Offspring repaid a fan’s loyalty by hiring him to sing on one of their most popular records. A forklift operator from Orange County, California, Jason Whittaker was given one line in the band’s hit “Come Out and Play.” He intones the tune’s most famous line “You gotta keep ’em separated.”
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
R.E.M.
A peculiar incident involving a convicted killer and a stodgy television talking head inspired Michael Stipe to pen “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” — the first single release from Monster, R.E.M.’s hardest rocking album to date.
The release of two back-to-back acoustic albums had turned R.E.M. into international superstars. Out of Time (March 1991) and Automatic for the People (October 1992) were quiet, deeply personal records that reflected the band’s somber mood. Although their star was rising in the world market, for R.E.M., it was the best of times and the worst of times. During the recording of those records, guitarist Peter Buck, drinking heavily, sunk into a deep depression following the dissolution of his marriage. Buck’s melancholy mood pervaded every note on that dark duo of records.
When it came time to record their next record and mount their first tour in five years, the band opted for an upbeat strategy. Drummer Bill Berry demanded the change, threatening to hang up his drumsticks if they made another acoustic album, thereby jeopardizing a musical partnership that had been established over a decade before.
Writing commenced in September 1993, and the band pumped out a series of straight-ahead rockers that saw the acoustic instruments of the past albums gathering dust in the closet. After writing forty-odd songs for consideration, by mutual consent, the quartet pared down the number to twelve tunes that fit their idea of what a roaring rock-and-roll record should be. Naming the completed tracks Monster (a sly homage to a Steppenwolf album of the same name), the band unleashed their hard-edged sound to the public exactly one year after the writing began. Monster debuted at Number One on the Billboard Two Hundred in September 1994.
The members of R.E.M. must have loved to eat out in restaurants. They have immortalized two Southern eateries on two separate albums. The Dead Letter Office 1987 instrumental cut “Walter’s Theme” was a tribute to Walter’s Bar-B-Que, one of their favorite dining spots. The phrase Automatic for the People, used as the title for their multiplatinum 1992 long player, was borrowed from Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods restaurant in Clarke County, Georgia. At the soul-food restaurant, when a customer placed an order, the waiters responded with the chirpy catchphrase “Automatic,” as if to say, “No problem.”
The album kicks off with a three-minute and fifty-nine-second electric guitar blast, signaling R.E.M.’s return to a stripped-down sound. The inspiration for “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” was ripped from the headlines of the day. A newspaper account of a strange encounter between CBS news anchor Dan Rather and a street person moved Michael Stipe to compose the song. Walking to the CBS television studio in New York one day, Rather was accosted by William Tager, a disturbed ex-convict who had served time for manslaughter. During the verbal assault, Tager repeatedly yelled, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?,” a nonsense phrase that Stipe later identified as streetspeak. Rather was shaken but unhurt by the encounter.
Stipe built on that event, crafting a tune that thumbs its nose at the media. He later told Musician Magazine’s Vic Garbarini, “[It’s] about people playing into the bullshit about the media drawing lines among young people in this country — that group is about cynicism, and this group are idealists. And yes, it’s also commenting on how we go about trying to research and analyze things we don’t understand, like people younger than ourselves, rather than using our intuition and figuring it out from that end.” Whatever Stipe’s enigmatic lyrics are about, he commented, “ ‘Kenneth’ is such a joy to sing, I don’t care what the words are about.”
“Kenneth’s” tempo slows near the end. During the song’s live recording, bassist Mike Mills slowed down the pace. The rest of the band instinctively followed his lead, not realizing he was having an appendicitis attack and would have to be rushed to the hospital. After Mills’s recovery, the band never found time to rerecord the song, so it was released as is.
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” had the unexpected side effect of allowing Dan Rather to show his lighter side. In a comedy bit on David Letterman’s Late Show, Rather was seen rigidly conducting R.E.M. in a run through of the song. The publicity generated by that performance, and R.E.M.’s own gritty video that won major airplay on MTV, helped push “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” to the midpoint of the Top Forty.
