10 Years, 100 Songs: #79. “King of the Town, Yeah, I Been That”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

It isn’t easy to completely ruin your reputation just seven years after releasing one of the best albums of all-time, by Nasir Jones certainly tried his damndest. Dropping debut Illmatic in 1994, an album which was quickly hailed as a classic and whose rep only seemed to improve over the years, Nas proceeded to piss it all away. Some liked It Was Written, which at least contained a pair of quality hits in “Street Dreams” and “If I Ruled the World,” but within a couple years, he was making videos with R. Kelly, Ginuwine, and worst of all, Puff Daddy, whose “Hate Me Now” collab with Mr. Jones was probably one of the five biggest MTV disasters of the decade. It’s still sort of hard to tell what Nas was thinking during this period, since if he was attempting to cross over and/or sell out, he wasan’t even doing a very good job–Nas was never even slightly believable as a pop rapper, too serious-looking and not really all that charismatic. Often when fans cry out for their artist of choice to go back to their roots, it’s because the artist is growing faster than the fans are, but in Nas’s case, it actually was because street poetry was the one thing Nas was really good at.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #80. “I Watched the World Float to the Dark Side of the Moon”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

This is certainly going to be one of my shorter entries on the list, because truth told, I don’t have a lot to say about this song or band. Really, how much is there to be said about Three Doors Down? If this decade had a band to represent the “And the Cradle Will Rock” corrollary–a conceit presented by Chuck Klosterman* stating that if you lined up every song in the history of popular music from best to worst, the titular Van Halen song would be squarely in the middle, making every song better than it “good” and worse “bad”–it’d have to be 3 Doors Down. They mucked about the 00s making music that defined mediocrity, with megahits like “Here Without You” and “When I’m Gone” that were never exactly off-putting, but which became totally interchangable in your head, and which you wouldnt recognize on the radio until they got to the chorus, no matter how many times you’d heard them. They had boring titles, they made boring videos, and if you could name a single member of their band (or recognize any one of them on the street), that’s one more than I.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #81. “I Got to Tell You Something…”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

I had a revelation of sorts while at a rare live music excursion a few summers ago with my brother and his friends to see 311. I’d always viewed the band as being somewhat underrated, but seeing the crowd at the show, I realized that it was only rock critics and their traditionally indie-listening followers that disparage the band–everyone else loves 311. They appeal to punk kids because of their energy and their skater tendencies, they appeal to metal kids because of their volume and aggression, they appeal to jam band kids because of their musical virtuosity and penchant for blazing, and they appeal to frat boys for just about all of the above. Hell, even hip-hop fans could probably respect the reggae influences, the DJing and the occasional good-faith efforts at rapping by S.A. Martinez (maybe). Genre-blending in rock was certainly nothing unique at the turm of the millennium, but 311 had the advantage of not sounding like a bunch of dilettantes mixing and matching from their favorite cultures–they just sounded like 311, which is why they’ve been able to survive on rock radio doing largely the same thing for a decade and a half.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #82. “I’m Gon’ Shine, Homey, Until My Heart Stops”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

A little bit of The Game really, really went a long way. He was talented, probably, but he always seemed somewhat insecure in his bravado, and appeared to compensate for it in a relatively strange way–namechecking his musical heroes and influences left and right, as if to gather strength from their more assured presences. His backstory was compelling, but not all that interesting, and in the light of his mentor’s already well-circulated trials and tribulations, somewhat underwhelming. Ultimately, once his career became embroiled in beef-related drama, it became hard to take him all that seriously, since (fair or not), he always felt relatively harmless compared to even his G-Unit peers–a perception not helped much by a well-circulated photo of Mr. Taylor appearing on the cheesy dating game show Change of Heart

10 Years, 100 Songs: #83. “Shouldn’t Be So Complicated…”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

Two bands that will always be inextricably associated in my mind are Third Eye Blind and Matchbox20. They make for a fair comparison, albeit an extremely superficial one: Both bands emerged on the national spotlight in 1997, as unsure a period for rock as there has been in the post-punk era, and both seemed to signify nothing in particular–blandly personable bands with nice-enough tunes and no apparent scene or movement to represent. Their respective breakout albums–3EB’s self-titled, and M20’s Yourself and Someone Like You–were gargantuan hits, spawning radio singles well into 1998, crossing radio platforms and generally putting smiles on peoples’ faces. It seemed unsustainable, however, that both bands would maintain that level of popularity into the new millennium–one would continue to sell millions and own adult contemporary radio, while the other would become firmly entrenched in Best New Artist malaise.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #84. “Got Enough Work to Feed the Whole Town”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

