April 12, 2004
Rock Star Quote of the Week:
"I joined a band, and I knew three chords and they knew two so I was the wonderchild of the band."
-- a highschool reminiscence from Eric Carmen, later of pop maestros THE RASPBERRIES
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VELVETeen Angst: Songs I Hated-The-World And Loved-Unattainable-Girls To When I Was 17... Plus: submit your own! WIN-well... nothing really, but submit anyway!!
Earlier this week, while holding court alone at an eight-seater table in the empty non-smoking room, dubbed 'the library' - amber-stained walls bedecked with ornamental volumes behind glass - of this city's dankest subterranean bar, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Complete Stories in one hand, a refilled pint in the other, the barmaids showing me that peculiar brand of 'niceness' reserved for the terminally ill, mentally handicapped, very young, very old and those who drink alone at noon, I realised that I am still a cliche.
Problem is, in 2004 I can't listen to NINE INCH NAILS sans knowing grin. And I certainly can't listen to SARAH McLACHLAN and imagine that the adult-contemporary genre is, in fact, a suitable salve for my ontological pain. (Unless it's BELINDA CARLISLE. Ha.) I can still listen (and dissolve in raptures) to THE CURE, a sign perhaps that melodramatic thumb-sucking is not something I managed to transcend with much conviction at the 'close' of my 'youth'. Still: to be young is to be sad is to be teetotal, and minor-seventh chords never quite sounded like this again after 1997...
SMASHING PUMPKINS - Mayonaise, Siamese Dream (1993)
This is still bliss-even if I am somewhat less likely, at 24, to steal a pink Cadillac and trace a ribbon of blood and spunk across Nevada, trunk full of strange crystals and dead bodies and beautiful girls, blotting out the names of Starkweather and Mickey and Mallory and Martin Sheen with my glittering lipstick-ringed revolver. The centrepiece of Siamese Dream seems to feature 47 guitars all playing the same rhythm part, Billy Corgan adding an audible vocal, bad poetry and Zeppelin solos to MY BLOODY VALENTINE's six-stringed miasma and actually pulling an enormous thousand-faceted diamond out of his ass while still sounding like he doesn't care. Lyrics about running away to the desert to fuck and find God (ZABRISKIE POINT reference #1!) - sung with all the lust-for-life of a tax auditor - only add to the general gloriousness. If only for three minutes, pink Cadillacs are still in danger today.
TORI AMOS - Icicle, Under The Pink (1994)
It begins as a diminutive red-headed girl in her pink party dress seated stiffly at a drawing-room baby-grand, turns into a leering, autistic Angus Young - still seated at said baby-grand - trying to play Shostakovich and succeeding, and eventually becomes an anthem so primally yes! as to embarrass GOOD CHARLOTTE, Coleridge, and everyone in between who ever felt a little melancholy. 'I should have / I could have / Flown', asserts Tori-as a classical pianist? a lover? a Christian? a happy person? a pumpkin?-and even if we don't know exactly what she means (it has something to do with the Bible, masturbation, Electra, pyjamas), we breathe 'yes!' because we are 17 and a) we are nothing; and b) we are so much better than everyone else. O, narcissistic self-loathing-enfold me in your gentle rain...
THE CURE - Strange Attraction, Wild Mood Swings (1996)
This ditty would play on repeat for four-hour sessions in which I would try-and-fail to insert a 'trial pair' of contact lenses at a frequency of about 18.75 times/minute. I know the verses rather well. And no, the contacts didn't take on. Neither did glasses; voluntary blindness did, however, become something that continues to make me a beautiful and unique snowflake.
NINE INCH NAILS - Something I Can Never Have, Pretty Hate Machine (1989)
In which Trent showed us his soft underbelly, and we saw that it was covered in 10CC pin-badges. In which we also saw that if he could be this miserable at twenty-something, well... we would one day grow up to be even more miserable than him, because we totally related to everything he said. Already, even. Trent, you made it all go away-including that strange verb-age: 'to take the piss'.
SARAH McLACHLAN - Witness, Surfacing (1997)
Before emo there was... adult-contemporary? 'Will we burn in heaven / Like we do down here?' - it's about as heartening as a dinner-party with Kafka, Schopenhauer and DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL's Chris Carrabba. It also boasts about as much visceral musical interest as Chris Carrabba (hint: yes, that means it's vapid shit). And yet upon first listen, at 17-piped through the in-store speakers of a mall-landlocked, pink-neon-bathed HMV-I ran to the nearest semi-private space, a phonebooth, and wept for what seemed entirely too long at entirely too short notice. Would it help if I said that almost no song anywhere in any situation in any history of any universe has caused me to cry? Ever? Would it help if I said that it was to do with a girl? Um... I was menstruating? My hamster had just died! I was a starving orphan who-[Oh, shut up. -Ed.]
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Push the cringe-factor. No, seriously-actually raise the bar of pathos. (Anyone?) Submit your teen-angst tales of bad pop and man-tears to shadowrain@hotmail.com. I'll run them next week.
(c) Reuben Ham
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