The quintessential Mats record, as the good stuff strikes major emotional chords and the bad stuff is just stupid and fun enough to be, well, stupid fun. I don't think anyone's gonna confuse what's "good" and what's "bad" on Let it Be: the ballads are near-perfect, the pop/rock songs are superb, and the more metallic/hard rocky numbers kind of blow. Course, these latter tracks (I'll name them outright: "Gary's Got a Boner," "Seen Your Video," "Black Diamond," "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out," and "We're Coming Out") are played so sincerely, with seemingly no winking involved, that I cannot help but love them, at least a little bit (actually, I love "We're Coming Out" more than a little... just awesome energy).
The key to the Replacements-- the reason why I care-- is not just that they mixed traditional rock, country, and folk influences into their "punk rock" sound: it's that they introduced a touch of human sympathy to punk that was almost completely lacking before. Prior to Let it Be, and to a lesser extent, Husker Du's Zen Arcade, there were just a handful of ways to approach other human beings in a punk rock song. You could spite them (a la the Sex Pistols), you could judge them (a la Minor Threat), you could distance yourself from them with your cute artistic whims (a la Patti Smith), or you could plain alienate them (a la Public Image Limited)-- that's about it. At least in the early days, punk bands were not driven by a need to understand the whole around them, but by a desire to remove themselves from said world.
On the other hand, the Mats took a kind of pride (maybe ironic, but rarely mean-spirited) in their fragile and silly (but never insignificant) humanity. They came from the Midwest and liked drinking and covered Bad Company. They wrote songs you could understand and maybe relate to, and on Let it Be, they started writing songs that were kind of serious and beautiful and humane.
"Sixteen Blue," for example. Probably has the best guitar solo of all time. But I don't wanna talk about that; I couldn't, anyway (too gorgeous). I wanna talk about the lyrics, which ask you to empathize with the most loathsome character in America at any time: the teenager. I mean, what a chorus:
Your age is the hardest age
Everything drags and drags
Looking funny, you ain't laughing are you?
Sixteen Blue
That's it, amiright? That is exactly what it is to be a teenager. Everything really does drag and drag when you're sixteen. And you try and try to be an adult, but people still see you as an awkward nobody. So, yeah, you're kinda blue.
There's also "Androgynous," a perfect lyrical combination of the anthemic and the everyday (a combination only a few other songwriters, thinking here of Bob Dylan, have ever conceived):
Here comes Dick, he's wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, y'know she's sporting a chain
Same hair revolution, same build evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?
Cuz who is gonna fuss tomorrow? In a couple decades, no one is gonna give a rat's ass about what people look like or who they fuck.
Paul Westerberg is the closest thing punk has to a poet, because his lyrics are actually punk rock. They are not full of obscurity and allusion and artisness like Kim Gordon's or Richard Hell's or whatever. They speak of recognizable things in inspiring ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment