31 Songs

by Nick Hornby

  In fairness, there is very little that would cause offence on either Destiny’s Child’s Survivor or Jagged Edge’s Jagged Little Thrill. (The hopeless pun on Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill seems to be an homage to Alanis’s ability to sell CDs rather than to her penchant for agonized self-exploration; Jagged Little Thrill is not an introspective collection.) There is plenty of cleavage on display on the front of the former, and a lot of tattoos and motorbikes visible on the cover of the latter, but these girls and boys are good-bad, not evil, as the Shangri-Las once put it, and although He might be baffled about what He had to do with any of it, He is unlikely, I think, to get wrathful. This is sweet-natured and competent contemporary R&B, and though it is almost perversely unmemorable – how hard can it be to write one tune that sticks? – and utterly derivative (think girl-power pop soul in the style of the Spice Girls and TLC), you are unlikely to feel the need to call an exorcist if you find copies of either lying around in a teenager’s bedroom.

  Similarly harmless are the albums by Lil’ Romeo and Alicia Keys. Only you will know whether you want to listen to an album by an eleven-year-old rapper. ‘It’s teenage music, but it’s also adult appealing,’ the biography on Lil’ Romeo’s website claims, but this seems extravagantly hopeful, because it’s hard to imagine that anyone in his teens would swallow this stuff, and it certainly didn’t appeal to this particular adult. The intro features a version of ‘Frère Jacques’; track two is effectively a rap version of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’; and ‘Somebody’s in Love’ contains the line ‘Be my Mickey Mouse, and I’ll be your Minnie’. The twelfth track, incidentally, ‘When I Get Grown’, was written by Lil’ Romeo, Master P, PK aka Marcus Carter, Gip Noble, Cecil Womack, Linda Womack, Ahmad Lewis and Stefan Gordy; one or two of these, one suspects, weren’t at the very top of their game.

  The Alicia Keys disc really isn’t bad, however, and is certainly the only album in the Top Ten that I might contemplate playing again one day in the not too distant future, when the memory of this whole Billboard experience is a little less … vivid. Songs in A Minor, like a lot of diva R&B, is overproduced and overpolite, and the songs rely too heavily on the groove and on Keys’ melisma, rather than on their own structure, but it has its moments – most notably the bluesy, moody ‘Fallin’ ’, which borrows liberally from James Brown’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’, and her cover of a Prince song, ‘How Come You Don’t Call Me’. Indeed, one of the strengths of the album is Keys’ recognition that there was black American music before Whitney Houston. The string arrangements echo Curtis Mayfield, and the occasional willingness to lean on piano and voice suggests that Keys might have come across Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin.

  Politesse comes to seem like the most important and attractive of virtues when you enter the midnight worlds of P. Diddy and D12. P. Diddy’s The Saga Continues … and D12’s Devils Night – like the Staind and Blink 182 albums – come equipped with parental-advisory stickers, and these warnings, let me tell you, mean business. Anyone who has lived through Deep Purple, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Cramps, Grandmaster Flash and Nirvana could be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing out there with the potential to alienate in the way that our music antagonized our parents. We have become accustomed to sonic ferocity (and it was that, as much as anything, that terrified a generation raised on frank Sinatra and Pat Boone) and to songs that contain every conceivable obscenity, covert and overt endorsement of drug use, and sexually explicit language. Despite all this, an hour in the company of P. Diddy (formerly Puff Daddy, or Puffy, or Sean Combs) is a dismal, sordid experience. We have been told often enough that to disapprove of gangsta rap is pointless, middle class and smug, like disapproving of modern urban life itself. Nevertheless, one is entitled to feel queasy about the enthusiasm for and endorsement of the gangsta life audible on The Saga Continues … The eponymous first track (the title, as it happens, of the first track on the Jagged Edge album, a coincidence indicative of the general level of self-mythologizing going on at the top of the charts) could, it seems to me, be summarized as follows: some rich, powerful, violent people have been away for a while (who these people are, and where they have been, remains a moot point, particularly since we know enough not to confuse the artist with his narrators), and if, in their absence, you have been trying to muscle in on their turf, then they will not be happy about it. ‘Y’ all niggaz still talkin? Oh you got a little name little fame little fortune? What you have is a portion/Bout the size of the hats in the back of my Porsche and/So you better use caution.’ These rich, powerful, violent people seem to be on speaking terms with people who own firearms; beyond that it is perhaps best not to speculate.

