On the off chance that anyone is actually still checking this space in the vain hopes of some sort of new material, feel like I should let you know that I’m not going to be posting again anytime soon–in fact, I’m starting a trip/project in November where I’m traveling across the country and going to home games at all 30 NBA stadiums. (Yes, I am currently mostly unemployed.) You can read about my adventures at The Basketball Jones if so inclined, or follow my exploits in real time at @AUgetoffmygold (eventually, anyway–not really set up yet, clearly).

I’ll be back at the beginning of 2011 to do my annual One Year, 50 / 100 Pop Cultures list, and after that, I’m not really sure what the future holds with this blog. The only thing worse than bloggers who never update are those who are incessantly apologizing for doing so, but I am genuinely sorry to those of you who sent me Request Lines that I never ended up writing. I bit off more than I could chew with that, obviously, and while I was and am extremely touched that I got so many responses, I burned out on the four-song format surprisingly quickly. God willing I’ll get ‘em all done someday in the future, but I suppose I shouldn’t be making any promises with that at this point.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope that when I do finally get my shit together, you’ll still give a damn about what I have to say on the subject of Trey Songz singles and State Farm commercials. If not, no hard feelings–you’ve certainly given me my fair share of chances.

See y’all in 2011 and/or on the road.

-Andrew Unterberger, Intensities in Ten Suburbs

“Heat meets The Departed!!” screamed the rave reviews of the trailer. Having seen those two movies probably a combined 20 times in my life, I was a pretty easy sell for The Town, newfound double-threat Ben Affleck’s heist flick follow-up to the similarly New England-set Gone Baby Gone. Also starring longtime IITS favorite Jeremy Renner and TV stars Jon Hamm and Blake Lively in gloriously quintessential “Hey remember those TV characters that you’ll always associate us with well we can do other things too look at us!!” roles, I knew this was that all-too-rare flick I actually wanted to make the effort to get out to the theaters to see.

And to be fair, the quote was not wrong–except I was kind of hoping it was more of a qualitative statement than a quantitative one. The Town is indeed Heat meets The Departed–it’s pretty much the exact plot of Heat, with even thicker accents and crazier locals than in The Departed. I’m not sure what I was expecting, precisely, but I was hoping for something a little less eye-rolling, something a little more substantial. Instead, it was mostly a bunch of scenes of Ben Affleck trying to imply soulfulness by not smiling and Jon Hamm testing the limits of how disheveled he could get his hair and still look devastatingly handsome (Unsurprising answer: Very.)

Naturally, credibility-straining interactions and cliche-ridden set pieces abound. Here are the ten worst offenders, in roughly chronological order, though it also basically doubles as a countdown since things tend to get dumber as it goes:

10. Dougie (Affleck), after his meet-cute with bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) in a laundromat, picks her up for their makeshift first date. Dougie was supposed to just supposed to monitor how closely Claire, who Dougie and his masked crew momentarily held hostage during their latest boost, was helping out the feds, but wouldn’t you know it, ends up developing feelings for her. Talking with her in his car, she confesses to him that she was recently involved in a heist, and Dougie, barely registering any surprise at this hardly run-of-the-mill news, starts to needle her about the fine points of the FBI’s investigation before saying anything like “Wow, that must have been horrible!” or “Hey, so did anyone get shot or anything?”

Just in case that didn’t tip Claire off enough (who by the way, is inordinately trusting of strangers for someone who just was blindfolded and taken hostage by a number of armed thugs), he responds to her statement claiming that she’d definitely be able to identify the robbers by voice by saying something like “Well, it might be harder than you think.” Oh really, Dougie? Do tell.

9. Dougie enlists the help of psycho bestie Jem in intimidating some no-goodniks. Dougie deliberately undersells on his pitch to Jem, saying something along the lines of “I can’t tell you why we’re doing this, you can never ask me why afterwards, and we’re going to hurt some people.” A second’s pause where we’re supposed to imagine Jem demanding more info before signing on with his bullying service, but instead, he merely inquires “Whose car are we taking?” Ba-dum ching! I guess this guy Jem really likes to hurt people, huh? What a psycho!

8. Dougie, after a heart-wrenching confession to Claire about his mom leaving when he was young, goes to confront daddy Stephen (Chris Cooper) about it in prison. Why, Dougie wonders, didn’t Stephen ever look for her after she went missing? (“She was a druggie whore” is basically the extent of his explanation.) Not a terrible scene, and Cooper kinda kills it on his end, but it did strike me as a little amazing that it took Claire’s innocuous questioning some thirty-plus years after the fact for Dougie to raise the question to Pops of “So, by the way, why did Mom peace out all those years ago?” Seems like something that might’ve come up in conversation in the decades in between, dunno. Maybe the two would rather just talk about the Bruins during visitations.

7. Jem, noticing with irritation that Dougie has been seeing Claire socially, decides to crash one of their dates, introducing himself to her as Dougie’s long-time friend in an extremely tense scene involving a lot of doublespeak and glaring matches between Jem and an obviously none-too-pleased Dougie. After Jem leaves–though not before Dougie has to inconspicuously grasp his neck during his departure, so Claire won’t notice the distinctive Notre Dame tattoo he revealed on his neck during the bank heist–Claire’s one takeaway from the encounter is “So, I guess you didn’t tell your friends about me, huh?” A more pressing question might have been “OK, that guy introduced himself as your friend but you were clearly pissed off to see him and wanted to get rid of him before he revealed some big secret, what’s the deal?” These are the kind of people that pass for bank managers in The Town? No wonder it’s getting robbed all the damn time.

6. In the bureau office during the investigation of the crew’s first robbery, Agent Frawley (Hamm) gets a call on his cell phone, presumably related to the more-recent heist that the boys pulled off seconds earlier. “Close the bridge!,” he commands his partner without explanation. “What?” he understandably asks. “Close the fucking bridge!!” clarifies an evidently impatient Frawley. I mean…what bridge? Why? Do you really need to prove what a no-time-to-talk badass you are that you can’t elaborate a little on your big-deal imperative? Better yet, close the fucking bridge yourself, Jon Hamm. You’re not the boss of me.

5. Frawley, desperate for a lead in chasing Dougie and his crew, decides to bully his old squeeze Krista (Lively) for some information, using her apparently well-known role in an Oxycontin-running operation as leverage. But rather than come right out and say that, he cozies up to her in her home bar and flirts with her for a few minutes, even launching into a ridiculous extended metaphor about the weight of a $20 bill (which starts off sounding like a boast about his dick–don’t ask) before dropping the bombshell of the bill “not being worth its own weight…in Oxy” as Krista’s expression drops. I mean…for all Frawley’s time’s-a-wastin’ bombast, he certainly loves to meander around the point when chatting up the floozies. Chemistry between the two wasn’t bad, though–do I smell a Gossip Girl / Mad Men crossover?

