unfold make fun of it: “people’s derision proved to be more than diversion/ sha la la la later on.” These two are beneath the status of anti-heroes; their interaction places them into a mosaic that dwells in a nocturnal realm where bad luck dominates all interactions, and personal intricacies are subsumed beneath basic, crude power drives. This particular interaction covers the space of one night; it ends as day breaks. Street Hassle is, in fact, in its entirety, shrouded in darkness.

In the second segment of Street Hassle, a protagonist emerges, a street philosopher, who understands the streets, the darkness, why people behave the way they behave. In the context of this segment, he appears as a kind of philosopher-king; the segment takes place at his abode, a guest has come equipped with a too-potent, possibly toxic narcotic for the delectation of the rest of the party— “that’s really some bad shit/ you came to our place with…it’s either the best or it’s the worst/ and since I don’t have to choose I guess I won’t.” In this manner, the philosopher king puts his minion in his place— he can withstand the influence of the narcotic, while also iterating that this is his place, and that this person approaches him, rather than vice versa. However, the situation is a drastic crisis; the dealer/guest’s female escort has collapsed into a comatose, possibly fatal state, so that action must be taken. This philosopher is a pragmatist, who suggests “why don’t you drag your old lady by the feet/ and just lay her out in the darkened street/ and by morning she’s just another hit and run.” The philosopher demonstrates the existential realities that make street hassles what they are; the incredible brutality and crassness of the street is just something that happens; you can’t make the rules, you just live by them. The crux of the matter, the hinge of the monologue, follows: “you know some people have no choice/ and they can never find a voice/ to talk with that they can call their own/ so the one thing they see/ that allows them the right to be/ why you know they follow it/ it’s called bad luck.” There are mysteries left in this: does the street-philosopher, king or not, count himself among the luckless? Does his heightened, totalized perspective exempt him from the terrible fates he sees around him? The fact that his most trenchant utterance is issued in the third person plural suggests that it does. “They” might get killed; he doesn’t. That’s the streets— you either get killed or you don’t. Ruthlessness and brutality become part of one’s daily business. Bad luck is (or seems to be) the fate of the ones who choose to get killed. Why you make that choice doesn’t matter that much, nor is anyone else obliged to care if you do. One interesting thing about this narrator is that, despite his brutality, his bluntness and directness make him easy to trust. He doesn’t cut corners or make suggestions; he issues commands. But his sense of command soars above the sordid circumstances that surround him, into a place of objectivity, a height from which he can view the streets. He stands on a mountain of experience, and he isn’t seeing anything new as he watches these scenes unfurl before him. The ultimate reason we trust him is because he offers no solutions; he just shows us why the same things happen over and over again. And why theirs’ no way out of them.

The second half of the “Street Hassle” section is given over to a little monologue spoken by none other than Bruce Springsteen. The way Street Hassle is structured, the character Bruce plays could be the unlucky guest the street-philosopher was conversing with; it appears he is (or may be) talking about his recently-deceased lady-friend. Because this miniaturized monologue doesn’t make much literal sense, it could reflect this character’s state of intoxication, which creates an obvious comparison to the steady, sober street philosopher, who can ingest narcotics without losing his head. In Bruce’s inchoate state of bereavement, he attempts to imitate the philosopher’s pragmatic profundities; its’ an unsuccessful imitation, which ends with a paraphrased quotation from Bruce’s “Born to Run” (“tramps like us/ we were born to pay”). This bleeds into “Slip Away,” the least substantial segment of Street Hassle, which expresses further bereavement from a male protagonist who may or may not be “Bruce” continued, but doesn’t add anything to the narrative, nor any philosophic heights of insight. But by this time the piece has built enough momentum to let the music carry it. Musically, Street Hassle is extraordinary for its mixture of simple and complex elements. Based on a two-chord riff that weaves through the entire piece, it calls to mind Sister Ray from Lou’s Velvets days, but extends Lou’s range through the use of female voices, strings, and a rock-solid tempo that neither changes nor shifts. The musical primitivism on display here makes clear that each element of musical accompaniment is meant to bolster the effect of the various usages Lou makes of words, narratives, characterizations, in the context of what for rock is an outrageously extended collage.