The phrase “losing my religion,” the basis of R.E.M.’s 1991 Top Five hit, was an antiquated saying from the American South. It means “at wit’s end,” or “at the end of your rope.”
The Macarena
Los Del Rio
In 1996, everybody did The Macarena. Hillary Rodham Clinton did the Spanish dance at the Democratic Convention. Chita Rivera shook her booty Latin style along with a crowd of fifty thousand fans at Yankee Stadium. Even Bob Dole got into the act. Falling off a stage in Chico, California, Dole covered by saying he was doing that “new Democratic dance, The Macarena.” All this attention came as a shock to the song’s creators Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz, better known as Los Del Rio. Colleagues for thirty-two years, the duo has released a record a year for as long as they have been together. “The Macarena” became their biggest hit and the first Spanish song to top the US Billboard chart.
As curious as it may seem now, “The Macarena” almost didn’t get released when it was recorded in 1993. Despite a career spanning more than three decades, Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz had never scored a chart-busting hit. As Los Del Rio, the two men were cult darlings in Don Hermanas, a small city in Spain. Monge wrote the infectious number in homage to Diana Patricia Cubillan, a sensuous Flamenco dancer whose erotic moves entranced him after seeing her perform in a Venezuelan nightclub. Depending on which report you believe, Monge either named the song after a saint whose statue is carried through the streets of Seville every year or a neighborhood in that Spanish city.
Duran Duran took their name from a character in the campy sci-fi film Barbarella. It was no surprise, then, that they released a tune called “Electric Barbarella” on 1997’s Medazzaland CD. Leader Simon LeBon denied the song was inspired by the film. In an interview with Toronto Sun’s Jane Stevenson, he said “[Keyboardist] Nick [Rhodes] worked the lyric for that one, and he wanted a four-syllable name, and somebody had already used “Macarena.”
“Barbarella” just seemed like the right one.”
Initially, Los Del Rio’s record company didn’t want to release the tune. The record label’s quandary was with the line “Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Macarena” (“Give your body some joy, Macarena”) — pretty racy stuff for Spanish radio. The company yielded, releasing “The Macarena” with little or no promotion in April 1993. Despite the lack of publicity, the tune became a minor summer hit in Spain.
The story could have ended there. With no international promotion, “The Macarena” fell off the charts in Spain and seemed destined to become a footnote in Los Del Rio’s prolific career. Then came a series of unrelated events that propelled them into the glare of the international spotlight. In 1994, their record company was snapped up by music-industry colossus BMG, and after Los Del Rio performed for the Pope, a BMG excutive commissioned a video for “The Macarena.” The clip’s director made a decision that would ultimately make the tune the Number One dance song of the nineties. He hired Mia Frye, an American dance instructor based in Paris, to choreograph easy-to-remember dance moves for the tune. “My main focus,” she said, “was to remove anything that was too fast. It was important not to include moves that were dependent on the beat. I wanted to be sure that even a child with no sense of rhythm could dance The Macarena.” She came up with a series of nonchallenging line-dancing moves that were easy to memorize and perform.
The song about the sassy temptress Macarena made the rounds in European nightclubs, earning little radio play but packing dance floors all over the continent. In late 1995, the Bayside Boys, a Miami remixing team, reworked a club mix of the tune, adding an English monologue about a woman who rejects her soldier boyfriend Vitorino to hang out with his two best friends. Samples from The Graduate, with Anne Bancroft cooing, “I’m not trying to seduce you,” were thrown in to add extra steam.
A hit in the clubs, the Bayside Boys’ “The Macarena” wasn’t an immediate radio favorite. After eighteen weeks on the charts, it peaked at Number Forty-Five before falling off the hit parade in December 1995. Then, as the weather got hotter, so did the song. “The Macarena’s” club success continued to spread, and suddenly the song was on the charts again. Thirty-three weeks after the Bayside Boys originally entered the charts, “The Macarena” went all the way to Number One, making it the slowest rising pop single in history.