4. Before the two embark on their latest, biggest, presumably final heist, Jem gives Dougie a little speech demonstrating how much he hated the nine years he spent in prison when he was young. Thus, he says, if he gets cornered by the cops during the upcoming job, he’s going to die shooting his way out rather than go back to jail. I wonder how many big-moment speeches in crime-flick history have focused around thugs saying to each other “You know, if the cops corner us on this one, let’s just surrender, because bullets hurt a lot and I’m actually kind of afraid of dying, and besides my cousin’s a really good defense attorney and could probably get our sentence down to 15-20 if we cop a plea.” Could you count them on one hand? I’m betting you could count them on one hand.

3. OK, this one might actually be on me. After pulling off the movie’s climactic heist at Fenway Park (where else?), crew member Gloansy (Slaine–also a member of La Coka Nostra, apparently) makes a crack about how “No one’s robbed the Sawx like that since Jack Clark!” Over my head in the theaters, I checked Clark’s Wikipedia page hoping it would partially explain the reference. After poring over it a couple times, I still got nothing. Anyone wanna help me out? (And in the meantime, if they were going the baseball route, wouldn’t “No one’s robbed the Sawx like that since [Yankees Owner Who Traded for Babe Ruth]!” have been the obvious choice? Guess it’s a townie thing.)

2. After the final heist goes awry (Damn, damn, damn!!) and Dougie is the only one of the crew who makes it out alive, he gives Claire one last call to try to persuade her to come away with him. Unbeknownst to Dougie–well, actually, entirely beknownst to Dougie, since he’s watching with binoculars from across the way–Claire has agreed to cooperate with the Feds, and uninspiringly tries to get him to meet her at her apartment, where the cops will be waiting for him. Heartbroken at her collaboration, Dougie unconvincingly agrees to come over, but just before he’s about to hang up, a suddenly motivated Claire tells him just how much she wants to come over, saying it’ll be just like one of her “sunny days”–a call back to a previous conversation between the two where she’d mentioned that she always associates sunny days with death. Clearly relieved at her trying to help him out, Dougie says he’ll be right there and hangs up.

Generally, I’d think this would be the point where one of the feds would take the phone from Claire and say something like “OK, so you obviously just tipped him off with that last part there, now what’s the deal and where can we find him?” Instead, Frawley and company’s conclusion is more along the lines of “Great! Did you hear that guys? He’s coming over! This is gonna be easy!” They set up their semi-inconspicuous trap for him while Dougie gets an hour’s head start on his getaway. Eventually, Frawley realizes he’s not coming and makes a “Sunny days, huh?” type comment to Claire, just to let her know that her little ruse wasn’t completely lost on him. This is the best and brightest the local FBI has to offer? Once again, no wonder this town gets robbed all the damn time.

1. After Dougie gets away–and yes, he actually does get away, presumably because Affleck was always as crushed as I was when DeNiro got killed at the end of Heat–Claire digs up a bag that he left buried in her garden before splitting from The Town. The bag contains Dougie’s share of the money from the Fenway heist, with a note saying that she should use the money to do some good. I figured the next scene would feature a guilt-ridden Claire turning over the money to the feds, possibly exchanging an understanding glance with a resigned Frawley. But no, apparently Claire’s good with spending Dougie’s blood money, and she uses it to refurbish a skating rink that the two had previously bemoaned having lost its ice. (Dougie was once a hockey prospect, you see.)

Uh…what? Claire, an ex-bank manager (she quits halfway through the movie for some reason) who presumably knows a thing or two about money, doesn’t see the risk in laying down such a large cash donation? Do suspicions in The Town not arise when unemployed consorts of known felons suddenly shell out five or six-digit amounts for local charity projects? And on the off chance that it wasn’t already 100% transparent where she got the money from, Claire has the rink dedicated to the memory of Dougie’s departed mother. Subtle.

In conclusion, go see The Social Network. Trent Reznor does the music!

are you still doing these, they’re fun

aerosmith – no more no more
fleetwood mac – what makes you think you’re the one
deftones – change
steely dan – the boston rag

Then later amended to:

i take back the song requests i posted on your blog. feeling good about these:

people who died
tainted love
any associates song
possum kingdom

I told him I’d do two of each of these….so I’m gonna do that.

Not having listened to an Aerosmith album since high school, I gotta admit to having completely lost recollection of this song. In fact, all I remember off Toys in the Attic were the two monster singles (“Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion,” obviously two of the best rock singles of that decade) and the one piece of obvious filler (“Big Ten Inch Record,” which I hated at the time but would probably think was brilliant for some reason if I listened to it now)–don’t think I could have even named another song off the album if pressed. Listening to “No More No More,” though, I’m surprised that it didn’t make more of an impression–it’s probably the only Aerosmith song I’ve ever heard that doesn’t sound definitively and uncompromisingly like an Aerosmith song.

From the opening guitar plucking of “No More No More,” I’d expect it to turn into something off #1 Record, or at the very least one of the less-virtuosic early Rush songs. I certainly wouldn’t anticipate it turning into an Aerosmith rave-up–much less one bemoaning the perils of life on the road and begging for them to come to an end. (Though with about half the lyrics being back-handed boasting about their sexual misadventures, it’s hard to read their bitching as being particularly straight-faced.) It ends up being a hell of a song anyway, though. I respect songs that are both willing to stand by the simplicity of their choruses, and not to dwell on them longer than necessary, and if Aerosmith don’t have any commentary more elaborate on the state of affairs then “No more, no more” (in predictably gorgeous two-part harmony, no less), then, well, why bother? And if you’re going to make one of these “Woe is us, we are a rock band” songs, then it’s probably a good move to avoid the Bob Seger-style histrionics and just keep things moving at an upbeat, if somewhat melancholy clip.

Good to know that Aerosmith were capable of such a moment of pretty introspection. Somehow, I doubt “upbeat, if somewhat melancholy” defines the tone of their Walk This Way autobiography, though. Probably for the best.

Feeling like lists with these entries today, so my ten favorite “No More ____” songs:

10. Berlin – “No More Words”
9. Ruff Endz – “No More”
8. The Stranglers – “No More Heroes”
7. Black Flag – “No More”
6. Michel’le – “No More Lies”
5. My Bloody Valentine – “No More Sorry”
4. Pavement – “No More Kings”
3. Annie Lennox – “No More I Love You’s”
2. Ozzy Osbourne – “No More Tears”
1. Alice Cooper – “No More Mr. Nice Guy”

So is this song about deflowering a virgin, or what? Some of the people at the Songfacts page seem to think so, and I’m inclined to maybe agree, though it’s possible that Weezer overexposure has just prejudiced me to think that all songs about insect metamorphosis-type topics are about that. (Is that what HIM’s  “Wings of a Butterfly” is about, too? I only really know the chorus.) Anyway, I sort of hope not–the song’s semi-demonic lurch is a little too adult-sounding to me to be about that kind of adolescent guilt. (And if he means to be bragging about it, that’s just creepy–the wrong kind of creepy for the Deftones, anyway). Besides, we were already getting close to Fat Chino territory by the time of White Pony, so i don’t think we much want to envision him seducing anyone.

