From "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to "Rebel
Girl," 10 songs that changed my decade.
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By Charles Taylor
Jan. 3, 2000 |
The heyday of Top 40 radio could be as frustrating as it was
exhilarating, requiring you to listen through songs you hated to hear
ones you loved. Today, pop radio is so rigorously formatted to carefully
selected audiences that you can listen for hours and never hear any
music outside of your demographic. And when you can throw on a new CD or
download music, the possibility of exposure to something new dwindles
even more. MTV has never been a haven for new music trying to find an
audience, but watching the station, you probably have a better chance of
encountering a mix of styles and songs than you would on any radio
station. A hip-hop video will follow a metal video will follow a Latin
pop video will follow a pop video. Granted, they could all be junk, but
at least it's a mix.
1. "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Nirvana
Every seminal moment in
rock 'n' roll contains the possibility of its opposite. The enormous
affirmations of Elvis and the Beatles contained implicit refusals of
deadening routine, and the resounding negations of the punks allowed for
the possibility of something beyond boredom. Like punk, Nirvana was a no
that implied a yes, even if that no, in the form of Kurt Cobain's
voice-shredding mantra "a denial," sounded as if it would brook no
argument. I first came across it in a hotel room in Syracuse on an
all-request video station, and could scarcely believe what I was seeing
-- a pep rally in hell that turns into an anarchist's ball. But you need
never have seen that great video to hear a sound growing out of the
rubbery, underwater guitar chords that open the song that could reduce
buildings, and everything that surrounded it on the charts, to rubble.
2. "Independence Day," Martina McBride
"Smells Like Teen
Spirit" is the song that defines the decade, but this mainstream country
hit is the most subversive of the decade's singles. Seven years later,
its contradictions are nowhere close to being resolved. And the way
Martina McBride, the finest mainstream country singer of the decade,
heads into those mysteries is still thrilling. Songwriter Gretchen
Peters based it on the 1983 film of the same name (written by
novelist Alice Hoffman), and the material could have been a classic
country weeper. It's sung by a woman remembering the Fourth of July when
she was eight. While she's at the town fair, her mother sets fire to the
house, killing herself and her abusive drunk of a husband. The little
girl returns to find herself homeless and orphaned: "They just put out
the flames, and took down some names and sent me to the county home."
Nothing here is that tidy. Years later, time hasn't begun to heal any of
the wounds. Listen to McBride's voice and you hear bitterness -- at her
old man's brutality, at the death of her mother, at the wagging tongues
of her small town finding more shame in a woman who stays than the man
who beats her. But when McBride shifts into the chorus what you hear is
a kind of glory. "Let freedom ring," she begins, echoing Martin Luther
King's "I Have a Dream" speech, except this is no celebration of
nonviolence. In the next lines -- "roll the stone away/let the guilty
pay" -- she's confusing New Testament forgiveness with Old Testament
retribution. "I ain't saying it's right or it's wrong," McBride sings in
the song's windup and if that refusal to apologize or judge her mother
is by itself startling, it's no preparation for the shock that follows
with the sneer McBride puts into the lines "Talk about your
revolution/It's Independence Day."
In that moment McBride focuses the song's juxtaposition of independence
as national institution and banal abstraction with independence in
action. McBride may not be aware how far she went; surely the country
radio stations that made this a hit weren't. But as surely as the punks
did. "Independence Day" calls into question the nature of institutions
and Values taken for granted. If McBride has a spiritual ancestor in
this song, it's a figure from the civil rights movement, SNCC's Jim
Forman, who said, "If we can't sit at the table, let's kick the
motherfuckin' legs off!"
3. "Miss World," Hole
Maybe 15 years from now this will
sound like a great punk anthem with a great punk catch phrase: "I'll make
my bed/I'll lie in it/I'll make my bed/I'll die in it." To anyone who
lived through that awful
spring of 1994, they will always sound like the only words that
didn't seem to be spoken in a foreign language.
4. "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," The Geto Boys
Despite some
records that have thrilled me to the core, I've listened to hip-hop as
outsider more than adherent. Partly it's the lack of distance I hear in
the celebration of guns, money and hos, a hard materialism that's (to
me) depressing in a way that Chuck Berry's celebrations of drive-ins and
coffee-colored Cadillacs and Hooverators crammed with TV dinners and
ginger ale could never be. This horrifying song steps back from gangsta
fantasies and puts us -- inescapably -- into the skin of a man trying to
live the thug life. He's given up everything in pursuit of it -- his
woman, his son and now, it seems, his mind.
This character had an on-screen equivalent, Ice Cube in "Boyz N the
Hood," flattening all human feeling from his expressive face, steeling
himself to die, an old, tired man in his early 20s. The only comfort
the song offered was the scratchy sample from an old soul record, and
yet as a reminder of a vanished warmth it was no comfort at all. But
treating both singer and audience as subjects rather than objects, the
song approached the hard truths of great early '70s soul, the heyday of
Curtis Mayfield and the Chi-Lites, the O'Jays of "Back Stabbers" and the
Temptations of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." No hip-hop record I've heard
has touched it.
5. "Common People," Pulp
The glorious return of class hatred.
In the song, at a British art school -- launching pads for countless
dandy-aesthete-socialists who, like Pulp frontman
Jarvis Cocker, have prowled through British rock -- a working-class
young man meets a rich foreign girl who wants to "be like common
people." What follows is funny, incisive, cruel and, finally, something
akin to the revenge taken by the sideshow freaks on the heartless blond
wife in Tod Browning's classic horror film "Freaks." Cocker sings as if
he has the power to make her wish come true and to make it her regret it
for the rest of her life.
Next page | "There She Goes," "Are You That Somebody?"
Photo illustration by Ian Walsh/Salon.com
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