  The star of the rap collective D12 is Eminem, who, as some readers may be aware, has caused a stir in the last couple of years, mostly by directing a Tourette’s-like and apparently inexhaustible torrent of bile towards his fellow-entertainers, his partner, and members of his family. The D12 album Devils Night offers no respite, needless to say; listening to the fourth track here – a ‘skit’ entitled ‘Bizarre’, in which one of the gang members’ attempts to seduce a colleague’s girlfriend goes awry, because he farts all the way through it – was, I think, the single most dispiriting moment of my professional life so far this millennium.

  This, of course, is more or less the entire point, and it gives pause. When one is confronted by The Saga Continues … or Devils Night, any complacency one might have felt about pop music’s no longer having the capacity to alienate or irritate heard-it-all-before liberals evaporates. By comparison, the Sex Pistols’ nihilism seems thoughtful and politically engaged. (It came as something of a shock to realize that the music I have been listening to over the past few years is exclusively and disgustingly sensitive. Even my favourite recent hip-hop song, OutKast’s ‘Ms Jackson’, contains the line ‘I apologize a trillion times’ – a sentiment that would make Eminem gag.) Just about everyone, from the scariest metal singer to the dimmest dance act, wants the world to be a better place, but not Eminem, who veers more towards unmediated hostility and threats of violence, rampant consumerist bragging, casual misogyny and puerility. ‘What’s going on in the world today? People fighting feuding looting, it’s OK/Let it go let it flow let the good times roll,’ goes the chorus of D12’s ‘Ain’t Nuttin’ but Music’. (The music on Devils Night, incidentally, is frequently superb – tense and springy, with a wit and energy that blows P. Diddy’s stale, pompous beats away.) The echo of Marvin Gaye is gleefully and knowingly perverse. Eminem must realize that Gaye wanted an answer to the question, and, to the rapper’s way of thinking, that kind of political angst is contemptible.

  We should have seen this coming. Ever since Elvis, it has been pop music’s job to challenge the mores of the older generation; our mistake was to imagine ourselves hipper and more tolerant than our parents. The liberal values of those who grew up in the sixties and seventies constitute an Achilles’ heel: we’re not big on guns, consumerist bragging or misogyny (where are the people who objected to Bruce Springsteen’s use of the phrase ‘little girl’ when you need them?), and that is the ground on which Eminem and his crew choose to fight. I know when I’m beaten; I can only offer sporting congratulations and a firm handshake.

  Blink 182 makes chirpy pop-punk music in the tradition of Green Day and the Dickies, and they have received their parental-advisory sticker for services to grotesque schoolboy humour. (A previous album was entitled Enema of the State.) Most of the songs on Take Off Your Pants and jacket deal straightforwardly and unimaginatively with first dates (‘First Date’) or youthful alienation (‘If we’re fucked up, you’re to blame,’ and so on); every now and again, presumably to dispel the air of Monkees whole-someness, they stick their fingers down their throat and vomit all over their lyric sheet. The chorus of ‘Happy Holidays, You Bastard’ is as follows: ‘Unless your dad will suck me off/I’ll never talk to you again/Unless your mom’ll touch my cock/I’ll never talk to
you again/Ejaculate into a sock/I’ll never talk to you again.’ Why? I don’t know why. My copy of the album came with four exclusive bonus tracks, one of which is called ‘Fuck a Dog’, but maybe I was just lucky.