This song is fantastic, of course. If we’re talking about ownership of the word “haunting”–one of the most overused words in the music critic lexicon, but one that’s still absolutely unavoidable in certain situations–the top five would be something like (in no particular order):

1. Coil – “Tainted Love”
2. Portishead – “Roads” (and later, for different reasons, “Threads”)
3. Elliott Smith – “Needle in the Hay”
4. Johnny Cash – “Hurt”
5. Deftones – “Change (In the House of Flies)”

Now, the Deftones cheat a little bit to get on the list here, because the distant, wailing synth sounds throughout the song are obviously meant to imply some sort of ghostly infestation. Nonetheless, the result is the same, and listening to “Change” has the kind of psyche-altering effect that the rest of those songs on the list and only a select number of other songs throughout history really do.

As one of the few bands that we both owned CDs by, I asked my metalhead brother once if he and his scene viewed The Deftones as something of a guilty pleasure, since they were obviously accessible enough to appeal to me and others of a more pop-oriented ilk. No, he insisted, they were as metal as anyone. I respected that, because no matter how pretty a song like “Change” is–and it is so very pretty–I could still always feel the metal seeping through at every corner. It’s a positively soul-blackening song, one which makes you reflexively slow your walk and lower your eyes while listening. It feels heavier and more intrinsically violent to me then most of the double-kick-bass-drum metal my brother rounds out his rotation with.

The key, aside from the ghost synths, has got to be the bass line. Subtly bubbling under the surface during the verses, it gives the song its necessary insidious groove (not all that different than their “No Ordinary Love” cover, really) for Chino to deliver his distortedly hushed whispers/come-ons/threats over. The groove is necessary to really get the song under your skin and possess you with its malice–almost so much so that it should be sort of anti-climactic when the screaming guitars inevitably crash-land on the chorus. Luckily, the chorus is strong enough that it never feels like a let-down, and the harmonies on the “ahhh-ahhh‘s at the end are some of the most unsettlignly sublime you’ll ever hear. Heroin, huh.

Great song, great album. If only all metal bands internalized lessons learned from the Cocteau Twins and The Cure as the Deftones did. (OK, that’d be completely disastrous. Couple more wouldn’t hurt though.)

Basically, this song sucks. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but from a songwriting perspective, this couldn’t be much sloppier of a pop/rock song. The verses are reptitive, blow at rhyming and have no consistent sense of meter, the chorus is insultingly lazy and head-smackingly simple, and the whole thing is at least two minutes too long–impressive, considering that the whole thing clocks in at under 4:00. The case for the song would be that there’s an undeniable kind of manic energy to the whole thing belying the sincerity of its intentions, and that it’d probably be pretentious and heartless to bother trying to craft an actual song out of this drunken rant of a punk anthem. Personally, I see both sides of the argument and call it a draw. I’d sing along to “People Who Died,” but probably only once or twice a year.

How about that Basketball Diaries, though? Had to read the book and see the movie in some class I took on New York Literature in high school, and it predictably fit into my love/hate relationship with stories about people who experienced more excitement and danger by the time they were 15 than I will in my entire life. Still watch the movie pretty much any time it’s on TV. My five favorite scenes:

5. Juliette Lewis cackling at strung-out-and-broke Leo: “WHO’S THE WHORE NOW??? AHHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
4. Leo’s exquisitely pained facial expression as he gives it up to some old guy in the Grand Central bathroom for money.
3. The post-funeral basketball scene in the rain, soundtracked by the above song. I think Leo dunks at some point and yells out in anguish. Probably shirtless.
2. The post-downers hoops game where it becomes obvious that Leo and co are druggies, set to “Riders on the Storm.” I have nightmares that play out like that all the time, for some reason.
1. “If we go outside, one of us is gonna get hurt.”
[Leo gets his ass kicked]
(Laughing) “I told you one of us was gonna get hurt!”

Ah, the lessons the vampire enthusiasts of today could have learned from Toadies. (No “The,” apparently. Assholes.) I don’t think I even knew what “Possum Kingdom” was about until years and years after the fact, and while it made sense, it didn’t really significantly change my opinion of the song. Bassist Lisa Umbarger (underrated in the canon of 90s female alt-rock bassists, btx) even insists that’s not what it’s about, but once you listen to it under that presumption, it’s pretty much impossible to read it any other way. The fact that it may very well not be about vampires, but still so very clearly and obviously has to be about vampires–that’s storytelling, motherfucker!

I mean, goddamn, what a cool song this is. Makes better use of the whammy bar than anything else I can think of, certainly–I don’t even think I knew what that thing was used for until I saw this video. Then those opening chords, that missing beat every two measures, the creeping bass line, the distortion-and-feedback-only solo, the countless number of bridges, the octave-up croon-to-wail that Todd Lewis does about a dozen times throughout the song but still works brilliantly every time–I mean, really, what’s not to like? Who doesn’t like “Possum Kingdom”? It’d be inconceivable. Classic song.

Feel a little bit obligated here to mention “Possum Kingdom”‘s ugly step-brother of a follow-up single, “Away.” I absolutely loved it back in the day–think I might have even heard it before PK–but listening to it now, it’s almost comical just what a poor man’s version of their breakout hit the song is. Basically just the same song with its parts slightly out of order. Also, Todd Lewis is wearing glasses in the video. Vampires don’t wear glasses, Todd.

Finally, aside from “Possum Kingdom,” the ten alt-rock one-hit wonders that it was inexcusable that Pitchfork left off their Top 200 Songs of the 90s list (Honorable Mention included):

10. Republica – “Ready to Go”
9. Rollins Band – “Liar”
8. Dada – “Dizz Knee Land”
7. The Posies – “Dream All Day”
6. Butthole Surfers – “Pepper”
5. Luscious Jackson – “Naked Eye”
4. Meat Puppets – “Backwater”
3. The Rentals – “Friends of P”
2. Folk Implosion – “Natural One”
1. Primitive Radio Gods – “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hands”

(In retrospect, several of these exclusions may indeed have been excusable, and Pitchfork actually did a pretty good job covering themselves on this territory. “Possum Kingdom” was a bad one, though, and let’s not get started on the Gin Blossoms.)

And, uh, one sentence on the songs not covered:

“What Makes You Think You’re the One”–Good song but I’ve written before how basically all my favorite Mac songs are Nicks cuts.
“The Boston Rag”–Good song but I’m more of an Aja fan.
“Tainted Love”–Two slots on the list of the top ten covers of all-time belong to the Soft Cell and Coil versions of this, with the former very likely at #1.
Any Associates Song–I like most of what I’ve heard off Sulk, and I’m minorly infatuated with the melodrama of “Tell Me Easter’s on Friday.”