DJ Khaled was a unique presence in 00s pop music, and really maybe  the first of his kind for about as long as I can remember. Occasionally in hip-hop, a producer has had enough cred and name recognition to be designated as the primary artist on his songs, even if another singer or rapper was actually the song’s principal performer. But not only did DJ Khaled not sing or rap on his own songs, he often didn’t even produce them–his contributions were not so much musical, but rather organizational. He was a curator, or a producer in the truer sense of the word, if you will, simply assembling the rappers and producers to be on his tracks. It was confusing to us underground hip-hop amateurs at the time, but apparently he’d been doing this long enough and well enough that he was allowed to just drop a “LISSSSTENNNN!!!” or a “WE DA BEESSST!!!!!” on songs he procured to get the main credit on them.

There’s Gonna Be a Showdown: Point Break vs. The Fast and the Furious

Sorry to digress from our regularly scheduled programming, but I had to take the time to write about something that had been weighing on my mind recently. I’m not sure when it was that I first realized the many similarities between Point Break and The Fast and the Furious, but the more I thought about it, the more staggering the parallels became. I mean, I know that I’m far from the first to make this observation, but have you ever actually sat down and thought about how close The Fast and the Furious is to being a straight-up remake of Point Break? Loose cannon detective goes undercover with a group of extreme adrenaline junkies to uncover a ring of thieves, falls under the spell of both the charismatic frontman of the group and its intelligent maternal figure, participates in a final heist with them that goes horribly wrong, and has to decide whether his devotion to his badge is more important than his devotion to his new Xtreme family? How the hell is that two separate action gems could have that exact same plot without at least sharing stars, a director or a title?

But it’s more than just the general plot skeleton that makes the two flicks such spiritual bros, and recent cable viewings I caught of both just drove this point home further–it’s everything, from the characters to the twists to the set pieces to the names. Hell, look at the picture up there–they even dress the fucking same! However, which of the now extremely dated, but still classic flicks holds up better? Let’s get radical…

Better Mimbo Protagonist: Both movies made the risky but inspired choice of casting two of the prettiest, dumbest male actors of their respective generations as the leads in their respective movies. With his wavy, sandy blonde hair and penetrating eyes, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner had even the male characters in The Fast in the Furious swooning (”Ahh, he is beautiful!” remarks gang techie Jesse upon laying eyes on Brian for the first time). But when it comes to ditzy male action stars, there’s still none finer than ur-action dreamboat Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah. With Reeves, you’ll inevitably chuckle at some of his over-enunciations, but it’s never watching-through-your-hands bad like it with Walker, who even gets thoroughly outacted in scenes with Ja Rule in The Fast and the Furious. The proof is in the pudding: Reeves would go on to a twenty-year career stuffed with blockbusters, cult classics, and arthouse successes alike (though obviously not without a few bombs in between). Walker probably still can’t figure out why it’s taking them so long to make a sequel to Joy Ride.

Edge: Point Break

Better Beefcake Semi-Antagonist. This might be my greatest act of heresy in this article, but I was never all that huge on Swayze in general. He always seemed a little too old, scraggly and stiff to be cast in the hunky roles he made his bones with, and those roles in turn kinda killed the idea of him as a pure action star for me (the obvious exception of course being the immortal Road House). His Bodhi is cool and all, but a little too hippie-ish for my tastes. Vin Diesel, on the other hand, is the great lost action star of our time–never demonstrated better than here, as muscle man Dominic Toretto. He looks like a badass, talks like a badass, yells like a badass, has badass girlfriends (Michelle Rodriguez in her mainstream breakout), races like a badass, and gets in fights like a badass. (He might even be able to act a little bit, though admittedly next to Walker, just about everyone is going to look like Philip Seymour Hoffman). That our culture seems to have foresaken him in favor of…who exactly, Shia LaBoeuf?…is one of the decade’s great tragedies.

Edge: The Fast and the Furious

Better Main Chick. My friends and I were talking last night about how generally surprising it is in general that Point Break, one of the dudest movies ever made, was actually directed by a woman, action auteur (auteuse?) Kathryn Bigelow. We concluded that the one way in which you could tell for certain that the movie was female-helmed was in the casting of Lori Petty, a shrill, irritating mouse of a woman, as Tyler, the surfer babe that Johnny falls in love with. What male in their right mind would look at this person and think “oh yeah, I would definitely risk blowing my cover with a bunch of insane bank robbers to get with her!” Yet we’re to believe that Keanu, one of the best looking men on the planet, was going to join in on a heist, get his partner killed, and jump out of a plane without a parachute…all for the ugly sister from A League of Their Own?? Yeah, might want to consult again with your casting director on that one, Kathryn.

Meanwhile, Jordana Brewster was a perfectly respectable, and arguably even somewhat underrated, hottie choice to play Dom’s sister Mia. Dark haired, tight-jeaned, vaguely exotic looking–Brewster was kinda like Megan Fox before Megan Fox, if lacking that certain edge that puts Fox totally over the edge. She can even act better than you probably remember, too–watching her date scene with Walker is like watching an acting exercise where Brewster was the one leftover good student who was forced to partner up with the class dunce. No contest here.

Edge: The Fast and the Furious

Better Scenes of The Life: A movie about a cop going undercover with action junkies is generally only as good as its portrayal of the action junkie subculture. In this respect, The Fast and the Furious was something of a masterwork, balancing utterly implausible scenes of fantastically visceral excitement (Hundreds of people showing up in hot cars for organized illegal street-racing? I don’t think I saw one event like that in the “Things to Do in New York This Summer” feature in New York magazine!) with equally appealing down-home, family-style hanging out scenes (The Dees looks like he can cook up a mean barbecue, if nothing else). Point Break has some good scenes like that, too–the house party where Bodhi does the lime and tequila thing with his lady friend, the ridiculous beach football game–but I dunno, surfing scenes are just never gonna look that cool to me. And you can only jump out of a plane so many times before it loses its novelty.

Edge: The Fast and the Furious

Better Quote About The Life: Each of the movies has a scene where, in a rare moment of quiet, the subculture ringleader gives their new inductee a speech about how much The Life means to them–as if to further sell them on it, just in case they weren’t quite sure just yet. Both climax in one quote that summarizes the entire appeal of their alternative lifestyle, and (not accidentally) seems to summarize their entire characters as well. Dom’s “I live my life a quarter-mile at a time” speech is quite nice, especially coming after his emotional confession about his father’s death and his own reaction to it (the action movie equivalent to Vin’s Oscar moment–his MTV Movie Award moment, maybe?) But I still prefer Bodhi’s “If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It’s not tragic to die doing what you love” message. I often find myself thinking that thought since, though I’m not sure when exactly how it comes up while I’m playing Sporcle trivia or singing karaoke. Anyway,

Edge: Point Break

Better Villlainous Crew: You go a while without watching The Fast and the Furious and you can almost completely forget about Johnny Tran, the evil leader of a fellow racing team, and one of the great Asian-American villains in action movie history. Paired with his inexplicably gold pants-wearing sidekick Lance, some of the greatest joys of The Fast and the Furious come watching Johnny execute vehicle drive-bys, or torture fences with forced gasoline ingestion, or try to outmuscle and outmacho Dom (good luck with that, broheim). Like Walker and Diesel, actor Rick Yune can’t exactly talk convincingly, so he does well not to ruin everybody’s fun. The rival surf gang in Point Break is pretty good too, even turning in one of the movie’s similarly forgotten classic scenes with the cops’ surprisingly violent raid on their place (featuring a naked chick smashing Reeves’ head into a mirror, I think). But come on…those pants!

Edge: The Fast and the Furious

Better Cops: Another thing you’re bound to forget about The Fast and the Furious even after seeing it eight times is that Ted Levine–Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and Agent Stottlemeyer on Monk–plays Brian’s main ally in the force, the emathetic and occasionally witty Sgt. Tanner. TFATF also gets some minor help from Thom Barry, the Cold Case star with an impressive That Guy resume, as Brian’s less understanding commanding officer. But really, who are we kidding here? Point Break gets an unbelievable boon from performances by two of the all-time greats, John C. McGinley in one of his many pioneering Asshole Authority Figure roles (and arguably his very best) as Utah’s supervisor Ben Harp, and Gary Busey, in the prime of his transition from I Was Nominated for an Oscar Once Busey into I’m So Crazy Somebody Give Me a TV Show Busey, as Utah’s wacky veteran partner Angelo Pappas. Not even the presence of Bill Duke could have swayed this one.

Edge: Point Break

Better Heist Gone Wrong Scene: Tough, because the on in The Fast & the Furious is pretty cool, and in general it’s hard for anything to beat a full-on, high-stakes highway chase scene. But my main problem with it is this: Why the hell would Brian risk his life to save Vince? This is a guy who’s in love with the girl you’re screwing, beefed with you from the first moment you ever showed your face, and in fact has been itching for an excuse to blow your head off just about ever since, and you’re going to casually jump onto a truck in the middle of a hijacking while the driver reloads his shotgun, to save this guy? Very possibly just so he can kill you later, once he finds out that he was right about you being a cop all along? I mean, I know he’s in love with Mia and all, but she didn’t seem to like Vince very much anyway, so really, why bother?

Meanwhile, I have my issues with the Point Break blown heist as well, mainly in that it’s a little too much of a downer for a movie that had been such great frivolous fun up until that point. But the heist also includes one of my favorite moments in the whole movie, where the undercover cop among the hostages in the bank tries to persuade the uniformed cop to follow his lead and try to take down the robbers with him–and the uniformed cop begs him not to try anything, because he knows it’ll get them both killed (and, indeed, it does). It’s a surprisingly funny and honest moment, because really, who wants to take on four armed gunmen just to try to prevent a bank from losing some insured cash? It’s enough to give it the close win here.

Edge: Point Break

Best Cameo from a Star Musician: Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis, no doubt a brah-in-arms of the So-Cal surfer spirit on display in Point Break (though he probably objected somewhat to Bodhi’s implicitly anti-drug stance), had a cameo in Point Break in the house raid scene, but by the end of that scene, Kiedis’s presence is maybe like the sixth most memorable thing about it. Who, however, could forget Ja Rule in the first racing scene in The Fast and the Furious, as his girlfriend promises him a three-way with a sideline hottie if he wins (”You get her, too”)? Or, for that matter, his ultimate cry of anguish as Brian blazes past him during the race, obliterating his chances of victory: “MOOOOONICAAAAA!!!!!!“? Somewhere, not far away, the future producers of Half Past Dead were taking notes.

Edge: The Fast and the Furious

Better Most Ridiculous Scene: Point Break no doubt contains several of the canonical ridiculous scenes in action movie history, most notably being the scene where Johnny, having skydived exactly once in his life (earlier that day), nonetheless feels enough confidence in his ability to swim through air that he jumps off a plane, without a parachute, in the hopes of catching up to Bodhi and forcing him to deploy his parachute and arresting him once they hit the ground. (Apparently Mythbusters proved that Johnny could actually have caught up with Bodhi by streamlining his body, but couldn’t have freefallen (freefell?) with him for as long as he did, or conducted a conversation while doing so). I’m not sure what the most ridiculous scene in TFATF is–maybe the one where Dom and Brian race the asshole in the Ferrari for no real reason–but does it even matter?

Edge: Point Break

Better Last Scene: Naturally, it all comes down to the ending. Point Break’s was a real good one–I always respected how Utah kept going after Bodhi, despite having no real motivation besides obsession and a sense of impuned justice. Everything about their final exchange is fairly pitch-perfect, from Bodhi’s cries for one last wave, to Utah’s “vaya con dios” send-off, and his oh-so-symbolic tossing of his badge into the sea as he exclaims to his fellow officer that Bodhi’s not coming back. And ultimately, this is where The Fast and the Furious falters somewhat. If Brian was really planning on letting Dom go the entire time, why go through that entire charade of racing him down that quarter-mile stretch, nearly getting both of them obliterated by an oncoming train, just to let him go after they both managed to survive it? Was his stilted, unconvincing, overused explanation of “I owe you a ten-second car” really good enough? Not for me.