The strange thing about Street Hassle is that it remains one of Lou Reed’s least talked about major accomplishments. Perhaps because it relates so much more readily to literature, perhaps because proper appreciation of the piece requires a good amount of cognition, the rock cognescenti prefer to talk about the Velvets, who approached but never equaled the scope, multi-dimensionality, and philosophical import of this piece. Ultimately, what this piece offers is not dissimilar to what Ray Davies’ offers in “Big Sky”; an account, via a synecdochic situation, of the Fall of Man, owing to both impersonal and personal circumstances, and into squalor, incoherence, and death. Davies offers redemption via acceptance; Reed offers no redemption except lowly-wise wisdom, knowledge of other humans, of one’s own position, and of how to maintain it for as long as possible. If a poet has pulled something this overarching off since T.S. Eliot, I haven’t seen it. Post-modernism, in fact, argues against doing this much damage through its insistence that narratives, however intricate, and however many compete with each other in one context, can be ditched in favor of attempts to create incoherent coherence and nonsense sense. Between 1943 and 2000, did the serious rock writers and their masterpieces take the place of what serious poetry could have done? I not only believe that this is the case, but I am almost certain that it will be de rigueur to designate the great rock songs written between 1965-2000 as the highest form of poetry being produced in that time period. For all that so much of popular culture is dross, when high art degenerates, sometimes popular art can become elevated, and do major high art damage. Lou Reed, in the context of Street Hassle and elsewhere, certainly does, and with a handful of his peers created great narratives (fractured or not) that the poets would, or could not create.

Adam Fieled

Real Language of Ponces: Jarvis Cocker and "Common People"

First things first: how class runs in England, what the striations are that keep the upper classes held fast over the lower ones, is a mystery to me that presents both coherences and baffling incongruities. For an American to seriously address class in England, an acknowledgement must first be made that I am this: an imposter. I have not done months of serious research (where class is concerned, anyway) to write this, and my knowledge is derived almost solely from British poems, movies, novels, and songs. That having been said, the issues of authenticity, posture and imposture, realness, have been cropping up for two hundred years in England, and seem not to have changed in the British psyche. What’s funny to me is how simplistic the American psyche seems in comparison. It boils down to this: in the States, there really is no class; as far as the average American is concerned, you’re either rich and famous or you’re not. Just being one won’t do: one has to be both rich and famous to really feel a sense of both accomplishment and entitlement. There are nuances, but they are minor ones. The American Dream hasn’t changed much, and what we venerate is what the mass media presents for our delectation. The British class system seems, to a novice imposter like me, to be filled with subtle nuances about who’s allowed to do what, who’s allowed to say what to whom, how one may do and say the things that one does and says, and all the interrelationships that these doings and sayings create.

With two vastly dissimilar class hierarchies in place, it may come as no surprise that British artists who choose to directly address the British class system in their work may meet with limited success in American markets. A classic example would be Pulp, whose 1995 masterpiece Different Class heralded their eruption into prominence in the context of debauchery, rivalry, and self-perceived greatness we now know as “Britpop.” The smash single “Common People” from this album did not make much of an impact on American listeners; it isn’t necessarily that Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s singer, lyricist, and resident auteur, wanted to be provincial rather than universal, but the UK class hierarchy was such a compelling theme for him that he (seemingly) felt he had no choice but to address it. If Cocker has an obvious predecessor, it is certainly Ray Davies; “Common People” can be taken as an updated “Dead End Street,” except that Cocker threw in large dollops of humor, perversity, sexuality and irony. To adumbrate a concept from Wordsworth, what transpires in “Common People” could be called an “anti-providential encounter.” In a nutshell: Jarvis is accosted by a foreign, artsy, attractive female trust-funder, who he then proceeds to lecture on class, what constitutes authentically lower-class emotions, responses, situations, and attitudes. The woman who is the subject of the song is a problem specifically because she is a foreigner, an artist, and a trust-funder. And what gets Cocker’s goat is not so much that this woman equates “coolness” with poorness; it’s that she doesn’t understand what poorness really is, what it means, and why the lower classes have their own inherent dignity, that can’t be faked or replicated.

Going into the lyrics, Cocker feels that he needs to make clear that he does understand what it means to dwell (permanently) in a lower class milieu, and, as sharp and feisty as the song is, the key element to understand is this: hopelessness. The folks who “dance/ and drink/ and screw/ because there’s nothing else to do” have earthiness and substance that this woman doesn’t, simply because they don’t have the hope that they might be raised above their circumstances. What’s funny is the extreme to which the female protagonist of the song goes to ape the authenticity of the working classes, but as Cocker narrates, it’s a flush, because “when you’re laying in bed at night/ watching roaches climb the wall/ if you call your Dad he could stop it all.” The interesting twist here is Bohemian; that this woman clearly perceives a connection between being an artist, or at least artsy, with being poor. So, the equation runs, if you are an artist, you must be poor, and if you’re a poor artist you must be cool, and since I want both to be an artist and to be cool, I can slum it here with you ponces until my ship comes in. She is, as the Beatles would say, a Day Tripper. On the other hand, Cocker had to live with the ironies of his own success once “Common People” took hold as a massive single; he was now a rich, famous celebrity, stationed because he could articulate the concerns of the lower classes. It is important to recognize that the narrative involves two characters— the unnamed bitch goddess of the song seemingly perceives Cocker as a common person, and this arouses her sexual interest: “I want to sleep with common people like you.” As in “Day Tripper,” the relationship remains unconsummated; a further irony is that Cocker seems to find telling this woman off more orgasmic than shagging her. The music builds slowly, and the kitchen sink production elements, that have more in common with the synth pop of the 1980s than the grunge and Alternative rock that was coming out of the States at the time, remains subsumed beneath Cocker’s voice, so that every word is precisely articulated, nothing is swallowed, and Cocker, as Ray Davies before him, makes clear that he has something to say that’s worth saying.