Anyway, try these ones on for size?

Elvis Costello – Oliver’s Army
The Zombies – The Way I Feel Inside
Peter Salett – Heart Of Mine
Wilco – I’m Always In Love

I hate trying things on–it’s a socially and physically uncomfortable experience that I like to avoid whenever possible. I’ll just buy ‘em straight up and get back to you about the receipts later.

I’m in on this song for its first two lines: “Don’t start me talking / I could talk all night.” After that, I’m totally lost. Wouldn’t be the first time in history that a punk song has confused me as to its real-life application–I did spend a healthy chunk of my youth rapping along to Rage Against the Machine, after all–but there’s just no entry point for me here at all. Oliver’s Army? The Murder Mile? Checkpoint Charlie? Costello doesn’t give a damn about stringing it together comprehensively, and just puts his faith in his overbearing sneer to get his point across. Maybe all this stuff made sense in 1979 (I’d hope so, since a Wikipedia cheat sheet wouldn’t be available for another 35 years), but even if not, a good punk protest song should at least make you feel like you kinda get the gist of what it’s going for as you’re singing along to it at the top of your lungs. I just feel kinda dumb singing along to “Oliver’s Army”–like I’m being patronizing and indignant about nothing in particular.  I dunno, replace it with some sly and cutting lyrics about love and maybe you’ve got “Cruel to Be Kind,” but as is I just can’t get into it at all. Shame, too, ‘coz that piano part had some obvious potential. The “oh-oh-oh-ohhhh“s, too.

I’m not that huge on Armed Forces in general, to be honest–it crosses that line from being self-righteous and pissed off (cool) to being smug and condescending (less cool), and the increased production budget isn’t exactly helping matters on that front. There’s room for sophistication in punk, no doubt, and a lot of this is probably a matter of personal preference, but I just find Elvis Costello to be more appealing at his more direct–I was even all about those bedroom demos at the end of the My Aim is True reissue. Yeah, Elvis couldn’t spend his whole life singing about sexual frustration, but if I’m given the choices of an album with song titles like “Allison” or “No Action” and one with “Two Little Hitlers” and “Oliver’s Army”…chances are I’m not going with the latter too often. (Which is not to say his only good songs were on his first too albums, but I’d need to kind of pick and choose from the rest. Despite what you may have been told, nobody needs twenty tracks of Get Happy!!.)

My roommates love it, though. If they see this article, they’ll probably sing it on our 70s karaoke night just to spite me.

Had not heard this one before–not that I realized, anyway. But it’s really quite lovely, isn’t it? Nothing new for the Zombies, of course, who basically made two separate careers out of such loveliness, but I had no idea they had a song this austere in them. My problem with Odessey and Oracle is actually that it often bordered on the unnecessarily ornate–the songs were good fairly across the board, but some of them just weren’t substantial enough to be able to bear the weight of those lush productions. A sub-2:00 b-side, just a simple but somewhat twisty vocal line showcasing the band’s skill at manipulating unusual rhythms and off-kilter chord progressions in still highly-accessible pop songs, with nothing but some understated late organ for accompaniment. It’s insidious, it’s intimate, and as just about any song largely sung solo a capella ultimately turns out, it’s the littlest bit spooky as well. Basically, it’s a pretty fucking cool way to spend 94 seconds of your life.

When I say that I hadn’t consciously heard the song before, I add the qualifier because I guess I’d heard the song the handful of times I’d seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zisou, as the song apparently plays over the burial scene out at sea. I’m not wild about the way they use the song–yeah, I guess the haunting and melancholy vibe of the whole thing makes it a good fit for a funeral (especially with the organ part), but…I dunno, feels kinda cheap to me. Might just be general overkill with Wes Anderson and 60s psych-pop obscurities–hard to shake the feeling of him wanting to put a song he liked in his movie and shoehorning it into the scene that best fit, something of a recurring issue with TLA in general. (Can’t hate on you too much for this, though, Wes, as I’d almost certainly be the same way were it me behind the camera. C’mon guys, let’s use “Electric Blue” for this party scene at the beach! ‘Coz, uh, the water’s blue, and the chemistry between the two leads is electric! Don’t worry, the audience will understand!)

Interesting to hear the full band version of this inside. Lacks a smidge of the original’s singular charm, naturally, but still works surprisingly well as more of a garden-variety British Invasion production–almost like a moodier cousin to The Beatles’ “If I Fell.” I can get down with that.

Practically a critic-proof song, this. Just a nice, unobjectionable little number. Some lyrical quibbles, perhaps (“Do you want to know / If everything that glitters / Will turn into the gold / I see inside your hair”–not exactly Sonnet 18 as it comes to opening stanzas), but delivered earnestly and thoughtfully enough that it would be hard to raise too much of a fuss about them. Short, sweet, the whole megillah. I’m not sure who Peter Salett is, precisely, but given that searching for him on Wikipedia just redirects to the pages for a number of different movie soundtracks, I’m guessing that he’s a singer/songwriter that was put on this planet for the specific and express purpose of writing musical accompaniments to film montages of two people preciously falling in love with each other, as with the Keeping the Faith clip seen above. Hard to argue with–keep on keepin’ on with that, Peter Sallet. Have your voice crack a little more often, it’s adorable.

Since I have nothing more to say about this song, I’d like to take a minute to discuss this clip of Keeping the Faith, a movie I was incensed at having to go see at the age of 13 when I only wanted to watch movies that got ratings of three-and-a-half stars or higher in the Inquirer (KTF got three) and even angrier about it later in the year when I got into a very low-grade high-school love triangle with a friend and a girl and couldn’t stop relating it to Keeping the Faith. I hate this movie for any number of reasons, many of which are not the movie’s fault, but this one certainly is–during this nauseatingly endearing montage, when Ben Stiller decides he’s had enough of Jenna Elfmann’s incessant blabbing on her cell phone, steals it from her mid-conversation, and deposits it into a corner mailbox. Are you fucking kidding me? Cell phone in a mailbox, just to prove a cute point? For any sensible coupling of adults, this is nothing less than an act of war, but in the sunshine, lollipops and rainbows world of Keeping the Faith, it’s just a flirtatious act of intimacy to be performed in consequence-free silhouette. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.

To be fair, now that I’m a little older and a little wiser, I can forgive Edward Norton for this movie, because I understand that it’s just him trying to counterbalance the humongous cinematic injustice of Stiller having lost Winona Ryder to super-chode Ethan Hawke six years earlier in Reality Bites. Karmically speaking, someone had to do it. Sucks it had to be you, Ed–you were coming off a hell of a run there.

