Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1997
by Scott Miller

"MMMBop" - Hanson
I usually consider 1997 the best year of my life (first full year spent with my wife Kristine), and 1997 was the last year of a generally very good five-year stretch for pop rock music. Certainly the average number one hit of any of the twenty prior years was a bloodless, unmusical, and forgettable effort compared with Hanson's "MMMBop," a rare case of entirely well-deserved mass appeal. Of course it's based on the Jackson Five, but it's well short of plagiaristic, and cunning in its angle of divergence: the lyrics, interestingly, don't traffic slickly in feelings and entertainment like J5, they critique. The word "MMMBop" is the heartbeat in which relationships you thought would last can be gone: "Keep planting to find out which one grows/It's a secret no one knows." They riff on that with, "Can you tell me?/Oh yeah, you say you can/But you don't know," which is rather impressive hardball for literal teenagers. And as everyone already knows, the performance is fabulous.

"Standing In the Doorway" - Bob Dylan
Pound for pound, it might ring truer than any other song about carrying a torch for past requited love. By itself, the line, "I got nothin' to go back to now" speaks quite a bit—we've heard lines like it before, but not so strategically situated; here it says: the relationship became where the singer came from. Again, "Last night I danced with a stranger/But she just reminded me you were the one" is, in a way, traveled lyrical territory, but the rightness of Dylan's word choices achieves a crisp intensity: e.g., he didn't decide it, her being someone else reminded him of what can never be undecided. Dylan sounds closer to 150 years old on this record than on the more recent ones, and that can take some getting used to, but in the end it opens up real opportunities for vocal tunefulness, as on "crying" whenever "You left me standing in the doorway crying" comes around.

"Brimful of Asha" - Cornershop
It may not have that much to do with Indian inflection, but the way Tjinder Singh chews the syllables on "Brimful of Asha on the 45" is essential to the catchiness here. And you'd sort of have to be of Indian ethnicity to come up with the idea of a song about Bollywood playback singers; at least, it's difficult to imagine, say, an American group writing a song about Marni Nixon.

"Tracy" [edit] - Mogwai
Nostalgia for mid-nineties music by Mogwai, or Tortoise, must be the ultimate postmodern emotion. My editing of the elegantly modulated slow-pan cinematics of "Tracy" for iPod listening is second in fiendish laboratory success only to my 5:45 version of Pink Floyd's "Dogs." It's compressed enough so that you can hear that phone bit about not even wanting to think about what would happen if they don't take care of whatever it is. Hey, it screams million seller to me now!

"If I Think Of Love" - OP8
Lisa Germano, Howe Gelb (Giant Sand), and Calexico people did the sparkling one-off album Slush, which is among my favorites from the sum of the parts. Germano's key contribution is this string of borderline non-equitur phrases with an indefinable directness.

"Already Over Me" - The Rolling Stones
It gives me no pleasure to reward lyrics as bad as, "When you laughed I just cried/When you left, I just died," or vocals this overacted, but at the end of the day I like this song quite a bit; I'd feel that spark of kinship with anyone else who picked this as one of the Stones' in-decline successes. The chorus is just such a hook.

"I'm Gonna See You" - that dog
Producer Brad Wood deserves some credit for the era's quality results as the go-to person for giving acts groomed for low-fi audiences pretty dependably punchy recordings. Near the top of that heap was the nineties version of "We've Only Just Begun," the relationship-inaugurating "I'm Gonna See You" ("I'm gonna see you in the morning... I'm gonna see you when you're boring"). It's actually a very snappy tune—much more so than that fragment suggests; the attendant Hadens and Waronker acquit themselves admirably.

"Montreal" - Of Montreal
The Kevin Barnes of this record is almost unrecognizable as him of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? who pisses Tris McCall off for doing Outback commercials. This is kind of a cowboy yodel set to unpredictable chord changes, with a disarming ability to telegraph naive emotional vulnerability not completely unlike Daniel Johnston's. There's a curious verisimilitude to the phrasing, "When you told me that this isn't it," and details like "every street sign written in French."

"Hopeless" - Future Bible Heroes
Really, no one should attempt disco except Stephin and Claudia, or the apparently also arrestingly gifted Chris Ewen, who gets a giant thumbs up for that change on "Our dreams are dying of overdoses."

"Start Again" - Teenage Fanclub
It always happens: I start out thinking a Teenage Fanclub album is bland, and someone gets me to stick with it, and they end up being right, it's good. Northern Britain is one of the not quite superb ones, but the harmony clusters here are a prime showcase for Norman Blake, who can be one of rock's best singers, and a winning motif of truncating measures as if excited to get to the next part sooner.

