Tuesday, December 21, 2010

100 Songs for 2010: 21-25






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We're counting down our 100 favorite songs of the year.  Today, 21-25.  Check out previous posts here.

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25) The Hold Steady - "Hurricane J"

In which no one protected me from the crazy.

I have written just a huge amount of words about the Hold Steady. A crushing amount of words. Maybe you remember the thousand words just a couple pages ago. Or you can follow that link right above this paragraph for another thousand words. Or track down one of my countless other blog posts about the band.

This, right here, is overkill. I know that. But I have a captive audience right now, so I’m going for it anyway. This is an essay I wrote for Elliot’s sadly-defunct blog. I don’t think it’s online anywhere else, and I’d like you to have it. If it’s too much to read right now, well, there’s a reference to Cold War aeronautics in the next blurb. Maybe pick it up again down there.

Seventeen and Stuck Up / Up in Osseo: The Hold Steady and the Validity of Individual Experience

I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota. While I have since moved to San Francisco, I still consider myself a Minnesotan, and I probably always will. The rural Midwest defines me. For this reason, I spent the majority of my formative years feeling culturally insignificant. However, for this same reason, I love The Hold Steady more than just about anything in the world. Let me explain.


Those of us raised in the flyover states know, deep down, that our lives are not nearly as meaningful as those of our peers on the Coast. We grow up lacking a kind of metaphorical substance. No one writes songs about us, and deep down we know it’s because we do not have lives worthy of pop music immortality.


I spent my high school years playing sports, listening to music, drinking in basements, and unsuccessfully pursuing girls. This, I have to imagine is exactly how teenage males spend there time in New York City, Los Angeles, or any other major American city. I’m told that Californians don’t have basements, but really this seems like a minor issue. The fact of the matter is that I shared the same experiences with most everybody my age, and yet I knew deep down that my life was fundamentally different than those of the City kids, that if I could trade places with them, I would crash and burn immediately. I knew that any happiness I could acquire was a direct consequence of inhabiting a very small pond. For this, as with all the problems in my life, I blame pop music.


Here’s a fun exercise: Name ten songs with the word “California” in the title. I’m not kidding ... do it. I takes about thirty seconds. New York is just as easy. These are cultural touchstones, and it’s not surprising that songwriters rely on the imagery and emotion that come with them. It’s easy to attach significance to any coastal metropolis. If you live in New York City, some indie band has penned an ode to your borough, some up-and-coming rapper has given a shout-out to your block. I don’t have the facts to back this up, but I would bet there is a song about every major highway in Southern California. And so, as a confused teenager in the City, you can listen to music about things you see and do every day, and you can relate on a very intimate level, and you can know that the emotions you feel are just are real as Lou Reed’s, or Tupac Shakur’s, or whoever your icons may be. You can be reassured that life is hard, but that there is meaning in the struggle, because your heroes came from the exact same place, and they made something beautiful out of your surroundings. This has to be about the most hopeful thing ever.


Kids from the rural Midwest, however, listen to those same songs, and we feel the same loneliness, or isolation, or even joy, but we wonder if those emotions are somehow different in the City, we wonder if our loneliness is as gripping as theirs, we wonder if they feel joy on a much larger scale, if we’re just pretenders to some larger human truth. It’s like breaking your wrist falling out of a tree house, then showing up at school the next day and hearing about the mountain climber who had to amputate his own arm. You thought you knew pain, you thought you had the toughness to overcome anything, but then you realized that maybe there was this whole other world of pain that would probably break you, and you realized there were people who could likely endure your sufferings without even flinching. Life in the rural Midwest is like that.


And so we go through our lives without songs about us. Bands from the Midwest just don’t operate the same way as bands from the Coasts, which is interesting because there are so many seminal acts from the forgotten states. The Twin Cities alone can claim everyone from Price to the Replacements. And yet these bands always seem to strive for a larger kind of universality, one lacking the relevant details of acts from other geographic regions. For instance, the alternative music scene in Minneapolis rivaled any in America in the early 1990s, but these bands didn’t want to talk about Interstate 94, or the bars in Uptown, or how it felt when the Twins won the 1991 World Series. Listening to Paul Westerberg sing about getting drunk, you can guess at which bars he frequented, but he never relies on that specific information, and so, really, a burned-out college student at the University of Minnesota has no more claim to “I’ll Be You” than anyone else anywhere. It’s great music, and it resonates, but bands do not belong to the Midwest in the same way that Green Day belongs to the East Bay or The Strokes belong to New York. The music often plays like it’s hiding its heritage, like the bands are scared no one wants to listen to songs made in the Central Time Zone.