Pretty sure when the dust settles on Wilco for me, it’s Summerteeth that’ll hold up the best. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is probably the better album of the two, but there’s an edge to the best Summerteeth songs that I can’t get enough of, and which just doesn’t seem to be there in quite the same way on YHF. Supposedly Jeff Tweedy was super-fucked on any number of different highly-unprescribed meds and worse during the writing and recording of this one, and there’s a kind of subtly unhinged tension to it that you just don’t find in too many other collections of hooky, perfectly-produced pop/rock such as this. “Via Chicago,” the ballad-y one that begins “I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt all right to me,” is probably one of the less creepy songs on the album. The happy-sounding ones are much more disquieting.

“I’m Always in Love” is a great title and chorus hook for such an album, because at first glance it seems like a harmless pop song title, until you start to glance at it from a couple different angles and you realize that it’s kind of a weird thing to say, and could probably be more logically read as a statement of crisis as anything else. (See also: Weezer’s “Can’t Stop Partying,” a song about the physical and emotional toll of a life obligated to ceaseless mirth and merriment.) Wilco were masters of the late-song lyrical shift, most famously using it on Summerteeth to turn a key line in “She’s a Jar” from “She begs me not to miss her” to “She begs me not to hit her.” The twist in “I’m Always in Love” is less jarring but equally effective, as “I’m bragging / I’m always in love” becomes “I’m worried / I’m always in love” by the final chorus, and Tweedy’s shouts of the titular phrase get throatier and significantly more maniacal.

The rest of the song’s lyrics float in and out of comprehensibility, generally sounding lost and anxious and more than a little bit cynical. (“Why, I wonder, is my heart full of hope / And the feeling goes but my hair keeps growing.”) Wise, then, for Jay Bennett to build the song musically around an irresistible whiny synth hook and a pounding, piano-rooted groove (which, possibly not coincidentally, is more than a little reminiscent of “I’m Waiting for the Man”-era VU), making sure the thing was never less than a total blast to listen to. If you don’t listen too closely to the lyrics–easy to do, given how little Tweedy gave a shit about enunciating back in those days–you can sort of believe what you want to about the song, and probably read it as a straight-up summer song if you so desire. Good thing, but really, I think it’s more fun as a drugged-out statement of emotional anarchy. More fun than “Casino Queen,” anyway. And hey, “Casino Queen” is still pretty fun.

I don’t even mind the “Smoke pot / Smoke pot” backing vocals during the bridge. I mean, why not? The rest of the song/album is such a miserable advertisement for soul-sucking drug dependency, you might as well create an extra couple layers of irony by throwing in a cheapy like that. I can get down with that also.

And just because I want you to have material to work on well into the 2020s:

“Photograph” – Ringo Starr
“Photograph” – Def Leppard
“Photograph” – Weezer
“Photograph” – Nickelback

Four different decades of “Photograph”! Or at least it should be. Stupid Weezer dragging their feet on releasing the Green Album. I say we count it as a ’90s song, dammit.

Works for me. Let’s do this thing.

The first time I saw the trailer for Funny People I had fairly mixed feelings–I was excited to see Adam Sandler playing a darker, slightly-fictionalized version of his real-life persona (and really all movie stars who spend their entire careers trying to be likeable should do this at least once), though it being in the context of yet another Apatow/Rogen/MANN trifecta wasn’t exactly setting fire to my loins. The one part that I was unreservedly excited about, though, was that it appeared to feature a prominent scene involving Sandler covering Ringo Starr’s “Photograph.” I figured the song, long forgotten by classic rock radio, could get that sort of Apatow-endorsed “Heat of the Moment”/”Panama”-style re-appropriation to introduce it to a new generation–which, in my opinion, it rather richly deserved. Yet for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, when the movie actually came out, it was The Beatles’ posthumous 90s hit “Real Love” that Sandler covered, not “Photograph.” Good song, but not the same thing, and clearly a rather sizable missed opportunity.

You probably don’t need me to detail the reasons why Ringo Starr’s solo career hasn’t been as enduring as those of the other three Beatles–frankly, it’s sort of miraculous that Ringo had a solo career at all, let alone one as contemporaneously successful as his was (Seven top ten hits! Two #1s!), and it’s not like it was a coincidence “Don’t Pass Me By” was at best the 28th-most memorable song on The White Album. But if Starr has any kind of pop legacy on its own, then “Photograph” is surely it, and if no one is going to be confusing it with “Imagine,” “Silly Love Songs” or “My Sweet Lord” anytime soon, it just makes it a more appropriate legacy. Ringo’s aspirations never seemed particularly big and it’s doubtful anyone would have believed them if they had; consequently, if it’s a quirky little slow-burn of a love song that ends up defining the post-breakup career of the Funny Beatle, that’s about right, no? (Well, that and “No No Song,” but I wrote about that one already and I doubt anyone really cared the first time.)

“Photograph” starts off like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” performed by someone a decade older, slower and more resigned. It has the same sort of wind-up riff, but rather than revving up the excitement that “Hand” did, it just sounds like a slog to life, like a hungover guy needing multiple attempts to lurch himself out of bed the morning after. And like “Hand,” it then launches into the chorus, in a song that really has no verse. The lack of energy is easily explained by the chorus lyrics: “Every time I see your face / It reminds me of the places we used to go / But all I’ve got is a photograph / And I realize you’re not coming back anymore.” Yet even though 95% of other singers would turn this into a torch ballad, in Ringo’s hands, even the sluggish torpor of “Photograph” can’t help but sound the slightest bit jaunty. Richard Starkey just wasn’t the sort of guy to languish in musical self-pity–even on a break-up lamentation like this, it still sounds like he’s having fun playing with his friends. (Maybe why the Funny People scene inherently made so much sense.)

There’s not many surprises to be had in the rest of “Photograph”–at 4:12, the song may as well be Starr’s “Hey Jude,” and most of the song’s appeal comes from the lessons Ringo learned well from Macca in building up a song’s ultimate momentum by feeding its choruses into one another while the band/orchestra swells behind it. But there’s a line in one of the bridges that kills me every time: “Now you’re expecting me to live without you / But that’s not something that I’m looking forward to.” It’s possible that in someone else’s hands the line would’ve sounded insultingly obvious, but as plaintively sung by Ringo, I can’t imagine a better couplet to convey the sense of quietly soul-crushing anguish of having gotten over the shock and the drama of splitting with a loved one, and then just being faced with the miserable prospect of spending a whole lot of days in the absence of their presence. It’s not Paul shrieking about you being the only woman who can ever help him, it’s not George moaning about what is his life without your love, and it’s not even John sighing about how he lo-o-o-ves you, now and forever, but if you don’t think it’s every bit their equal, I would gently but firmly beg to disagree.

