The <slide> theme was deliberately left nebulous enough to allow for slide guitar entries or some pedal steel, and if you happen to follow my personal tastes, you'll know that my favorite musicians include masters of that style: Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Bonnie Raitt, Lowell George.
As I often do, I scratched out a couple of starting lines heading down that path with the intention of letting the idea stew for a couple of days before settling on one of the slide masters. As we are now at the end of the <Slide> theme calendar, it looks like that one will have to wait for our traditional November <Leftovers> theme because (Baby, Baby, Baby ....) I'm out of time.
Yet, as that idea sat on the desktop, I also began work on a song or two with <Slide> in the title. This would have been last week, some time before the Video Music Awards earlier this week. Pure coincidence, since I had no way of knowing the song list for this week's Video Music Awards.
Bono, Oasis, The Verve, Noel Gallagher ... they've all got songs named <Slide Away>. Bono doing the vocals on a Michael Hutchence composition. And Oasis doing the Noel Gallagher song of the same name. And then Miley Cyrus this past week. And then, as a last minute bonus, yet another Slide Away from a group on Muzai Records called Sunken Seas. There's probably more out there.
Not knowing much of anything about any of these, I guessed that they were likely variations/covers of someone's original.
I can't think of too many other song titles of exactly the same name that are distinctly different songs. At the same time, you could surmise that the conceit behind the song name is obvious enough that any could hit on the title for an original: I guess it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise ... how often does love end in one party slip/sliding off down a different path? Slide Away is a quite natural occurrence - whether as an act IRL or as a title for a creative work. The song stories are all "love songs" in one form or another. The Gallagher/Oasis and the Verve's are more centered on sliding away together; Cyrus' and Hutchence's are more about being away.
Another Champagne song, but what the hell is a “Champagne Supernova?” They are words that make no sense together, and even Noel Gallagher, who wrote the damn thing, has no idea what the song means. (Strangely, I’ve recently written elsewhere about an album titled Kilonova, which is not as bright as a supernova, but is still kind of a big deal, despite not being wine related).
Nevertheless, the Oasis song is a great singalong, as the best Oasis songs are, but I’m not posting that version. Instead, the video above is a cover by Scala & Kolacny Brothers. Scala is a Belgian girls choir conducted by Stijn Kolacny, and arranged and accompanied on piano by his brother Steven Kolacny. Starting in the early 2000s, they decided to move away from the classical repertory and into rock covers, garnering way more fame than would be expected from a Belgian girls’ choir singing rock covers.
Their cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” was used in the trailer for the movie The Social Network, and other songs were used in trailersforDowntown Abbey, and for othermovies and in TV shows.
They have released a bunch of albums, mostly of covers of songs from pretty much every genre, in English, French and German, and, of course, a Christmas album (which includes a cover of one of my favorite holiday songs), so, if this kind of thing interests you, I’m sure you can find something that turns you on.
Ah, the future—flying cars, fully-automated homes, robot
girlfriends…What a time to be alive.
When the information age really started taking off, which I
calculate to be when I got my fist cell phone, I used to like to talk about how we
really were living in age of The Jetsons. All those cartoon-fantastic, whiz
bang inventions that made everyday life something much faster, more convenient
and brought us more in tune with the wider world seemed to be coming true.
Within reason, of course—I still had to sit in traffic, rather than fly over it
on my way to not a pneumatic hive of prodigious industry and lightning fast
tech innovations, but rather a crumbling building without air-conditioning.
But, no worry—I had a cell phone; I could talk to people
while I sat in traffic. I had satellite radio, which meant I never lost the
signal, unless it rained. And, as a teacher, I had this resource called the
internet, so I didn’t really need to do much planning for my lectures—it was
all right there for me, no trip to the library needed…
Strange how the Future ended up. I find myself often wishing
for the days before I had high speed internet service and could stream and
Google and text and Tweet and Snapchat and Instagram—and a whole host of other
common elements of my life. Life seems to have taken not only a semantic shift of meaning, but
undergone a radical revision in action and lifestyle as well. This is the
information age, yes, but things change so rapidly as we trip merrily along to
the future, we might as well dub it the age of Neologism, as well. We're constantly reinventing, in order to achieve this almost undefinable 'better', but we don't stay in one place long enough to think of what the better might entail...
But, let’s go back to get forward, shall we?
When I think of the theme “the Future”, a lot of songs come
immediately to mind, one because of their subject matter, but more for the
sense that, when it comes to music, the future is all well and good, and I’m
sure some great things are coming—but, it’s the past, the pedigree, the
primordial beginnings, that make the future what it is. Rock comes from a
specific well spring, a beautiful, ever-thriving gene pool that keeps
replicating its DNA into new creatures, that look a little different but all
come from the same family. Its like Jurassic Park—the old stuff makes the
new...We never have to go travel too far into the past to find the specific root of not only the modern sense of music, but also to predict where it is headed. Rock 'n roll is very simple--it's a product of its upbringing, and damn, did it have good parents...
My song this month is The Rolling Stone’s “2000 Man”, from
Their Satanic Majesties Request, their 1967 concession to psychedelia, and
psychedelics (that means “drugs,” kids). It’s not a great album—even the band
admits to thinking it was mess—court appearances, drug indulgences, no one to
pull the strings—and it adds up to a collection of silly, flower child ditties,
but overall, the album carries with the same sense of messiness that comes from
over indulgence and the sense of boredom that inevitably follows said abusive
behavior.