The one advantage of the Fast and the Furious ending? It left the door open for a sequel–2 Fast 2 Furious, almost as good as the first. And hey, when the alleged Jan de Bont-helmed follow-up to Point Break comes out sometime next year, maybe we’ll have a new Showdown on our hands. But until then…

Advantage: Point Break

FINAL SCORE: POINT BREAK (6) – THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (5)

10 Years, 100 Songs: #85. “Cruisin’ Down the Street in My ‘64…”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

Far be it from us to lecture about racial semiotics here on Intensities in Ten Suburbs, but here we go. Dynamite Hack were a post-grunge band from Alvin, Texas, who achieved very brief and limited fame at the turn of the millennium for their cover of N.W.A.’s gangsta rap standard “Boyz n the Hood.” It first appeared on a compilation entitled in a tribue to classic hip-hop entitled Take a Bite Out of Rhyme: A Rock Tribute to Rap, and then as the first single from ‘00 full-length Superfast, where the song would gain moderate radio support and eventually peak at #12 on the Modern Rock charts. Many would call the southern white boys’ cover of the violent, decadent West Coast anthem patronizing, obnoxious and dumb, if not outright racist. Personally, I’d be more inclined to call it one of the best–and one of the most surprisingly influential–pop covers of the decade.

Not to say that isn’t just a little bit patronizing, obnoxious, or dumb. But in my opinion, the cover is an entirely worthy and faithful tribute to what made the original so great, just presented in a different framework–that of the patronizing, obnoxious, dumb white kid enamored with the glamor of the N.W.A. persona. And there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all–it’s practically the manifest destiny of the suburban youth of America to idealize the rock stars of their infancy, and around the time of the 21st century, a new generation was coming of age that (somewhat understandably) found the gangsta rap and eventual g-funk stars to be far more compelling figures than either the lame hair metalers or the introspective grunge dudes that dominated popular rock from the late 80s into the early 90s. They had no shot at ever being like them, or ever being able to relate to their experiences, but neither really did anglophilic punk followers or members of the KISS Army in the late 70s. All NWA did was add guns and hard drugs to the mix, and those were really just peripherals to the true appeal of gangsta rap to young, confused white males–the confidence, the pure untouchability that all the genre’s leading lights seemed to possess.

Anyway, for me to try to morally justify Dynamite Hack’s brief moment in the sun–as if it even needed jutsification–is to get away from the main point: There’s a reason that this song, and not StainD’s “Bring the Noise” or Kottonmouth Kings’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” was the one that became the first major Stupid White Boys Covering Covering a Classic Rap Song hit. And that’s because Dynamite Hack didn’t really sound like they were doing anything outside of themselves to cover the song. Built on a rollicking guitar-picking melody, the thing sounded almost like a campfire singalong–sweet, catchy and pristine, a perfect jumping off point for a folky story song (which in essence is what “Boyz n the Hood” is–just not the sort of song for which you’d generally picture Eazy-E saying “Hey kids, let’s all gather round, while Uncle Eric tells you all a tale of drive-by shootings and domestic violence!”)

The Hack were wise to drop listeners right into the middle of the song, and to not attempt to cover the entire near-six minute running time of the original. Drawing it out would have played up the joke elements of the song, instead of just making it sound like a bunch of bored teenagers trying to glamourize their uneventful events of their day by exaggerating on a few key details–a take on the song supported by the fact that it starts out with the narrator getting bitched out by his mom. Meanwhile, structurally, the song takes the original to the next level by building up to one key point in each verse, at which point the narrator’s unimpressed drawl turns into a triumphant shout–”THEN I LET THE APLINE PLAYYYY!! / I WAS PUMPIN’ NEW SHIT BY N.W.A.!!!”–creating a sense of exultation in the lifestyle, missing in the original because it wouldn’t have made sense to seem that enthusiastic about, but entirely appropriate for a remake by losers for whom the supposed daily events of living in South-Central L.A. would seem unbearably exciting.

And really, when you get down to it–is the original “Boyz n the Hood” actually that unassailable? Don’t get me wrong, lyrically, it’s easily one of the best first-person narratives in the last 30 years of pop music, but the production–miles away from the rapid-fire breakbeats of “Straight Outta Compton” or sweet soul samples of “Express Yourself”–was still really quite raw, just a basic synth pattern, a pounding 808 and a couple miscellaneous contemporary samples thrown into the chorus breaks. It gave the song an urgent, street-level feel to it which probably ended up helping its rep at the time, but listening to it today, it does get kind of monotonous by the four or five-minute mark. The suburban white kids of the 21st century deserved a condensed, more easily palated version of the song from which they could eventually work backwards to the NWA version, and Dynamite Hack were more than willing to oblige on that front.

Apparently realizing their own right to make soft, accoustic versions of gangsta rap hits, the success of Dynamite Hack opened the floodgates for similar covers by other pasty artists, like Nina Gordon’s “Straight Outta Compton” and Ben Folds’ “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” as well as less inflammatory send-ups like Coldplay’s “Hot in Herre” and Travis Morrison’s “What’s Your Fantasy?” For better or worse, though, Dynamite Hack did not stick around to really reap the benefits of their moderate success, as Superfast was their last album released to date, and their hip-hop cover tally seems permanently stalled at one. Still, nearly a decade later and few songs are as guaranteed to put a smile on my face from their very first note as this one. If you think it’s ridiculous, deplorable stuff, then fine, that’s your right, I suppose. But if you ever feel the urge to try to make the West Side sign with your fingers while watching a 2Pac video, or to hold your gun sidweays while playing Duck Hunt, or to wear a White Sox hat to a block party outside the city of Chicago–well, you better not let me catch you.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #86. “My Heart’s in Overdrive and You’re Behind the Steering Wheel”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

When The Darkness first came out, the most common discussion topic about them was always about whether or not they were being ironic. The snobbier critics and indie kids tended to want to believe that they were doing it as near-parody, and the classic rock true believers wanted to believe that they were totally sincere. Of course, both sides of the argument were totally ridiculous. They couldn’t possibly be doing it 100% straight faced, otherwise it’d look more like Jet or Buckcherry, whose intentions were too base and unremarkable to ever be questioned by anyone. And they couldn’t be doing as straight parody, either, otherwise there’s no way they’d be doing such a great job of it. Rather, the appeal of The Darkness was that they viewed classic rock the same way that most people in the 21st century with half a brain and half a heart did–a genre of occasional ridiculous, poorly-dated cliches, which nonetheless continued to tap more effectively into the pleasure centers of listeners than just about any other style of music.

And the crazy thing is that when The Darkness were at the very peak of their hype, they were about as anomalous among their supposed peers as was humanly possible. 2003 was the year of The Strokes’ Room on Fire, The White Stripes’ Elephant, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell–all bands celebrated for their relatively raw, frill-less, street-and-garage-level approach to rock and roll. And yet somehow the UK press still found time to help pitch US audiences on The Darkness, a band for whom “frill-less” will never be among the more fitting appelations. With their glammy get-ups, ripping guitar solos, and unabashedly corny music videos (to match their unabashedly corny lyrics), The Darkness were, for all their retro fixations, actually a breath of fresh air in the almost oppressively pretension-devoid stylings of the New Rock Revolution. (Though don’t worry, all three of those bands will be coming up at some point on this list as well.)

“I Believe in a Thing Called Love” was, without question, the defining moment of The Darkness’s brief reign at the top, and possibly the closest thing that our young century will come to our own “More Than a Feeling.” You know what you’re in for from the very beginning, as the at-first muffled opening riff explodes into your speakers in all its panoramic glory, the perfect introduction for lead singer Justin Hawkins and his classically-trained metaphor usage: “Can’t explain all the feelings that you’re making me feel / My heart’s in overdrive and you’re behind the steering wheel.” Like everything else about the band, Hawkins was big–big hair and big voice, shouting at the top of his lungs from the get, and racing further up and down his multi-octave range as the song goes on (”Touching you-OO-OOO-OOO-OOO!!! / Touching me-EEE-EEE-EEE-EEE!!!“)–hitting the highest registers in rock with the bravado of no one since Lou Gramm and Kevin Cronyn (if not, y’know, Freddie Mercury).

