Fluxblog 428: the sounds of the SUMMER OF LOVE
Plus classic songs by Wire, Elastica, Pavement, Tears for Fears, and Guns N Roses
This week’s playlist is THIS WAS SUMMER 1967, collecting the groovy sounds of the legendary Summer of Love. This one features a lot of familiar old classics, but I think there’s some interesting curveballs and juxtapositions here that keep it from feeling too rote. It’s a great vibe, a moment in time where people were exploring musical possibilities and starting a lot of threads that continue on to this day.
[Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I decided to take this week off from writing new posts, so here’s a few older posts from the archives that I like and can remember, which tend to be the ones where I write about older songs.
You Want To Avoid The Inevitable
Wire “Three Girl Rhumba”
“Three Chord Rhumba” is built like a logic proof, a simple and efficient argument that stops after just a minute because the point has been made. Most of the early punks were attracted to blunt stripped down arrangements for its roots in earlier iterations of rock or for its utility in expressing anger and aggression but Wire focused in on the possibilities rock minimalism had to offer in servicing formal ideas and making it so cerebral lyrics could be presented with a musical punctuation that could make them physically engaging.
The first verse of “Three Girl Rhumba” is a structured like a game that seems designed to keep you distracted, like a musical version of Three-Card Monte. You think of numbers, open boxes, open and shut your eyes, think of more numbers. You end up with no numbers, and it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s not a nihilistic song – you end up doing the impossible to avoid the inevitable, and that seems pretty cool. Even better, the logic of the song moves towards a conclusion in which all efforts to project meaning on an experience is rejected in favor of just dancing.
Buy it from Amazon.
Elastica “Connection”
OK, here’s a different card game. This time it’s all about luck and timing, and you win by making it appear to others like you actually have control over circumstances that are entirely random. Justine Frischmann demonstrates how it works by looking and sounding like the coolest human imaginable – androgynous, mysterious, effortlessly graceful, and casually flirty in a way that seems to presume that everyone’s interested and thus it’s all very low stakes. She almost seems bored by a positive outcome: “somehow the vital connection is made,” sung with a droll sarcasm that suggests it’s impossible to avoid her inevitable victory.
“Connection” famously lifts its riff from “Three Girl Rhumba” but it’s less a copy and more like a sequel – the Aliens to Wire’s Alien, in which core ideas that were once expressed with a brute minimalism are now presented with a sleek poppy maximalism. Elastica accessorize the spikey central riff with new wave synthesizers, alt-rock crunch, and a very ‘90s sort of gloss that sounds the way shiny vinyl clothing looks. Style for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted…
Buy it from Amazon.
Pavement “Westy Can’t Drum”
Stephen Malkmus is playing a game too; it’s called Telephone. He deliberately lifts the riff from a song that everyone knows to be a “rip off” – the essence of popular music if we’re being real, but being a clever songwriter he only just uses it as a starting point before heading off in his own direction. So maybe the game he’s playing is actually Exquisite Corpse? He complicates the riff a bit while keeping its energy – always a smart way to avoid legal issues – and by the middle he’s off on more of a Stereolab-gone-feral tangent.
Malkmus possesses a slacker elegance similar to that of Frischmann and a playful mind comparable to Newman, but he doesn’t come off anywhere near as severe as either. “Westy” is very silly in a way that feels distinctly American to me in much the same way that Frischmann’s version of sexiness and Newman’s sort of intensity feels specifically English. Malkmus stacks evocative phrases like he’s fully in the zone with a magnetic poetry kit, each verse ending in a punchline – “all embrace and segue to the burning masses,” “brings to mind the portraits on the coinages and Lincoln’s beard…but why’s he got a horse’s body??” The impossibilities that are inevitable here are all fanciful and strange.
Buy it from Amazon.
Hot Tips For The Boys
Tears for Fears “Break It Down Again”
“Break It Down Again” was released in 1993 and was a solid radio hit, which is sorta surprising in that the aesthetic of the song is extremely un-1993, the point at which post-Nirvana “alternative” sounds had become entirely dominant in the mainstream. It’s one of the last songs to make it out of that fascinating bubble of pop history that I explored in this playlist – the ‘80s mutating into a glossy, self-consciously classy new ‘90s sound that ends up entirely abandoned within a couple years as the major aesthetics of the era are defined by a cohort of artists who favored more raw styles of rock, pop, and hip-hop.
Tears for Fears, a defining band of the ‘80s, showed up a bit late to the ‘90s party partly because Roland Orzabol had become a studio perfectionist in the late ‘80s but mostly because the band was derailed by his acrimonious split with band co-founder Curt Smith. “Break It Down Again” and the rest of the Elemental album sounds like it would have fit right in with the zeitgeist of 1990 or 1991, but in 1993 it’s already a throwback in the midst of a rock scene centered on records like In Utero, Siamese Dream, Vs., and Pablo Honey. Some of Tears for Fears ‘80s contemporaries had at this point successfully reinvented themselves with very ‘90s palettes – U2, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., The Cure – but Orzabol made no such concessions. It’s not clear to me whether this was out of fidelity to a specific artistic vision or because the record was in the works for so long that there was no way to update the sound of it without starting from scratch. Probably a little of both.
“Break It Down Again” is maximalist and bombastic, and absolutely jammed full of ideas. Orzabol was no stranger to this approach – if anything, the band’s 1989 hit “Sowing the Seeds of Love” is twice as dense – but the relavitely compact structure of this composition makes the swerves from martial political fanfare to hyperbolic synthesized orchestral hits to smooth layered harmonies feel a bit dizzying. Orzabol gets away with his most highbrow notions and acrobatic feats of arrangement because he’s so gifted with melody, and “Break It Down Again” is so stacked with ear-catching hooks that it feels like it could tip over and crash like a Jenga tower at some points.
The lyrics are just as packed as the composition, to the point that each iteration of the chorus has a new set of lyrics attached to the melody. Orzabol approaches the idea of “breaking it down” from multiple angles: dissolution of both personal relationships and nation states, the deconstruction of masculinity, the erosion of emotional walls and the things that keep you from finding your inner truths, the eventual decay of all things. The song embraces the concept of entropy – not so much in the sense of awaiting oblivion, but in that the end of things allow for new beginnings. The lyrics convey an intriguing blend of cynicism and optimism, to the point that he seems to be begging for destruction as an impetus to change. I don’t know if Orazabol intended this song to espouse accelerationism, but it certainly comes off that way.
Buy it from Amazon.
Everybody’s Doing The Time
Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City”
I’ve come to the conclusion that when people think abstractly about the concept of the “rock star,” whether it’s in casual conversation or corporate rhetoric or in hugely successful rap songs, they’re basically thinking of Guns N’ Roses, and Axl Rose in particular. While there are other figures who probably are mixed up in this – Kurt Cobain for the people fixated on authenticity, Jagger/Richards or Led Zeppelin for ‘70s classicists – Axl Rose represents all the attitude and every excess that goes along with the term.
To some extent, this is by Rose’s own design as Guns N’ Roses is the postmodern synthesis of nearly all the major tributaries of popular rock aesthetics up through the mid ‘80s: metal, glam, blues, and punk most obviously from the start. By the time they released the Use Your Illusion albums that would expand to prog, folk rock, rock opera, and Beatles-derived pop. Guns N’ Roses united all of this with a musical and visual aesthetic that was as iconically rock as it gets while rooted specifically in the late ‘80s. The look they and their cohort in the Los Angeles scene in the ‘80s refined and codified the appearance of the “rock person,” and their stylistic influence continues to this day.
Guns N’ Roses made themselves a living, breathing representation of rock values and aesthetics at a time when this canon was becoming formalized both in the development of the “classic rock” radio format, the recent opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in the pages of Rolling Stone, a magazine with a vested interest in establishing and maintaining a canon built around what they had been covering for 20 years. While the construction of a critical canon is always self-conscious affair, the beauty of Guns N’ Roses’ achievement is that their synthesis of all this rock history was almost certainly an intuitive move coming out of natural fandom for all the popular bands of the past 15 years or so up to the point they got together. It looked and sounded authentic because they’d internalized all the same things their audience had – they were sharp critics and analysts of all that music, but that was filtered through strong songwriting instincts and a genuine “give ‘em what they want” populism.
“Paradise City” is the pinnacle of that impulse in their catalogue. The song, written and recorded long before they’d ever played arenas much less a stadium, is built to be the ultimate mass-scale rock experience. It’s hard to imagine the starting point for this track not being something along the lines of “we need the best concert-ending song ever.” It’s starts off as a cousin to “Sweet Home Alabama,” is built around a big sing-along chorus hook, and moves through big riffs, punky verses, solos and more and more opportunities for everyone to sing along. “Paradise City” is extremely eager to please, but it never feels cheap or condescending, and there’s so much momentum in the song that it never feels overwrought, plodding, or clumsy. As with everything on Appetite for Destruction, Mike Clink’s production is sleek and professional but allows for a ragged, wild energy to come through in a way that sets it apart from most other big mainstream rock albums of the mid ‘80s. “Paradise City” is mixed to evoke a massive scale so that it feels like you’re front row in your personal stadium concert.
This much is clear if you listen to the earlier version of “Paradise City” recorded live in session at Sound City that is featured on the expanded “super deluxe” edition of Appetite for Destruction. It’s a great raw version of the song and it feels a bit more edgy and ferocious, but the song doesn’t ask to just sound like five guys in a room playing instruments. “Paradise City” demands to be presented as an idealized experience of rock music, performed by untouchable iconic figures. The sound of it needs to imply your presence, to make you feel included. A lot of rock music thrives on feeling like a document of a special moment in a studio, but songs like “Paradise City” are more like works of fiction that ask you to complete it by imagining the most perfect and magical experience of the music.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I strongly recommend Ann Powers’ interview with PJ Harvey about her new record I Inside the Old Year Dying, which I think benefits a lot from the context provided in this conversation.
• Sean T Collins and Molly Mary O’Brien both wrote very thoughtful pieces about the finale of The Idol and The Weeknd’s performance on the show.
• It feels crazy that Rob Sheffield had to write a piece for Rolling Stone about the intensifying trend of people throwing things at pop stars on stage but here we are…
• Steven Hyden wrote about U2’s Zooropa pegged to the record’s imminent 30th anniversary, and I’m just glad to see more and more people acknowledge this record as one of U2’s great works.
• Steven also talked to Christopher Storer and Josh Senior about their use of music on The Bear.
• Yasi Salek launched her new interview show with Liz Phair as her guest, a great choice as Liz is one of the best conversationalists around.
I worked at a record store when Elemental came out, and it was on the mandatory in-store playlist. More than anything people would hear Orzabal's voice, and get a little confused. There were a lot of "this sounds like Tears For Fears" comments, or "Is this...Tears For Fears?" It was a record with just enough familiarity, but also sounded wholly new (at least to me, anyway).