Another song that’s basically too boringly flawless to merit any kind of real discussion. Any discussion of the truly perfect textbook pop songs of the 1980s has to include this song, up there with “Just Can’t Get Enough,” “Like a Virgin” and (much though I may begrudge it) “Livin’ on a Prayer”. Really, the only thing approaching a grievance I could have with this song is the unnecessarily goofy “Look what you done to this rock ‘n’ roll clown” line in the pre-chorus. Otherwise, the opening riff, the driving beat, the bass rumble, the solo(s), the cowbell, the harmonies, the chorus, even the image-defining music video–really, where is there to find fault with this song? It’s not my personal preference for the Lep–I’m more of a Hysteria man, myself, and even of the Pyromania singles I’d probably rather pick up “Rock of Ages” on the radio–but it’s a deserved classic, and if it hadn’t turned Def Leppard into one of the biggest bands of the decade overnight, you’d have to think there was something seriously wrong with the Popular Music Way of Things in this country.

Oh, and in case you forgot, there’s also this. So I guess I owe Lep’s “Photograph” for that.

I’ve gone through just about the full range of emotions as regards Weezer’s Green Album. Like many superfans at the time of its release, I was heartbroken upon my first few listens to it, and like many other superfans I still, I eventually came to appreciate it for the pristine collection of gorgeously-produced nu-wave jams that it was. In fact, a good deal of the biggest Weezer fans I know now view it as one of their very finest hours, and I wondered if I was bound to get there myself. As the years pass, though, it’s starting to seem pretty unlikely. Mostly, it’s because unlike any other Weezer release before or after, Rivers Cuomo appears to be making a genuine effort to obscure himself on Green. It’s understandable after the miserable half-decade Rivers went after the failure of the intensely personal Pinkerton, but to me Weezer’s greatest asset has always been the singularity of Cuomo’s weird and wonderful universe, and how unafraid and unapologetic he’s been about shining a light on its obscurest, most eye-wideningly un-normal corners.

The light’s brighter on Green, no doubt, but it’s just not showing us anything. Some people only liked Cuomo’s weirdness when it paralleled their own (the two albums before Green), but I loved it just as much as it spiraled off into previously unseen dimensions (the four-plus albums after). Green is the only Weezer album with a hint of self-consciousness, the only one where it seems like Rivers and company are actively avoiding doing anything that could be construed as too honest, too slight, too bizarre, too anything. Perhaps given Cuomo’s likely state of mind at the time of recording, perhaps a recording as emotionally vacant as The Green Album was actually the most honest statement he could have made, and in fact my favorite song on the album by far is “Island in the Sun,” a song so purposefully dippy and escapist that it quickly becomes clear that it’s actually either about going insane or committing suicide. Still, it’s the only Weezer album that actually could’ve been produced by any one of their acolytes–Ozma, Rooney, Ben Kweller, whoever–without the difference being abundantly clear by the end of the first song. That bothers me a little, it does.

Admittedly, great pop music trumps all other rules and preconceived notions one might otherwise have for their favorite bands, but let’s not act like Green was all 10/10s on that front, either. Almost a decade later and I’m still not sure if I could identify a verse of “Crab” as being independent of “Smile” or to even hum you how “Simple Pages” goes. Even “Photograph,” one of the singles, seems totally negligible once you get past the hand claps and oooh-ooohs–if it’s about anything, I certainly couldn’t tell you what (“It’s in the photograph”? OK, so?), and apparently Weezer didn’t even have enough faith in the song as a single to shoot a legit video for it. Not that all pop songs need wacky hooks and thesis statements, but they need something to latch onto, and like too many songs on Green, there’s just not that much to work with.  Ironically for their pop-friendliest album, Green is actually the Weezer LP I need to listen to all the way through to fully appreciate, because eventually the immaculate sheen of the thing (produced by New Wave hero and official Guy Who Should Know, Ric Ocasek) becomes so intoxicating that it doesn’t really matter as the songs start to bleed into one another. On its own, I check in and out of interest in a song like “Photograph” about a half-dozen times before it’s over. Why “Don’t Let Go”–probably the best by-the-book pop song Weezer ever wrote–was passed over for this, I’ll never really understand.

(By the way, if you really had wanted to do the once-a-decade thing for this article, there exists a much better and much more representative choice for the 90s than this: The Verve Pipe’s “Photograph,” the first single off Villains, unfortunately forgotten in the wake of the much more successful “The Freshmen.” Gimme the near-G-funk keyboard hook of that one over anything in the Weezer song, no doubt.)

One thing you have to give it up to Nickelback for–they don’t hide behind long, misleading intros. Nope, with “Photograph” (as with “How You Remind Me,” “Someday” and no doubt at least one or two more of their hits), it launches almost immediately right into Chad Kroeger’s unmistakable and really quite terrifying wail. So if you’re determined to spend your entire life avoiding listening to Nickelback (as I was for nearly my entire high school experience), you don’t have to waste any time trying to figure out if an indeterminate post-Creed song on the radio is going to turn out to be a Silver Side Up or All the Right Reasons jam, and can jump to flip the station basically instantaneously. It’s a nice little heads up for them to give their innumerous number of haters, to kinda say “Hey, we hope you like us, but there’s a pretty good chance you’re gonna think we suck, so we promise not to try to trick you into listening into any of our songs.” Respect.

Is Nickelback really that bad? Probably not, though they’re permanently handicapped by Kroger’s unwillingness to sing at anything but the same near-max decibel level regardless of circumstance–clearly someone who managed to ignore 15 years of alt-rock lessons in the art of LOUDQuietLOUD (or vice versa). Beyond that…it’d be hard to classify any of their songs as being particularly good, since the lyrics usually tend to be on the clumsy side and the hooks are un-inspirational, to say the least. Maybe they’re just miscast as a rock band–a song like “Photograph,” with its rustic imagery, heavy nostalgia bent and sing-along chorus, would actually be much more at home on CMT than it was on VH1 or even FUSE. Cut his hair, give him a southern twang and gallon hat and tell him to take it down a couple of notches, and Kroger could have easily become indistinguishable from Toby Keith. Not that critic-types would like him/them any more, but at least they’d understannd Nickelback better if they knew that Kroeger was playing from a different rule book than most of the bands they listen to.

By those standards, “Photograph” is a tolerable if still largely unexceptional song. Some lyrics are kinda cute–”What the hell is that on Joey’s head?” “I was so nervous that I nearly missed”–and the chorus does definitely have that “c’mon, you know the words!” feel to it, though as is always the case with Kroeger’s throaty bleating, the thing invariably sounds impossibly overwrought for a lightweight remember-when song. It’s why my favorite Nickelback songs tend to be the angriest ones, because thanks to Kroeger, they’ll always sound far more plausible as a bunch of pissed-off, blind-drunk misogynists than as a good-natured gang of old-fashioned, backslap-and-a-beer homeboys. (Not even Toby Keith would ever get within 100 feet of “Figured You Out.”) The super-seriousness of “Photograph” was, at least, brilliantly parodied by some College Humor folk (Sample lyric: “Michelle’s the first girl I kissed / When we kissed I also grabbed her boob / Back then we were both 14 / I guess I grabbed a 14-year-old’s boob”), which also makes me wonder how exhausting it must get to sing like Kroeger all the time.

