35-for-35

35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

November 19, 2016 by krisis

My second-favorite shot of Ani, shot by Danny Clinch.

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]As occasionally problematic and non-intersectional as Ani DiFranco can be, sometimes her willingness to just say stuff makes for compelling, provocative songs.

Case and point: her song “Subdivision” from 2001’s double-album Revelling/Reckoning, which starts with the line “White people are so scared of black people.”

Despite the bombshell opening line, “Subdivision” is not a song exclusively about racial divides, but about Ani’s beloved home town of Buffalo and her beloved country. Her city has seemingly been left behind by a march of modernity. Here, she wonders if that march is just about having the money and privilege to put more space between ourselves and our fears. Maybe if we’re far enough away we no longer have to confront them.

Except: when we’ve forgotten, buried, or sublimated all that we’ve been running away from, how will we know when it is stil driving our biases?

I had a sense of foreboding when I picked “Subdivision” as my song from 2001 as I prepared for this campaign last month. I’d be posting it just 10 days after the election. I wondered how its message would play in a post-election America, the same country we lived in the day before the election but potentially seen through a new lens. What would it say about a world where Hillary Clinton won the election? What about a world where Donald Trump won? Would it be equally true in both?

Now we know the outcome, and I ask that you simply listen and take from it whatever message you hear. That first line will always stand out for me, but in this redefined world it is teaching me something different than it was a few weeks ago.

Subdivision
by Ani DiFranco

White people are so scared of black people
They bulldoze out to the country
And put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
And while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street
Separating east side from west

And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse
In the boarded-up stores and the broken-down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners
No mercy and no sense

35-for-35: 2000 – “The Easy Way Out” by Juliana Hatfield

November 18, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Do you know what “slept on” means?

It’s a slang term for overlooked, forgotten, or ignored and I feel like it describes at least half of my record collection.

Juliana Hatfield’s Beautiful Creature was slept on. Criminally. I almost slept through it, actually. I acquired it in the spring of 2000 from a basket of unreviewed promo records during a day apprenticing at Philly Weekly on assignment for my first journalism course. “Take whatever you want,” they said.

I vaguely knew who Juliana Hatfield was because of one of her two breakthrough hits, the peculiar 5/4 ode to kissing in the closet, “Spin the Bottle.”

Somehow she had escaped my omnivorous appetite for 90s women in rock, which is a sad confirmation of how slept on she was already before releasing this LP. I saw the cardboard sleeve for Beautiful Creature (paired with her harder rock record, Total System Failure) in the review copies bin and thought it would be worth a listen.

A few months later, and it was an LP I was plugging in several of CK’s earliest posts. It’s a perfect blend of Hatfield’s 90s rock bonafides with a late-Beatles acoustic simplicity she had left behind to get increasingly grungy.

“Easy Way Out” is a song that’s more on the grungy side, a riff-heavy rock tune that betrays the heaviness that Hatfield tried to constrain to Total System Failure but keeps the focus on irresistible melody.

It also keeps up Hatfield’s habit of being just as ribald and rude as the boys of rock in her songs while still cutting to the bone. Her last effort, Bed, was all about sleeping around, and this disc is all about love and drugs. “And he cries like a girl,” she yells in the refrain. “And he lies to the world. And the hate and the guilt and the pills – it’s an easy way out.”

julianahatfieldtop13 I kept lending Beautiful Creature and putting it on mix tapes for years. I tried to convince acappella groups to cover its songs as late as 2007. I kept on waiting for it to break through, for Hatfield’s unrecognized genius to be acknowledged by everyone I knew.

Fifteen years later and I guess it’s probably not going to happen for Beautiful Creature. I can’t even call it Hatfield’s best album, because the ones that came before and after it are equally amazing. Yet, it’s this one that remains one of my favorite LPs of all time, and since its release I have become convinced that Juliana Hatfield is one of the best performing songwriters working in America today.

If I get a day to linger in the year 2000, the year of Crushing Krisis’s birth, you can be sure I’m going to spend a portion of it lingering on Juliana Hatfield.

You don’t have to take my word for it – stream it for free right now if you have Amazon Prime.

35-for-35: 1999 – “Center of Attention” by Guster

November 17, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] lost-and-gone-forever-guster Lindsay, Erika, and I formed an only-child club together in 2001, but its origins were in 1999 and 2000.