But everyone knows what classic rock is really about–the anthemic chorus, and “Thing Called Love” has a doozy. “I believe in a thing called love / Just listen to the rhythm of my heart / There’s a chance we could make it now / We could rock it ’til the sun goes down / I BELIEVE IN A THING CA-LLED LOOOOOOVE!!!” Pure and easy, a classic rock chorus of such high quality that it doesn’t for a second feel like a cheesy attempt to recapture the glory of a sound that went out of fashion over two decades ago–rather, it sounds like The Darkness bragging that even though they’re 20+ years late to the game, they can still do it better than most of the guys from the genre’s classic period ever could.  Hawkins even uses the chorus–which is virtually impossible to sing along to in both its loose-lipped speed and its dog whistle-level pitch–to demonstrate the #1 rule of classic rock: the band should always seem like they can be properly imitated by anyone, ever.

Throw in a couple great double-tracked guitar solos, some more vocal trilling, and a video that really hits all the high points (Spaceships! Electricity! Giant spidercrabthings! That weird-looking dude with the moustache!), and in three and a half minutes,”I Believe in a Thing Called Love” made supposed classic rock lovers like Tenacious D look like rank amateur-poser-loser assholes by comparison. The best kind of tribute that can be paid to “Thing Called Love” to place it in the true ranks of its cock-rock brethren is that it continues to endure in the positive memories of everyone who was around for it when it came out, becoming a karaoke standard, a modern rock fixture and recently even a feature on VH1’s I Love the New Millennium. Even people who couldn’t name a single Boston or Styx song, and who wouldn’t normally come within half a mile of a mainstream rock radio station, still became converts at least for the duration of the song.

Of course, anyone who thought this song was the beginning of a long, beautiful career is far more of a true believer than I could ever hope to be. The Darkness only achieved a minor follow-up hit off Permission to Land (the mildly clever though somewhat less righteous “Growing on Me”) in the US, and then they only released one more album (the significantly less buzzed-about, albeit brilliantly titled, One Way Ticket to Hell…And Back!) before lead singer Justin Hawkins entered rehab, and left the band. But for a band whose greatest arena rock fantasies were all realized in their first big hit, I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised to see the Darkness quickly flame out afterwards. After all, it’s not like Boston ever topped their first album, either.

10 Years, 100 Songs: #87. “When I Run in the Dark…”

If you pay enough attention to the list here, you’ll notice that it definitely skews towards the beginning of the decade, with songs from the last year or two barely getting any due at all. The reasons for this are unfair, but simple. In my opinion, the way one feels about a pop song is a perception defined almost entirely by four times that you hear it–the first time, the tenth time, the (approximately) one hundredth time, and then the first time again, after not having heard it for a year. The first time is obviously the most important, usually (though not always) telling you enough about a song to at least determine whether or not you like it. The tenth time is key because by that point the song should no longer be packing surprises, and you should be able to judge it with relative thoroughness. The ~100th time is crucial because by that point the song has reached such a complete point of saturation that it will likely no longer move you emotionally in any particular way, thus allowing you to view it with complete objectivity, like a wine taster who spits out his drink so as not to allow the alcohol to cloud his judgement. But the first time after more than a year might be my personal favorite, blending the history of the 100th listen with the fully-formed feelings of the tenth and the freshness of the first. And since we can’t have had that experience yet with songs from so recently, it’s hard to be feel sure enough about them to include them here.

Of course, every so often–and it’s rarer than you might think–you just know. You hear a song and you know from that first listen that the song is something special, something that’s going to stay with you regardless of how many times you hear it. By most of my previously stated standards, “Daniel” shouldn’t be on this list–too new, not popular enough, not obviously significant or influential to the rest of the decade’s pop music. But I knew from the first time I heard it, and the tenth, for that matter, that this was one of the great songs of the decade, and I’m confident enough in being borne out on that that I’ll forgo the ~100th listen and first listen in over a year as qualifications here. Personally, I’d be overjoyed if there’s another song that comes out this year that I have greater faith in.