It is also worth saying that, as a protagonist involved in a dramatic situation, Cocker comes across more clearly than Davies does, in the sense that songs like “Waterloo Sunset” and “Sunny Afternoon” are separated (ostensibly) from first person concerns, though narrated in the first person: they are character sketches. Cocker, by making overt his working class stance, blurred the distinction between life and art to near invisibility, and his self-presentation, unlike, say, Mick Jagger’s, is not a caricature, though somewhat buffoonish. When he says, “I took her to a supermarket/ I don’t know why, but I had to start it somewhere/ so I started there,” one gets the sense that this is too down at the heels to be artificial, and has the completely unglamorous character of day to day life. Cocker is among the most interesting protagonists in all of rock music, specifically because he has personal obsessions and neuroses that skewer everything he does, and he takes pains to make the situations he is involved in both entertaining and humorous. The situations are both more entertaining and humorous than the ones found in Smiths songs, which often leave key pockets of vagueness and lack concrete details. As the song progresses, a seemingly friendly interaction degenerates into outright hostility, simply because (and this is true in the US as well as the UK) trust-funders are a clueless race, who take mobility completely for granted, expect those around them to service them, love the arts for how easy they are until they realize that their peevish laziness prevents them from actually creating anything, and often take the approach that no matter how shitty their art is, it’s still as good as anyone else’s. So Cocker is killing two birds with one stone: reinforcing that the lower classes have some dignity, and pinning down the leisure classes as the fickle, feckless pretenders they are.

Cocker, like Ray Davies, was (and remains) just a bit too pungent for US tastes. However, a song like “Common People” has all the elements in place to give it duration, so that it may remain intact as a kind of monument for a long period of time. For those of us in the arts who abhor trust-funders, and who work honestly for our wages (Ivy League affiliations aside), it is a reminder that, despite what post-modernity attempted to impose on us, there are forms of authenticity worth both maintaining and investigating, there are real things, real people, real songs in the world. I still believe (even if it is a beleaguered belief) that there is an X factor in all the arts, poetry, music, and the rest, and you either have “it” or you don’t. And the only way to get it is through suffering, and the only way to suffer is to have a bunch of things that you want and don’t have. This song is a perfect example of why there are major advantages to being a “have-not,” but only if you’re honest enough to tell the truth about the way you feel. If you lie, you get killed. And since the trust-funders live any number of lies at once, it is a privilege to sit back and watch as the majority of them tumble into graves of their own making. Those that fight are allowed to laugh at such things.

Adam Fieled

The Smiths: "There is a Light That Never Goes out"

A shrewd argument can be made (and has been made elsewhere) that, in the Western world at least, adolescence is the most dramatic period of most human lives. Why is this? The reason would seem to be that as adolescents, every experience is so new, rich, and fresh to us that we respond with vibrancy impossible to sustain into our mature years. Our experience of sex, friendship, competition, family issues, and coping with imposing responsibilities can seem so overwhelming that real drama becomes the context in which our day to day reactions blossom. No one knows this better than Morrissey, a successful solo artist who fronted the Smiths in the 1980s. As the front-man for the Smiths, Morrissey created a new archetype, one that hadn’t been seen before in the annals of pop music history— he was the celibate, bookish, James Dean-looking misfit, offering himself as a mascot for disenfranchised, disillusioned, alienated youth. Most of his most famous songs from the 1980s offer characters in the middle of crisis situations, which threaten to demolish their delicate sense of security and themselves. There is none more touching than “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” from the 1986 album The Queen is Dead. What adds interest to this song is not its sense of issuing an ambivalent invitation, like “Come as You Are,” but the sense of that other mainstay of the adolescent psyche, escapes and escapism. Rather than retreating into solitude and reverie, as Cobain’s protagonists tend to, Morrissey’s protagonist seeks a social context to nullify a social context that he finds stifling— an unwelcoming family unit. The way Morrissey develops this situation in these lyrics, with their ridiculous dramatizations and exaggerations, demonstrates the manner in which adolescents forced to cope with family abuses deal with their lives. There is pity and terror here, and not a little tragedy.