They say too much of anything that raises the senses will
eventually dull them. And Request is
just that: dull. And a bit silly.Have
you looked at the cover? It’s like a low-rent version of Sgt. Peppers, without the interesting subtext and treasure chest of
oddities.
Even the band looks a little uncomfortable about what they
are doing.One might guess they are
about 30 years early for one of those midnight Harry Potter Sales…
There are a few exceptions, such as the perfectly-pop She’s a Rainbow, and 2000 Light Years From Home, both of
which listen now as not only what was good about psychedelic rock, but as a
blue print for the sonic architecture of Brit Pop, and bands like Blur, The Stone Roses at their jammy best, and Oasis.
My favorite track on the album—the only other one I like,
aside from the aforementioned two above is 2000
Man. Let’s be honest: it’s the standout track on the album. It starts with
a country twinged guitar stutter and the chorus descends into a drum smashing,
organ grind shout out, something that wouldn’t be out of place in the Three
Penny Opera. The breakdown is pure static, and the song reads like a mash up of
a few genres, steps lively, and relies on those gorgeous twin guitar ripples
that Keith and Brian Jones did so well during their brief tenure as the melody
makers in the Stones.
It’s reminiscent of The Who’s A Quick One While He’s Away or
Medley, fromThe Beatles’ later Abbey Road
in that it is more than one song rolled into a single vinyl track. And while
both of those songs are much longer in scope and more masterful in
instrumentation and riskier in trying to accomplish something grandiloquent and
operatic, 2000 Man makes it mark as a gesture towards taking rock music in a grandly nuanced direction.
Lyrically, which is what brought me to the song for our
theme, 2000 Man is as interesting as it is nonsensical. It’s a confessional
poem of sorts, delivered by a man who identifies himself as the 2000 Man and who
proceeds to confess his misdeeds, his infidelity to his wife, his disconnect
from his children and in a strange nod to horticulture, the strange flowers
he’s growing on his window sill.
In a way, the song talks to the future in the sense that the
narrator just doesn’t fit—perhaps he’s outdated, but when he says don’t you I’m
a 2000 man, he seems to be saying, you don’t get me because I’m well beyond
you. I am the future. When the song switches narrative perspectives and the
speaker’s kids start responding to the conceited claims of their father, they
simply chant:
“Oh daddy, proud of your planet/ Oh
mummy, proud of your sun.”
It’s not necessarily done with the
clearest of intentions, but it does read like a back and forth between two
parties, both insisting they are hipper, more knowledgeable, more
at home in the new paradigm. The insistence at being a 2000 man comes across as
a desperate claim of relevance, which is what happens to those of us who stick
around long enough to see the world change, without our help, perhaps before
we’re ready.
The world morphs at a rapidly accelerating pace and it’s
hard to hold steady sometimes, especially for those of us who work and have to
interact cross-generationally. Nostalgia—looking back fondly, or fiercely or
with bitterness—is simply a self-defense mechanism that helps us to feel
relevant in a place where the only true relevancy is measured by the newness of
the idea or innovation.
The future was not kind to him...
I think, though, to disparage a younger generation is somewhat
pointless. Being grumpy about being 'out if it' won't get us anywhere. And, really, the more things change, the more
they stay the same…No, that’s bullshit. The more things change, the better
things will alwys have been ‘back in the day’. It will just depend on whose day it was. Bands
like The Rolling Stones? It will always have been their day, their party; we
were just lucky enough to get the invite.
At some point—sooner, not later—those that think we’re dinosaurs
will experience the same shame of irrelevance. Such is the pace at which we are
growing. Hold on to the classics—they will be everyone’s classics at some
point. Because, no matter how far we grow and move on, the beginning, the fount
and wellspring of greatness, the firsts—will always be the best. Elvis, The
Beatles, The Stones…all that amazing rock n roll, that was the future at one
point—the future with a capital F and italicized, the ideal. And, because it
was first, it will always be first and won’t fade away.
And if we go back to our stubborn speaker in 2000 Man, who insists he’s not lost his
hipness yet, it’s interesting to compare him to Jagger and the Stones—is there
any other outfit in rock ‘n roll who has the privilege of not having to insist
at all on having stayed relevant, no longer taste makers, but the creators of
the taste and pretty much the judge and jury of rock ‘n roll cool and the ones
who created the measure that everyone else will always have to live up to…?
I've had a soft spot for Oasis since the day they hit the scene in 1994. It's shame they haven't really released anything noteworthy since 1998, but that's okay. When they split for the millionth and possibly last time in 2009, I wasn't too bothered.
We'll always have those first three albums, Definitely Maybe, (What's The Story) Morning Glory? and Be Here Now and the b-sides compilation The Masterplan, all of which should have a prominent place in everyone's record collection. Be Here Now has gotten an unfairly bad reputation for not living up to everyone's expectations at the time, but it's actually very good.
Though I admit some songs are too long, and it's also a good early example of what would later be known as "the loudness war". It's a very brickwalled record, definitely one of the loudest mixes I've heard, which makes it quite tiring to listen to after a while. A real shame, since some songs, like Magic Pie and My Big Mouth, are among the band's best.
Yes, Noel Gallagher stole bits and pieces from every part of rock history, but what he did with his loot is the important part and I don't think his skills as a songsmith can be questioned with any real authority.
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