That’s when five of the more senior members of The Drexel Players – Erika, Kate, Laurel, Megan, and Anthony – all shared the top two floors of an old row home at 3418 Race Street. For all of us Freshman, it’s where we decamped after every informational meeting, audition, and rehearsal. It’s where I met so many of the friends I still hold dear today, and where I met my entire wedding party (aside from Gina, who still factors into this tale).

There were certain records that never left the CD spinner in that house, such that their songs have become synonymous with one or more of those people for me. (Yes, CD spinner, though we were into into the heyday of Napster at this point.). Some of the records were the stereotypical white college kid things you’d expect – Dave Matthews was a frequent play, especially his Live at Luther College with Tim Reynolds.

Perhaps influenced by that choice, there was also Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever, produced by longtime DMB collaborator Steve Lillywhite.

Sometimes when I hear an album for the first time it seems so melodically obvious that I cannot believe I haven’t heard it before. Other times an album is so perfect that I consider every song a slice of 5-star perfection and can listen to it endlessly.

Lost and Gone Forever is both.

There aren’t a lot of catchy, pop-oriented bands that break through mostly on the power of acoustic guitars and harmony, which is the trick Guster somehow pulls on songs like “Center of Attention.” The amount and intricacy of Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner’s harmony is really quite incredible. It hardly ever sticks to the straight thirds most bands plaster their songs with. At points they’re what I’d call the nearest male analog to The Indigo Girls.

“Center of Attention” doesn’t really use any chords. Listen carefully in the first verse as it reaches the “walls inside my head” prechorus. It’s just a pair of riffs churning against each other to imply tonality. It’s also a perfect example of how Guster eschews the typical rhythm section of drums and bass, with most songs rooted by a baritone-range guitar figure and drummer Brian Rosenworcel pounding on all manner of congos, bongos, and even typewriters.

Guster promo flat

That doesn’t sound like it should make for great, catchy pop music and honestly it didn’t on Guster’s first two records. However, the combination of Steve Lillywhite as a producer and this remarkable set of songs created a whole that you could have never predicted by looking at the parts.

Lost and Gone Forever is an amazing record about the changing nature of friendship and platonic love, about selfishness and getting over yourself, and you can sing along to every song on it.

One of us won’t last the night
Between you and me it’s no surprise
There’s two of us, both can’t be right
Neither will move till it’s over

I’m the center of attention
and the wall’s inside my head
And no one will ever know it
if I keep my mouth shut tight

The that motley crew of Drexel Players I met Freshman year shifted in 2000-2001 as I started this blog. Three members of the house moved away, which is how at one point Lindsay came to be renting Laurel’s back bedroom, and I came to be sitting around in the middle of the day with her and Erika watching game shows.

Just as there aren’t many memorable acoustic pop bands like Guster, there aren’t a lot of great, catchy songs about the mental defenses you construct as a clever only-child. “Center of Attention” is, without a doubt, the only-child’s anthem in that regard. I’d say, “maybe that’s just me,” but Lindsay and Erika have proven that it’s not. You’re not only your own protagonist, as every child is, but all of your adventures are entirely contained in the gossamer bubble of your brain.

Somehow (and I honestly still can’t quite explain it, even with copious posts from the time to aid my memory), the three of us wound up renting a house together in the fall of 2001. Three only children, each as selfish and stubborn as the other, all holed up in the top two floors of our own apartment on 44th street (where we’d later be joined by a fourth only-child (sort of), Gina)).

My own little world is what I deserve
Cause I am the only child there is
I’m king of it all, the belle of the ball
I promise I’ve always been like this
Forever the first, my bubble can’t burst
It’s almost like only I exist
Where everything’s fine
If I can keep my mouth shut tight, tight, tight

I think the reason we found each other and became (and remained) so close is because we’d each tried to outlast each other through the night and failed. Once that defense is finally knocked down, you’ve found someone with whom who you don’t always have to keep your mouth shut so tight.

35-for-35: 1998 – “Baby Britain” by Elliott Smith

November 16, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]A long, long time ago, I wrote about how Built To Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret was the first crack in the dam I had constructed against enjoying music performed by men.

My 90s record collection was like a personal Affirmative Action policy on music. At the time, I didn’t even have the excuse of being a musical artist who was wielding judgement and harboring jealousy when it came to my male peers. Aside from Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits and the requisite Nevermind and Unplugged, I had nary a dude in my collection. The sound of the male voice didn’t please me, even if their songs weren’t of the dull “get the girl” variety.