I had already moved out to California by the time I discovered The Hold Steady (and, also, lead singer Craig Finn’s previous and very similar band, Lifter Puller). Fantastic though it may sound, I don’t think it would be hyperbole to say that if I had listened to The Hold Steady in high school, there’s a good chance I would be living in Minneapolis right now. The band is that important to me. They make Minnesota real. They make Minneapolis significant. They carve out a pop cultural niche for all of us who love the Golden Gophers but hate all those drawn out winters.


There is a whole world in the details of a Hold Steady song. For anyone who ever walked across the Grain Belt bridge, or even shopped at a Rainbow Foods, Finn’s lyrics are a revelation, forceful and sung with a hint of a sneer. He doesn’t care if hipsters in Greenwich Village or scenesters on Rodeo Drive are turned off by obscure references to suburban Minneapolis or parties on the banks of the Mississippi River. He doesn’t care because these things happened TO HIM, and therefore they are important TO HIM, and so he’s going to sing about them because we all have random experiences seared into our memories, and if we ever want to engage each other on a meaningful level, we must realize that meaning and significance are almost always subjective, and if you think that the only things that matter are things that happen on the Coasts, well, Craig Finn does not care what you think. He is not writing songs for you. He is writing songs for him. And, by doing so, he is writing songs for me.


The music is not a celebration of Minnesota, but it IS a declaration of Midwestern significance. Finn is not writing jingles for the board of tourism. These are songs about drug overdoses and fights and even suicide. These are not songs to make you love Minneapolis. However, in the same way that Bruce Springsteen expressed his feelings about New Jersey through characters who wanted nothing more than to leave, Finn creates a world that is definitely not paradise, but is definitely home. Though the band has relocated to New York City, they still write songs about Bloomington, Minnesota (home of the Mall of America!). Why not substitute Brooklyn instead? Because life is just as real anywhere. Broadway and Lyndale are both just roads. I didn’t always know that. Craig Finn did. This is why his band matters.

SEE ALSO:

The Hold Steady - "Touchless"
The Baseball Project - "Don't Call Them Twinkies" (f/ Craig Finn)

24) Belle & Sebastian - "I Didn't See It Coming"



"Everybody's talkin' about you / Every word's a whisper without you"

All I want is for my favorite bands to come to San Francisco, headline our music festivals, and tell stories onstage about their adventures on the J-Church. If Belle & Sebastian can do it, I don’t know what’s stopping the rest of you.

Also, if there’s even one percent truth to the rumor that Stuart Murdoch wants to play a B&S show in Dolores Park … well, if you need more than that to be happy, you’re just being greedy.

SEE ALSO:

Belle & Sebastian - "The Boy With The Arab Strap"
Belle & Sebastian - "Lazy Line Painter Jane"

23) Freelance Whales - "Location"

In which it’s never an A or B choice.

If it were possible to wrap yourself in a song, really snuggle in there, envelope yourself in the soft, comforting texture of it … if I could do that with one song released in 2010, I would choose this one.

I’m not even mad that I missed the best college basketball game of the year (Kansas State – Xavier, Sweet Sixteen, double overtime with Gus Johnson on the call) to see these guys at Bottom of the Hill. I would do it again in a second.

SEE ALSO:

Simon & Garfunkel - "The Only Living Boy In New York"
Freelance Whales - "Generator ^ Second Floor"

22) Free Energy - "Hope Child"

In which there was a time when we understood everything in terms of The Wire.