There is more than one level of drama being tackled in these lyrics. Interpersonal relationships create one level; interior levels of consciousness create another. In the interstices between these two levels, we find a protagonist in a situation that presents no obvious solutions. Of his family he says “its not my home/ its their home/ and I’m welcome no more.” Given Morrissey’s androgynous image, it would be easy to read gayness as a subtext to these lines; that this character is having struggles with his family because his gayness has been both detected and made light of or disapproved. But the lyrics have a universality that chafes against these restraints. Because the character reinforces these concerns, in the lines “driving in your car/ I never never want to go home/ because I haven’t got one anymore,” we know that the contextual drama is extreme enough to lead to a state of heightened nerves, tension, and sensibility. However, as most adolescents go through periods of rebellion, the lyrics are not stark enough to indicate a situation that is irrevocable. The funny tension here (and this song does add levels and layers of humor to its sense of pathos) is not knowing how much this character is dramatizing things for effect. The character’s sympathies (or lack thereof) go in two directions— towards the hated family, and towards the love object that happens to be driving the car in which he (or she) is the passenger. It also needs to be noted that the sex of the two characters in the car is never stated. Thus, there would seem to be no way to determine if homoerotic impulses are on display here, and Morrissey’s androgyny, along with his obvious identification with the characters he writes about, make exact designations impossible to determine. Androgyny is another key feature of adolescence, in which kids becoming adults explore different roles, different patterns of behavior, different proclivities, and different modes of seeing.

Now, to the situation at hand: they are driving in a car, the passenger who narrates and the love object, and he/she intones “and in the darkened underpass/ I thought, O God my chance has come at last/ but then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask.” So, this protagonist is doubly thwarted— by a family who has ostracized him (her), and by a love-object who is not making any overt moves in his (her) direction. Part of the tragedy of these lyrics is that even though “there is a light and it never goes out,” this protagonist never gets what he (she) wants. It is, perhaps, no accident that Morrissey also penned a song entitled “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” The funniest bit in this song is also the creepiest, and the most dramatic; that whoever the unnamed driver/ love-object is, he/she doesn’t appear to have many developed skills as a driver. Either that, or the protagonist is dramatically exaggerating his/her fear of death. The lyrics run “and if a ten-ton truck/ crashes into us/ to die by your side, well, the privilege, the pleasure is mine.” If Kurt Cobain had written these lyrics, they would have an edge of sarcasm and malice (one thinks of “Hey, wait, I’ve got a new complaint” from “Heart-Shaped Box”); coming from Moz, they have an edge of ridiculousness, and an ambiguity owing to not being sure how much is being exaggerated for effect. These lyrics also cast doubt on how worthy this particular love-object is; if he/she is down at the heels, and just as ornery as the protagonist’s family, then this truly is a “no exit” situation, especially because the protagonist happens to be trapped in a car being driven by a (possible) lunatic. The boundaries between fantasy and reality are being explored here, and in such a way that this unreliable narrator takes his place as one of the great unreliable narrators in rock music history, right next to the respective protagonists of “Maggie May,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Musically, the song is split into halves— verses in moody minor, chorus in triumphant major. Morrissey’s baritone does little trills that express his protagonist’s discomfort, and the split between major and minor creates uncomfortable tensions and unresolved paradoxes. The song ends with a fade-out on the moody verse section chords, over which Morrissey intones several times “there is a light and it never goes out.” Is he begging the question? One gets the sense that this protagonist is repeating this over and over to himself like a mantra, so that he may believe it’s actually the truth. The use of synths and strings over this final section adds an air of the New Romantic, and though the Smiths had more or less eclipsed the New Romantics, the hints of Spandau Ballet added to the ambience. Johnny Marr is not as much on display here as he is on other Smiths classes; despite the lyrical content, there is musical understatement at work, which actually heightens the intensity of the group performance. The American music press never had much time for the Smiths; when this record was released, rock music was in one of its biggest ever doldrums, as great as the doldrums which have overtaken the music business in 2010. When the rock cognoscenti talk about the 1980s, it is often with the perspective that the Smiths might have been the only great band the 1980s produced, despite commercial behemoths like U2 and R.E.M. One of the reasons that the Smiths achieved greatness is that they did tackle serious themes in serious ways, and even Morrissey’s occasional flippancy seemed a plant to distract listeners away from the deeper resonances of his lyrics. And this, with its ambiguities, exaggerations, and memorable characterizations, is certainly one of the Smiths greatest creations, as the adolescent psyche is laid bare. Those of us in the arts take pains to carry many of these dramatized emotions into our adult lives, cause therein lies the impulse to create that is our raison d’etre.

Adam Fieled