If picking up the Built to Spill record in February of 1999 was a crack in my dam, Elliott Smith’s XO was the flood that followed.Rarely in my life have I been so sucker-punched by a record as I was by XO, released the prior August. I first heard them both from the same source – my friend Anastasia, whose musical taste subsumed my own for a few months that year, transforming it completely for the rest of my life.

While the quaver of Smith’s voice and his delicate songs of defeat would worm their way into my brain over time, but it was when I hit track four that I knew I was in love with this album.

There is something about a song that starts abruptly with a vocal and clanging piano chords that makes me love it. Perhaps it’s a genetic disposition towards anything reminiscent of “Penny Lane.”

While “Baby Britain” doesn’t necessarily call back to that song, there’s an unmistakably 70s McCartney vibe to the bounciest of Smith’s songs from XO (which namechecks Revolver in its third verse). It helps that it straight up nicks the tiny, high guitar stabs from “Getting Better.”

The song is so relentlessly cheerful and major key that it takes several listens before you realize how tragic it is. (This is one of Smith’s singular talents.) It’s a song for a friend in a downward spiral – one Smith recognizes but doesn’t know how to steer out of. All that cheer is the good humor of someone halfway through the evening’s bottle of vodka; it won’t last until the bottom, and she’ll need another the next day to recover.

baby-britain-elliott-smith I’ve always adored the puzzle of the chorus – two incomplete thoughts that change the lens of the rest of the song depending on how you read them.

For someone half as smart
You’d be a work of art
You put yourself apart
And I can’t help until you start

Is the “someone half as smart” the Baby Britain Smith is singing to? If you read it that way, the entire song is a kiss off or a put down. I don’t. Nothing else in the song casts her as dim.

I’ve always read that first line as Smith’s dig at himself. If he didn’t know all of her destructive behavior so well he’d swear she was a work of art – an alchoholic manic pixie dream girl sailing across a sea of vodka. Sadly, he knows better than that. What’s charming to a man half as smart is a honeycomb of character flaws to Elliott.

It’s easy to hear the next line as “You pull yourself apart,” which entirely makes sense within the world of the song, but the lyric is “you put yourself apart” (calling back to “separated from the rest” in the first verse). Can Baby Britain’s problems be character flaws if some of them are so intentional? We’ve all met that person who creates their own tidal waves of conflict. It’s easy not to pity them when they’re the ones putting themselves apart from everyone else and the helping hands offered by that crowd, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel sorry for the choices they make.

The final line is one of those perfect Elliott Smith lines. It’s a sentence of infinite density. If we were reading this grammatically, the “until you start” would seem to apply to the prior phrase. It doesn’t. It’s self contained. Smith applies so much compression to “And I can’t help you until you start to help yourself” that he’s stripped out every extraneous word. The chorus could just be this single elegant line repeated four times, but that would draw too much attention to it. Better a a the final line, a summation but also tossed away as the swell of the song crests into another verse.

Also, I humbly submit that this is one of the best lyrics ever written.

We knocked another couple back
The dead soldiers lined up on the table
Still prepared for an attack
They didn’t know they’d been disabled

Yet, with retrospect, the truly cutting lyric is the final line of the final verse. It’s another of Smith’s trademark compressed phrases, with a double negative obscuring the meaning until you squint at it closely.

Nothing’s gonna drag me down
To a death that’s not worth cheating

Who is Smith to pull Baby Britain out of her spiral of misery when it would be an admission that he could pull out of his own? That death is a fate that’s not worth cheating – either because it’s inevitable or because on some level he believes he might deserves it. Nothing can drag him down to that level or away from it because he’s already a permanent inhabitant.

I’ll always remember stepping into my mother’s car a few days after October 21, 2003 and saying, “I’ve got some awful news to tell you.” Elliott Smith’s music was something so intelligent and perfect, and to this day I mourn that there’s a finite amount of it in this work because he finally reached the end he couldn’t cheat his way out of.

35-for-35: 1997 – “Shame On You” by The Indigo Girls

November 15, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I do this thing where a band floats around on the periphery of my world for many years until, finally, one of their later singles becomes my touchtone and doorway back through their catalog.

I did it with Ani DiFranco, with Tori Amos, with Radiohead, and in 1997 I unknowingly did it with The Indigo Girls – it just took another five years for me to really feel the impact.

I had heard of the Indigo Girls before, in passing. My friends sang “Closer to Fine” in a talent show and I had to have heard “Least Complicated” at some point to explain my later familiarity with it. Yet, it was “Shame On You” that clicked in my adolescent brain in the fleeting years of when alternative rock radio that would still play an acoustic song by a female singer.