Really, when it comes down to it, I still rush to change the channel when it comes on. Might be more reflexive than anything else at this point, but I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

I’ve been a long time reader of your blog, and I really like the new request line thing you’ve been doing so I figured I would throw my suggestions out there.

You normally do four songs. But I came up with five. So you can pick and choose the four you want to talk about.

Rusted Root – Send Me On My Way http://bit.ly/5J0OTI
Yes – Changes http://bit.ly/9rECSJ
Janelle Monáe – Tightrope http://bit.ly/9q3V6Q
Toy Matinee – The Ballad of Jenny Ledge http://bit.ly/bTCX4a (there is a music video for this song but this clip has better audio)
Rush – The Spirit of Radio http://bit.ly/7ucIs

Liking the four for five thing. Hate to balk on the most obscure of the bunch, but I’ve listened to “Jenny Ledge” a handful of times and still can’t pin down a conclusive opinion on it, so I’m afraid I’m using my free pass on that one. Onwards and upwards…

My younger cousin recently showed my family a film he made of his immediate family’s vacation to Africa–a relatively professional-looking montage of sweeping vistas and funny-looking giraffes and whatnot. It was set to two songs–the theme to the Lion King and “Send Me on My Way.” For someone in their mid-20s (shudder) like myself, these would be head-smackingly obvious choices–the former is anyone of our generation’s immediate pop culture reference point for African music, and the latter is the only hit song of the 90s with both a flute solo and that scrape-y instrument from the beginning of “Gimme Shelter” whose name I can never remember. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had trickled down to my younger cousins, especially the latter–they’re a fairly pop-literate bunch, but endurance was not Rusted Root’s strong suit, and I was starting to worry that memories of the H.O.R.D.E. generation would die off with me and my friends. (Wikipedia tells me it was used in the movie Ice Age–this seems like the most logical explanation for it being on their radar.)

“Send Me on My Way” is a song guaranteed to make me feel ten years old again, excited to see the movie Mathilda in theaters, just about any time I listen. Not just because I was, obviously, ten years old when first exposed to it, but because the collective emotional intelligence of Rusted Root seems to have stayed permanently at about that level themselves. I’d never seen the video before writing this article, but it’s appropriately brain-damaged–a bunch of flighty, filthy-looking hippies galavanting out in the wilderness, not a care in the world and no apparent back-up plan should the weather turn quickly inhospitable. Lyric sites tell me that the first (and last) lines of the song are “I would like to reach out my hand / How may see you / How may tell you to run / You know what they say about the young,” but I’ll forever swear that it’s actually “I would like to reach out my hand / Ohm ‘bey say / Ohm ‘bey tell you to run / Uhhbibidisay, bibidiyah.” I’m not even sure which makes more sense.

Not that I’m complaining. Stupidity to this degree is often tolerable and occasionally preferable in the purest of pop music, and if “Send Me on My Way” didn’t want to make you go poncho-shopping and hitchhike to the nearest open plain in the mid-90s, then it’s entirely likely that no song would. I know every word to the thing–syllabically, if not literally–and I can’t deny the certain amount of idiot-wisdom contained in a line like “I would like to hold my little hand.” Singer Michael Glabicki (whoo, trivia) is certainly a talented vocalist and all, and he packs enough power and technique into the nonsense lyrics that they’re never less than a blast to attempt to sing along to. Hey, I even like the flute solo. (C’mon, it’d been nearly a decade since “You Can Call Me Al!” Way too long for one of the fundamental rock and roll instruments to sit on the shelf.)

Forgot how awful follow-up “Ecstasy” was, though. Video looks like it could’ve been made by MGMT too, which I don’t think I mean as a compliment.

Ahhh, 80s Yes. On the surface, I’m still not sure how or why prog and new wave should have anything to do with one another as hybrid genres, but between Yes’s 90125 (which I still haven’t heard all of–shameful, I’m sure), King Crimson’s Red, some of the later Police stuff and the work of another band I’m talking about later in this article, the two made for oddly complementary bedfellows. There is less than zero fucking with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” of course–one of the great riffs and best coke-fueled music videos of the 80s (and there was no shortage of either that decade, to be sure). “Leave It” is also fun, no doubt, and “Changes,” which I don’t think I’d heard before and is probably the most traditionally wonky of the bunch, is fairly worthy company as well.

I’m a huge sucker for that intro, of course–manic xylophone and guitar picking in–what is that, 13/8 time–until the entire band jumps in, subtly introducing the foreboding synths and layered guitar lines that continue throughout the song.  Every self-respecting prog outfit should have at least one “haha, we can play this and you almost definitely can’t, loser” moment per song, and I feel dizzy even contemplating attempting any of these parts myself, but as per the song’s strictly new pop-friendly rules, it doesn’t last too long, and flows seamlessly into the song proper. The rest sounds more by-the-numbers late-70s / early-80s arena rock–halfway between Kansas’s “Carry on Wayward Son” and The Scorpions’ “No One Like You,” basically–and the lyrics are predictably whatever. The thing feels big, does enough to justify its six-minute running time, and gives you another taste of that fantastic intro before checking out. Not a classic, but no particular complaints on my end.

Producer Trevor Horn really has to be counted as one of the unsung heroes of modern pop music. This album, ABC’s The Look of Love, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” (Who’s Afraid Of) The Art of Noise!, Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”–who had a stronger resume the first half of the 80s than this guy? And that doesn’t even even get to t.A.T.u. and “Kiss From a Rose.”

Truthfully, I’m not sure I understand the appeal of this woman. I mean, I get it conceptually–she’s a unique personality and a good dancer and what she appears to be selling musically (thinking-man’s old-school soul with a spirit of experimentation), it’s understandable that a lot of people would be buying. But the songs just kind of leave me cold, “Tightrope” especially. The verses are distractingly monotonous, which would be OK with a knockout chorus, but “Whether you’re high or low / You gotta tip on the tightrope”? Eh. I’m just not feeling it on any level–even as homespun soul wisdom, it feels marginal at best. And the Big Boi verse, pretty much the definition of phoned-in, just gives me another example of how far my opinion of Sir Lucious Leftfoot continues to drift in the wrong direction from the critical consensus. (I will say that I do really like the outro section, with the ukulele and that bendy guitar hook. That’s pretty cool, but it’s not worth sitting through the rest for.)

The next single, “Cold War,” I can get a little more into, but even that, I’m sorta perplexed by. When it comes for Janelle to have her little “Nothing Compares 2 U” moment at the end of the video, I’m just like Really? I dunno. I’m not on the same wavelength as this music.