  It is with some relief, then, that one turns to Staind – not because of the music (Staind is a metal band, and can think of no higher calling than to soup up old Black Sabbath riffs), but because at least you know where the group stands. ‘Most of you don’t give a shit/That your daughters are porno stars/And your sons sell death to kids,’ they sing on the very first track. Those of you whose daughters are kindergarten teachers and whose sons sell literary novels in independent bookstores should not take offence. Staind tends to look on the gloomy side, but at least its members care, and their howls of anguish are clearly connecting to the right crowd. One satisfied customer at Amazon.com writes, ‘I’ve had a rough time dealing with abuse, peer pressure, love, rape, hate and self-mutilation’ (and although her despair is affecting, is it permissible to wonder whether the self-mutilation at least was somehow avoidable?), before praising the band for providing consolation. Who are we to doubt her? Linkin Park, which performs a similar function to similar acclaim (‘One of the best albums of all time by far,’ another enthusiastic Amazon customer says of its new album, Hybrid Theory- with a bold disregard for the usual mealy-mouthed critical timidity), is a rap-metal band not dissimilar to Limp Bizkit, or, for that matter, to Staind, or to … Actually, the truth of it is that neither Staind nor Linkin Park nor Limp Bizkit is dissimilar to just about any other band that has played an electric guitar very loud in the past thirty years, which means that there is very little to be said for or about them, though I wish them no ill.

  The only album in the Billboard Top Ten made by an artist who is forty or older is the one by Melissa Etheridge, and, yes, the music sounds tired, clapped out. Part of this is deliberate – Skin is a break-up album, Etheridge’s Blood on the Tracks – but, in truth, her rock ballads, all throaty vocals and melodramatic chords, do not have the emotional power they might have had fifteen or twenty years ago, and much of the writing here is on the hackneyed side of generic: ‘ ’Cause you live and you learn/And you learn to hold on/And time will make it heal/And time will make it gone.’ It is all obviously the product of personal pain, but this path is rutted with ancient tracks, and, sure enough, Etheridge finds herself trundling along in them. Skin is unlikely to remain a bestseller for long, one fears; it’s too grown-up, and it’s too predictable, and maybe in the Billboard universe those adjectives are now synonymous. Sales are no longer the absolute indicator of success or popularity that they once were – this is what we must tell ourselves. The Billboard Top Ten means nothing! Kids download everything now! Or they burn CDs for each other! And, yet, hundreds of thousands of young Americans have wanted these albums badly enough to go to a store and spend their cash on P. Diddy and D12 and Blink 182; someone on your street might be listening to ‘Fuck a Dog’ right now. I shall, when I have recovered my strength, creep back to my little private Top Ten, which consists of penniless artists like the Pernice Brothers and Joe Henry and Shuggic Otis and Olu Dara, who make music full of thoughtful, polite ironies and carefully articulated cynicism and references to our glorious heritage. But I won’t kid myself that it’s pop music – not any more.

  Favourite Recent Songs

  What to do, OK Go

  Look at Miss Ohio, Gillian Welch

  Tailspin, Jayhawks

  You Were Right, Badly Drawn Boy

  What, Brendan Benson

  You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til Your River Runs Dry), Richard Hawley

  Brooklyn, Jesse Malin

  The Seed (2.0), the Roots

  Rock Hard Times, the Eels

  One More Song the Radio Won’t Like, Kathleen Edwards

  Baby in Two, Pernice Bros

  Hackensack, Fountains of Wayne

  Joe’s Head, Kings of Leon

  Set You Free, Black Keys

  July 2003

  Discography

  Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From, Teenage Fanclub

  If you have no Teenage Fanclub at all, then you might want to start with 4766 Seconds – A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub, a 2002 compilation that includes both the songs I write about in this book. They’re also both on Songs From Northern Britain, which, if you’ve already got Rubber Soul, is the next best comfort food you can buy.

  Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen

  You know where to get this.

  I’m Like a Bird, Nelly Furtado

  From the album Whoa, Nelly!, which doesn’t really offer anything quite as good as ‘I’m Like a Bird’.

  Heartbreaker, Led Zeppelin

  From Led Zeppelin II, the best Zeppelin album for riffs (‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘The Lemon Song’, etc.).