"You Spoke To Me" - Smoking Popes
I initially pegged these guys as an inessential crooner punk novelty act, but I should have realized they were a lot better than that, as the Destination Failure album proved. In my defense, there is a lot of witlessness going on in the titling department over at Vatican West. The battering guitar riff rhythm section of "You Spoke To Me" comes in meaning more business than just about anyone, and the vocal dramatization of talking to a favorite band as a back-stage fan is exquisitely rendered. The lead guitar's leveraging of the chord cycle for modal scale potential is remarkable.

"Buzzing" - The Negro Problem
At the time, when I talked in oh-and-Radiohead-too terms about the Negro Problem, Elliott Smith, and Belle and Sebastian making 1997 a big year, I got enough "huh?" to go around (even for Smith and Belle), but now with Stew's "Passing Strange" as last year's biggest on-Broadway smash, not anymore! I hope a number of gleaming moments from Stew's indie band past don't get completely eclipsed—"Buzzing" being one of those. I'm not positive I know what "buzzing" is (like, being buzzed, high, not thinking clearly?), but it's a devastating lyric set climaxing with lacerating and surreal cynicism about attitudes toward African American celebrity: "Come celebrate the chocolate face!" The whole album is well worth getting to know; the musical palette is astounding. Oh, I was convinced to relocate Belle and Sebastian in 1996, for those keeping score.

"Chatfield Manor" - Mike Keneally and Beer For Dolphins
All 8 minutes and 16 seconds of this prog rock masterpiece is quality music; any stretch that isn't an eminentry respectable hook is an opportunity for even more respectable guitar playing. I'm not talking about just fast notes, either; this is highly listenable as virtuoso material goes. A few people will be getting nervous when the lyrics commence with, "There's a place where I go/When I go to a place"; is this, like, a bad stoner humor thing? Not so; it's a straight-up thank you song to someone who offers the band a place to sleep when on the road. Stay with it. You will be singing along with "Let's go up the freeway/Hang a left/Hang a right/Chatfield Manor." Thanks much to Kenny Kessel for introducing me to Mr. K.

"Seems So" - Apples In Stereo
Pure pop doesn't get any more blindingly enjoyable than this. There's almost something of a Jerome Kern confection in the whole-step descents, as well as more obvious channeling of 1965 Beatles and Byrds. The cycles through the "dozed off on my pillow," "whole thing from my window" pattern hit with such miraculous perfection that you're put under the temporary impression that no one else is doing music quite right.

"Let Down" - Radiohead
The distinctive sonics of O.K. Computer hit a glacial, reverberating, ringing stride on "Let Down," a less prominent cut than "Karma Police" or "Paranoid Android," but the one that captures the indefinable emotional tug that is the group's most important value added. The chorus is an unusual construction; it has its impact on the words "let down," then dissipates, doesn't really go anywhere. Yet, somehow the song manages to stage things such that every time the crescendo comes back around, it's with more anticipation and climax.

"Flaming Pie" - Paul McCartney
I love this song. The whole Flaming Pie album is outstanding—maybe the best overall McCartney album. The song Flaming Pie recaptures the Beatle-era confidence of someone who is reckless and never goes wrong. The straight New Orleans piano break? Why not? The mid-chorus jolt into rhythm section off-counts? It stays. "I took my brains out and stretched them on the rack/Now I'm not so sure I'm ever going to get them back": that's a powerfully constructed descent, and those are lyrics that get things careening off a cliff in a way the 1997 Mick Jagger ought to study.

"Jane of the Waking Universe" - Guided By Voices
This is another important spike in the mountain for GBV's ascent to classic status. It's another of Robert Pollard's occasional full-blown visions of female deity, this one turning just a bit pagan and silly with "the devil's bride" (as Mr. Pollard once said in a different mood, I am a scientist), but hey, I'm all for the universe waking. Great production touch: the high end roll-off on the vocal tracks singing the title line.

"Rose Parade" - Elliott Smith
An apparently unusually sensitive soul, Elliott Smith had his share of emotional difficulties, but he was also unquestionably one of a tiny minority of lyricists who were not just serving sung verse—which is really the highest calling songwriters ought to be expected to hear—but were genuinely onto something. Rather, it was the music that seemed to serve Elliott's communication, which is a rare impression to achieve. The specific coup here are those three little descending guitar notes, as on "watch the parade," which seems perfect tone poetry for the "yes, but" sentiment of the lyrics. There's nothing wrong with rhe Rose Parade per se, "It's just that everyone's interest is stronger than mine." But the weak interest is in the spirit of the crowd that displaces one's humanity. Elliott wants you to follow him down to the parade to learn how not to get caught up in parades, because you won't know at the time if they're a Nuremberg rally as we recognize those today or something wonderful and invigorating, just as those participants didn't know.