By then, it seemed the public couldn’t get enough of “The Macarena.” Soon there were three versions of the tune on the pop charts — the Bayside Boys’, the original Los Del Rio rendering and a copycat take on the ditty by Los Del Mar.
The tune had hips gyrating everywhere — not just in trendy nightclubs. In Malta, they did the dance at the Nationalist Party rallies. Beer drinkers at Oktoberfest in Munich wagged their lederhosen to “The Macarena.” Kids and grandmothers alike were waving their arms to the catchy song, propelled by the bouncy rhythm, not the steamy story. “The Macarena” is a rare Number One hit that transcended generations, vocations and ethnicity. It’s huge appeal crossed all lines, sucking everyone in, even the rhythmically challenged.
By the end of the year, the very clubs that had propelled “The Macarena” into public consciousness had grown tired of repeated requests for the dance tune. One club posted a copy of the CD upside down on the staff bulletin board, warning their DJs not to play it. Another club retired the song in what they called a “crispy celebration,” burning a copy of the disc on the sidewalk outside their establishment. The craze was over.
THE MACARENA
Just in case you missed it, here’s how you dance The Macarena:
Right and left arms straight out front, palms down.
Right and left arms straight out front, palms up.
Right hand grasps inside of left arm at elbow.
Left hand grasps inside of right arm at elbow.
Right hand behind right back of neck.
Left hand behind left back of neck.
Right hand on left front pants pocket.
Left hand on right pants pocket.
Right hand on right front pants pocket.
Left hand on left front pants pocket.
Move rump to the left.
Move rump to the right.
Move rump to the left.
Clap hands and jump ninety degrees to the right.
Ironic
Alanis Morissette
A song from Alanis Morissette’s multiplatinum Jagged Little Pill CD hit heavily on the charts but left English teachers scratching their heads. “Ironic” was her fifth Top Five single in 1996. “The most ironic thing about that song,” said one DJ, “is that it is mostly not about irony at all. It’s about bummers.”
Ottawa-born Alanis Morissette has been singing since she was old enough to walk. In 1977, at the age of three, she memorized the entire score of Grease, and using a nail-polish bottle as a microphone, she often sang it in a loud, clear voice for her family. The three Morissette kids were obsessed with show business. Chad, Wade (her twin brother, born June 1, 1974, older by twelve minutes) and Alanis practiced dance routines they learned from watching videos and often acted out scenes from movies and television. Soon the boys moved on to more practical pursuits — Chad veering toward a career in business, while Wade became interested in sports. Alanis, though, was single-minded. She wanted to feel the heat of the spotlight.
In school, she participated in musicals such as Annie, and by 1984, she was writing her own songs, composing both lyrics and music. At age ten, she sent a tape of her songs to singers Lindsay and Jacqui Morgan, close friends of the family. One song, “Fate Stay With Me,” knocked out the couple. They helped Alanis rewrite the tune, adding structure to her crude melody, teaching her how to write a song. A few months later, having taken the Morgans’ advice to heart, Alanis was writing polished songs.
The year 1991 saw the realization of her dream — a full-length CD titled Alanis. She cowrote each of the ten dance tracks, scoring a Top Five Canadian hit with “Too Hot.” Canadian success continued with the 1992 release of Now Is the Time, moving 100,000 units and earning a gold record. Alanis’s brand of dance pop earned her the label of “the Paula Abdul of Canada.”
Although successful in Canada, the first two records were not released in the United States. With an eye toward an American release, she left Ottawa for Toronto to work with different songwriters and expand her sound. It was not a happy time. The next two years saw a series of disastrous relationships and unfulfilled creative needs. In 1994, she began commuting to Los Angeles, meeting with a series of songwriters in hopes of finding someone with the creative spark needed to kick her songwriting skills up a notch. She found her man in the form of Mississippi-born Glen Ballard, a seasoned record-industry veteran who had been associated with records by Michael Jackson and Wilson-Phillips — discs that had sold a reported 100 million copies.