Even before I was a guitar player I appreciated the utter simplicity of this three-chord tune with it simple I-IV-V progression. It reminds me of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” and every time Amy Ray says “la la la, shame on you” I always want to shout back, “sha la-la la-la la-la la, la ti da!”

(I swear, I had no thoughts of how politically relevant this pick would be when I made it a few weeks ago. That’s folk music for you.)

Despite hitting all the right Lilith Fair influences to make me love it, the song resonated with teenaged me on another level because it was one of the few songs on the radio at the time aside from Rage Against The Machine that was making a statement about anything. The song starts with Ray relating the story of her friends the window washers.

My friends they wash the windows and they shine in the sun
They tell me wake up early in the morning sometime
See what a beautiful job we done
I say let’s put on some tunes sing along do little all day
Go down to the riverside take off our shoes wash these sins away

The river said, “la la la,” it said shame on you

This was a different sort of blue collar nod than you’d expect to hear in a Springsteen tune. Ray wasn’t saying she was an every-woman, or bemoaning the plight of an underclass. She says “my friends” as she introduces these people who hang from the sides of tall buildings while she’s on the road as a rock star.

Her friends want her to appreciate their windows like they appreciates her music. She wants to take off her shoes with them and head down to the river, where they’re all the same and they can hear the water burble “shame on you” as their sins wash past downstream.

In retrospect, is this sort of romanticism of blue collar ideals from someone far outside their sphere more of a downward punch than Springsteen similar everyman vibe? Usually I’d say “yes,” but Ray continues…

I go down to Chicano city park because it makes me feel so fine
When the weeds go down you can see up close in the dead of the winter time
But when the summer comes everything’s in bloom and you wouldn’t know it’s there
The white folks like to pretend it’s not but their music’s in the air

And you can hear ’em singing, “la la la,” they say shame on you
And you can feel them dancing, “la la la,” they say shame on you

She has now identified herself, the narrator, as an outsider to all of the beauty that she witnesses. Is that patronizing or is it acceptance and affection for the other?

I was particularly struck at the the time at the gently accusatory way she says, “the white folks like to pretend.” Isn’t she a white folk, too? Or, maybe that’s only a label for those pretenders, and everyone else are just people.

And who is now admonishing “shame on you”? Is it the white folks, clucking at the Chicano culture? Or, the Chicano clucking in response that the white folks refuse to enjoy it even when it puts a smile on their face.

Or both?

My friend Tanner she says you know me and Jesus we’re of the same heart
The only thing that keeps us distant is that I keep fuckin’ up
I said come on down to Chicano city park wash your blues away
The beautiful ladies walk on by
You know I never know what to say

And they’ll be singing,” oo la-la-la-la-la, shame on you”
They’ll be dancin’, “la la la,” they say shame on you, shame on you

Wow. Had I heard anyone on the radio before so casually state their attraction to someone of the same gender? Who’s the shame on now? Ray for being attracted to them, or Ray for never knowing what to say?

That’s why I am so convinced this song isn’t punching down, not even punching up at the white folks. It’s not about punching. It’s about dancing, and finding those shared little moments of humanity with people who aren’t like you in the slightest. It’s about the shame in not admitting how much you just want to kick off your shoes and dance along.

Oh, wait, there is the one punch…

Let’s go road block trippin’ in the
Middle of the night up in Gainesville town
There’ll be blue lights flashing down the long dirt road
When they ask me to step out
They say, “We be looking for illegal immigrants can we check your car?”
I say, “You know it’s funny I think we were on the same boat back in 1694.”

And I said, “oo la-la-la-la-la, shame on you”

That line has always stuck with me, and it has never before felt so relevant as it has this year. Or this past week.

How can you turn your nose up and close your doors completely to the immigrants who want to forge a life in America when that’s how all of us got here … except for our indigenous people, to whom we all owe a debt that we can’t ever repay for destroying their land, their people, and their culture? Who are we to want to build a wall between us and Mexico when they have an actual, persistent culture to bring into our melting pot of customs imported from afar?

I wasn’t ready to really love The Indigo Girls until I borrowed their older CDs from my first boss, Laura, back in 2003, but as soon as I heard those records I realized that I already loved this band, and I probably always will.

(And, in a fun tie-in to yesterday’s post: E and I walked up the aisle together to a cello version of “Least Complicated!”)