It was obvious from “What’s a Girl to Do?, the Bat for Lashes (nee Natasha Khan) breakout single from 2006, that the girl was really good. The song was steeped in pop history–hard to get much more obvious than starting with the “Be My Baby” drum beat, of course–but it was also distinctly original, a stunning, shivering ballad with widescreen production and a superbly creepy video. Even the subject matter felt fresh, a song about emotional frigidness that, unlike Lily Allen or any of her more obnoxious contemporaries, actually seemed to be bemoaning the state rather than bragging about it, making the song far more striking. It wasn’t quite a classic, per se–the actual tune wasn’t a killer, and the song never really built much past the chorus–but it showed about as much potential as any other new artist from that year, and seemed to promise that she’d get there soon enough.

“Daniel” was exactly what I was hoping for. It maintained everything that I liked about “What’s a Girl to Do?”–the spooky atmosphere, the raw emotion, the compelling personality–but added absolutely perfect songcraft (and an 80s-ish beat!) to the mix as well. In relative contrast to her earlier semi-hit, “Daniel” was also unabashedly romantic, a paean to the fragile mysteries of young love which, if you believe Khan’s explanations (as well as her single cover), was actually more inspired by Daniel LaRusso, Ralph Macchio’s character in The Karate Kid, than any actual figure in her past. In a way, though, that inspiration makes the song richer than if, like some people, Khan had simply based the song on a specific, similarly-named boy of her youth–this way, it’s far dreamier and more idealized, as all recollections of teenage passion should be.

And from the song’s opening lines, sighed by Khan in a loud whisper–”Daniel / When I first saw you / I knew that you had / a flame in your heart”–the song is both frustratingly shadowy and sensationally vivid, confusing and fascinating, just like…well, you get the idea. Rather than relate simple tales of dalliances, Khan sticks mostly to simple, evocative phrases, split almost evenly between the atmospheric (”Under our blue skies / marbe movie skies,” “The smell of cinders and rain,” “Just catch in the eye of the storm”) and the physical (”With my arms around your neck,” “I found a home in your eyes”) to build a staggeringly emotionally loaded framework for the song. But as great as the verses are, they’d be nothing without an amazing chorus to anchor them, and “Daniel” has certainly has that–an almost devestatingly beautiful melody for the best synthesis of the song’s two types of lyrics: “When I run in the dark / to a place that’s vast / under a sheet of rain in my heart / I dream of home.” It’s the song encapsulated, and with the haunting (yeah, yeah, I had to say that word at least once) echo of “Dan-iel” ringing in the background after each line, it’s positively unforgettable.

And she had the song to match this time, as well. To have the synth-drum beat was an absolutely brilliant move, simultaneously ensuring the song’s catchiness and preventing it from ever sounding too draggy or dippy, but the entire thing’s a marvel–the violin hook that provides the bridge in between chorus and verse, the subtle bass drum rolls at various points of the song, the guitar reverberations throughout, they all add up to a gorgeous bed for Khan’s hazy, infinitely-tracked cries to lie their head on. The most commonly used points of reference (and justifiably so) for the song were The Cure’s “A Forest,” which Khan was so close to ripping off directly with the song’s theme and melody that she covered the song on the single’s b-side to be on the safe side, and Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon,” the prototypical mysterious, unnerving gypsy woman ballad, from which Khan even borrowed the “singing the titular name on its own without context” lyrical device. But I’ll throw a less trendy third one in there–Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession,” with which “Daniel” not only shares a swirling richness of production but a lyrical conceit and vocal performance so personal and intimate that it borders on the disturbing (and indeed, in the case of “Possession,” the song was even written from the perspective of a real-life stalker of McLachlan’s).

It’s all a very proud lineage, and Bat for Lashes fits it to a T. It doesn’t hurt that Khan herself, despite nearing the age of 30, still kind of had the look of a lost teenager to her in the video, with her droopy hair, baggy clothes, and (obviously painted on) perpetual tears, really made you want to save her from the demons plaguing her (literally, in the video–though why Khan keeps insisting on traveling on these empty roads at unnaturally nocturnal hours is, of course, anyone’s guess) and make her feel at home again. I hoped she could maintain the feeling of “Daniel” throughout full-length effort Two Suns, but though she came close at other points, “Daniel” is clearly her career standout, and one that will take great effort and fortune to match in future efforts. Still, you’d be foolish not to be monitoring her career very, very closely in the decade to come–and hey, with a couple hundred listens down, who’s to say how high her future songs could rank on our list of the 2010s?