  One Man Guy, Rufus Wainwright

  From the album Poses. ‘One Man Guy’ is atypical, however: Rufus seems to derive more inspiration from showtunes than from folk or pop, which is fine by me.

  Samba Pa Ti, Santana

  If you feel compelled to buy a Santana album, then a greatest hits should be more than enough for you. There’s one great Santana solo, however, on an album called Havana Moon, which I would never have come across had Jerry Wexler not introduced me to it; the song’s called ‘They All Went To Mexico’ (Willie Nelson sings it), and the solo is lovely, disciplined, elegiac and – fear not – short.

  Mama You Been On My Mind, Rod Stewart

  From the album Never a Dull Moment, the one with ‘You Wear It Well’ on it. Both this and Every Picture … stand up remarkably well.

  Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?, Bob Dylan

  From the album Biograph.

  Rain, The Beatles

  From the album Past Masters Volume Two, although annoyingly you’ll probably have all the other tracks – ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Lady Madonna’, etc. – worth having.

  You Had Time, Ani DiFranco

  From the album Out of Range, which contains the lovely ‘Overlap’. On most of her albums, however, Ani prefers to rant and rap, and more power to her – but it seems a little perverse, given how few people are capable of writing songs like ‘You Had Time’.

  I’ve Had It, Aimee Mann

  From Whatever, Mann’s first solo recording. All her albums are good (as are the last couple of efforts from her band, ’Til Tuesday), but on her new one, Lost In Space, her writing seems to have become even sharper.

  Born for Me, Paul Westerberg

  From the album Suicaine Gratifaction. Westerberg’s solo stuff is as patchy as his Replacements work, which is one of the reasons why he isn’t more famous. There’s a worthwhile Replacements anthology called All for Nothing/Nothing for All, and the good songs on that will go some way to explaining the passion of his devotees.

  Frankie Teardrop, Suicide

  Everyone should listen to Frankie Teardrop once. Get someone who owns Suicide’s first album, which is available on CD, to tape it for you.

  Ain’t That Enough, Teenage Fanclub

  See notes for ‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’.

  First I Look At The Purse, the). Geils Band

  From the album Full House – ‘Live’, one of the very few records to have survived every vicissitude of my musical tastes.

  Smoke, Ben Folds Five

  From the album Whatever and Ever Amen. I can’t believe the number of reviews I’ve read which have compared Folds to either Billy Joel or Elton John; this is obviously and blatantly pianist.

  A Minor Incident, Badly Drawn Boy

  From the soundtrack to About A Boy. Novel available now from Penguin Books.

  Glorybound,The Bible

  You can’t find the version I like. There’s another version on an odds-and-sods album called Random Acts of Kindness, but it really doesn’t have the same swing. Boo and Neill can’t find the recording I refer to.

  Caravan, Van Morrison

  From the live album It’s Too Late
to Stop Now. The BBC once showed a fantastic film of this concert on The Old Grey Whistle Test – someone should show it again.

  So I’ll Run, Butch Hancock and Marce LaCouture

  From the album Yella Rose.

  Puff the Magic Dragon, Gregory Isaacs

  From the album Reggae for Kids, which also features a pretty good ‘This Old Man’ by Yellowman. If your kids are listening over and over again to stuff that makes you want to smash the cassette recorder, then try the Music for Little People series: there are great kids’ CDs by Los Lobos, The Persuasions, Buckwheat Zydeco, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, etc.

  Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3, Ian Dury & the Blockheads

  From the greatest-hits album Reasons To Be Cheerful, which closes with the overlooked and gruffly beautiful ‘Lullaby For Frances’.

  The Calvary Cross, Richard and Linda Thompson

  From the album I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Linda Thompson’s 2002 album Fashionably Late, her first recording for seventeen years, is a delight.

  Late for the Sky, Jackson Browne

  From the album Late for the Sky.

  Hey Self Defeater, Mark Mulcahy

  From the album Fathering. This year’s top tip, via my friend Dan DeLuca of the Philadelphia Enquirer. The Instigator by Rhett Miller.