I am very protective of a lot of my favorite bands. Not all of them, though. I don’t always feel the need to fight for the more established ones. The Hold Steady – you can pretty much say what you want about them. I understand Craig Finn’s voice isn’t for everyone (though Chuck’s comparing them to Crash Test Dummies still seems almost purposefully nonsensical). I love them, but it’s okay if you don’t love them. They’re all adults. They’ve all made fine careers of this. They’re still my favorite band in the world, and I will probably tune you out if you criticize them, but that’s oftentimes the only reaction you’ll get from me. I am a reasonable man.

That being said, if you say one negative thing about Free Energy … I will cut you. Don’t test me. They are the nicest kids in the world, and they play these wonderful happy songs, and they give it absolutely everything they have on stage every night, and they always make time to hang out with their fans afterward, and they deserve to be huge, like Green Day huge, and I think there’s maybe a chance they will be, and if you stand in the way of that … at all … well, I can’t promise that I’ll be responsible for my actions.

Other bands this applies to include Los Campesinos! and Gold Motel. You’ve been warned.

SEE ALSO:

Free Energy - "C'mon Let's Dance"
Free Energy - "I'm Going Down" (Bruce Springsteen Cover)

21) Jens Lekman - "The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love"

I could write something here, but when the artist himself has already blogged about his own song, it seems arrogant to act like I have anything to add. Take it away, Jens:

It was the day before the American election 2008 and I was filled with a hopelessness that only a McCain supporter could have shared with me at the time. I was in Washington DC to perform for Swedish TV, sitting in the couch with a professional smile on my face, joking with the hosts and discussing the lobster with the TV chef. I saw the clips online sometime ago, it’s amazing what an actor I can be if I really make an effort.


I lived in America back then, up in New York. At the time I felt like everything I touched was turning to shit and I had decided to put everything on one card. Subconsciously I knew I needed to hit the bottom so I could work my way up again. I needed confirmation, I needed someone to tell me it wasn’t going to work out, not this way. Yes, there was a girl involved in this. I was very much in love with her.


Some things you just go through. You don’t write about it, you don’t turn it into art because it can’t be turned into art. I didn’t write any songs that year because you can’t pour manure into an espresso machine and expect a cappuccino to come out. When they announced the results and the streets filled up with people celebrating I felt happy to be part of something bigger than myself. It was a feeling that lasted me until the very last days of December 2008 when I finally sat down in my old teenage room at my parents house and I wrote this song. Then the year ended.


It’s a song of hope. When love turns it’s back on you it’s nice to know there’s a world out there that doesn’t give a shit about your problems. That forces you to keep your head held high and move on. A world that is fragile and beautiful. Maybe it can sound cold to some of you, but let me make it clear that I believe in love, I just get so wrapped up in it sometimes that I need to put it into proportion. It’s something you have to do a lot when you’re Jens Lekman.


The title of this song “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love” was written to me in an e-mail from my friend Maggie Macdonald. The song is based on the sentiment of these words and I owe her a lot of gratitude for letting me use them and for her support during this time in my life.

SEE ALSO:

Jens Lekman - "The Opposite of Hallelujah"
Jens Lekman - "You Are The Light"

4 comments:

  1. First, don't cut me.

    Second, I know it is cliche to say a band is better live, but both times I saw Free Energy with you I thought to myself during the show "these guys are just about the most perfect pop influenced rock band out there now".

    When I listen to them on my ipod I either get bored or it fades to the background. They just don't produce any sort of emotional/ intellectual/ other kind of response. I just think "yeah those guys were fun".

    Also they shouldn't open for Titus Andronicus. They don't rock nearly as hard and my memory of them is that they rocked way harder at pop scene even though I remember really enjoying them while they were playing at the independant. Though, to be fair, I think most bands would have sounded infinitly less epic after being followed by TA that night.

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  2. Titus sucks.

    That's all I got today.

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  3. So Free Energy is like your Scott Baker of indie-pop?


    Alright, I'll keep moving along

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  4. Elliot - That's like 90% correct. The only difference is that I will concede that there is some evidence to support the argument that Scott Baker is not that good. If Free Energy's second album is kinda mediocre, it would be an absolutely perfect analogy.

    Other than that, yes, absolutely. Pure, unconditional, somewhat militant love.

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