MCA set up a meeting between the two in February 1994, and they immediately connected. “Musically and cerebrally, Glen and I were so on the same wavelength, it all came together,” she told Mojo. One night, while working on a song that never got finished, they had an idea for another. In twenty minutes, they had written “Perfect.” Later that night, they recorded it, and that original demo appeared on Jagged Little Pill. Later, Alanis would call that night one of the most “overwhelming spiritual moments” she’s ever had.
“Perfect” established a methodology for their collaboration. Sitting together — Alanis on the floor, Ballard settled in a chair — they would strum acoustic guitars, working on snippets of lyrical and melodic ideas. When inspiration came, Alanis would enter a zone, almost as though the music was being channeled through her from some spiritual source. Songs were written and recorded the same night — sometimes taking only a couple of hours from the germination of an idea to a finished demo. The work was so stream of consciousness that Alanis would occasionally replay a tape recorded the night before and have no recollection of the tune or how they wrote it. Using this method, the pair penned twenty songs, including “Ironic,” with twelve making the final cut for Jagged Little Pill.
The first sign of the album’s eventual popularity came early. LA radio station KROQ sneak previewed “You Oughta Know” on May 16, 1995, weeks before Jagged Little Pill’s official release date. Public reaction was swift as the KROQ phone lines lit up. Listeners loved the song. The Alanis juggernaut had begun.
Contrary to her mellow, meditative style of writing, in live performance, Alanis Morissette is a whirling dervish as pictured in this 1996 photo from a London Hyde Park concert.
Subsequent Jagged Little Pill singles were snapped up by a record-buying public hungry for any song from the twenty-one-year-old Canadian. “Hand in My Pocket,” “You Learn” and “Head Over Feet” all topped the charts. But it was “Ironic” that picked up kudos from the public while earning scorn from the academic community. A debate played out in the newspapers questioned whether the song actually contained any real irony. A headline in the Washington Post blared “Now THIS Is Ironic; It’s Like a Hit Song that Got the Words Wrong.” Reporter Richard Leiby called the song an example of “irony abuse,” writing, “Just wrap quotes around a word, capitalize it or add an exclamation mark, and you’ve got Instant Irony!”
Saying the opposite of what you really mean is rhetorical irony. Webster’s cites the example of saying “It’s lovely day” when it is raining. Classic irony is more co
mplicated. Leiby cites satirist Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal as an example: “As a solution to the Irish famine, an economist proposes that the babies of the Irish poor be sold as food to the rich landlords — to raise money to prevent starvation.” Alanis is trying for situational irony, defined as “a combination of circumstances or a result that is the opposite of what is or might be expected or considered appropriate.” Does she hit the mark? Carol Myers-Scotton of the University of South Carolina doesn’t think so. She gave the song a poor mark, citing the “rain on your wedding day” line as bad luck, not irony. Catholic University professor Glen Johnson agrees, saying the tune lacks the “doubleness” required for proper irony. “There should be two levels,” he told Leiby, “some meaning other than the surface meaning.”
Academics may have given the record a failing mark, but record buyers were unfazed, pushing the song to the top of the charts.
Sheryl Crow’s 1993 album Tuesday Night Music Club was named after a group of friends who worked together in informal sessions at Bill Bottrell’s Pasadena, California studio. Members included Crow, David Baerwald, Kevin Gilbert and the band Wire Train. The musicians would gather and work on songs. By the end of each Tuesday “we’d have recorded either a piece of shit or a great work,” Crow said.
Anybody Seen My Baby?
Rolling Stones
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have been writing songs together for over thirty years. Prolific in the extreme, their alliance has yielded hundreds of songs and moved millions of pieces of vinyl. In 1997, on the eve of the release of Bridges to Babylon, the Rolling Stones’ twenty-third studio album, a quandary arose. The proposed first single sounded suspiciously like another song. Something had to be done. “We don’t steal songs,” quipped Keith. “We’ve got enough.”
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 20