Needless to say, this music, I am on the same wavelenth as. You could argue about whether or not “Spirit of Radio” is the best Rush song (I went with “YYZ” for my abortive 100 Years, 100 Songs project) but I doubt you could argue against this being the greatest single-song encapsulation of the band’s appeal–the virtuosity, the songcraft, the emotional explosiveness. The latter is too often ignored when discussing the band’s appeal–unlike the often clinical-sounding going-through-the-motions of their left-brained prog-rock brethren, Rush’s music often sounds like it’s bursting out of them in fits of over-anxious adolescent enthusiasm. (Yeah, gross, sorry.) The fact that they’re able to capture that unrestrained feeling without sacrificing anything in the way of technique or precision is what makes them one of the great classic rock bands.

“Spirit of Radio” is no doubt the definitive example of this, evident from the first millisecond that Alex Lifeson’s machine-gun guitar riff comes ripping through the speakers.  It’s visceral, it’s exciting, it sounds fucking phenomenal. And even though the song settles down from there, it never lets up on that gut level. In one of the first articles I wrote for this blog, I talked about how Rush was in essence a power-pop band as much as a prog-rock one, and the main verse riff for “Spirit of Radio” is Lifeson at his shimmery, Chiltonian best, aided by Geddy Lee’s predictably impassioned raving on the titular subject. Really, the very fact that Rush would write a song about the majesty of the FM dial is as good a demonstration of what sets them apart from their peers as anything–even during the days when they were at their poppiest, can you imagine Yes or King Crimson ever writing an ode to the pure joy of flipping around on the dial? No, they were probably too busy setting up their thousand-dollar surround-sound systems in their mansions so they could listen to John Cale and Ornette Coleman in peace, unfettered by the mainstream distractions of the outside world. (I know. I shouldn’t generalize. Maybe they were big Olivia Newton-John fans too. Hell, Robert Fripp made an album with Darryl Hall once.)

The song spends a lot of time leaping around from there, vascilating wildly between verses, choruses, bridges, breakdowns and solos, all without missing a beat and all without even pushing the runtime over five minutes. The entire thing is held together by its overflowing affection for the subject matter, intoxicating in its righteousness and sincerity. Seriously, this thing makes me want to cry sometimes–lines like “One likes to believe in the freedom of music” and “Hit the open road / There is magic at your fingers” they just strike right to the core of the feelings we all have about the power of great music, and the endless sense of discovery and wonder inherent in the capabilities of radio. You’d have to be a hard-hearted sort–or just another one of those Cale/Coleman types–not to feel that just a little bit.

Probably one of the best rock songs ever written on the subject of music. (My friend Leslie complained that I didn’t use enough superlatives in her recent Request Line article, so there you go, Leslie. Semi-superlative, anyway.)

It was brought to my attention recently that although at the beginning of the year, I promised sporadic updates on the Pop Chart Fantasy League on this blog, I’ve actually failed to do so. (In my defense, I haven’t been updating much of anything, and I don’t want all the other projects I’ve neglected to feel bad.) Yet the league is indeed alive and well, about to entire the 36th week of its 52-week season. So lest it fade from the public consciousness entirely, I suppose this is as good a time as any to delve back into all the gory details.

For those of you who have forgotten and/or never knew in the first place, the Pop Chart Fantasy League is basically what it sounds like–a sports-style fantasy league for pop music, where teams draft popular artists and score points based on how high their singles reach on the charts. (A more in-depth explanation can be found here.) This being a fairly unprecedented venture (and no I still don’t want to know if someone else has done this before shut up shut up shut up), there was much about the PCFL that was up in the air at the beginning, but I’m proud to say that so far it’s gone pretty smoothly and enjoyably for all involved, and even prouder to say my team is fucking steamrolling through our inaugural season.

To be fair, it’s not really fair. I had the first pick in the draft this year, and I essentially won the league on that pick alone–the infamous Glee Cast, pop powerhouse that they are, single-handedly responsible for charting 39 separate singles, worth a combined 1465 points. (No other artist has scored half that much yet.) Next year, we’re going to have to either significantly handicap Glee Cast’s scoring, enforce some sort of forfeiture of future draft picks to select them, or just eliminate them from contention entirely–like Fantasy Golf leagues had to do with Tiger Woods at the beginning of the decade, assuming those actually existed.

Don’t feel too bad for the other PCFL teams, however, because Team Utz’s supporting cast is also more than carrying their weight. In fact, thanks to some good early-round picks and a couple key waiver wire pickups, I’d still be killing even if I’d never drafted Glee Cast. Here’s how my original 12-artist roster breaks down, in the order they were drafted:

#1: Glee Cast (1465 Points, 39 Charting Singles)
#2: Eminem (704.5 Points, 10 Charting Singles)
#3: T-Pain (64.5 Points, 2 Charting Singles)
#4: Justin Bieber (559 Points, 8 Charting Singles)
#5: Linkin Park (116 Points, 1 Charting Single)
#6: Jay Sean (183 Points, 3 Charting Singles)
#7: Soulja Boy (94.5 Points, 2 Charting Singles)
#8: Carrie Underwood (238 Points, 2 Charting Singles)
#9: Trey Songz (247 Points, 4 Charting Singles)
#10: 50 Cent (No Charting Singles)
#11: Maroon 5 (84 Points, 1 Charting Single)
#12: No Doubt (No Charting Singles)

So aside from the super-disappointing performance of T-Pain (dude keeps pushing his album release later and later, lame), all my big guns have done a pretty good job of coming through, and I got some nice late-round value from Carrie Underwood and Trey Songz. (50 Cent and No Doubt have yet to come through at all, and likely won’t, but no one in the league has had every one of their artists score yet.) But the real damage I’ve done has been on the waiver wire. We’re allowed six claims each throughout the season of artists not taken in the original draft, of which I’ve used three:

#1. B.o.B. (503 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
#2. Nicki Minaj (316 Points, 10 Charting Singles)
#3. Taio Cruz (355 Points, 3 Charting Singles)

The B.o.B. one I got lucky on, and the Taio Cruz one was just me being the first to read about him getting ready to jump to #1 with “Break Your Heart” and claiming him instantly (setting off a league-wide debate about adjusting the waiver-wire practice in the process.)

Of course, I haven’t been the only one to take advantage of the waiver wire over the course of the year. Other savvy mid-season pickups have included Iyaz (306.5 Points, 5 Charting Singles), Bruno Mars (245 Points, 3 Charting Singles), and much to my surprise and displeasure, 3OH!3 (267 Points, 8 Charting Singles). And part of the fun of the whole league has been watching singles by unclaimed artists slowly creeping up the charts and sweating one another over who is going to grab that artist, risking a potential one-single wonder in the process. Train was one such artist, as “Hey Soul Sister” scored 130 points all on its own, but follow-up “If It’s Love” has managed just 52 as a follow-up, making it a borderline (though arguably still successful) pickup. Recently we’ve all been eyeing each other over who’s going to make the leap of faith with Mike Posner, whose “Cooler Than Me” would be worth 106 points so far, but whose career longevity is still unproven. (I’m skeptical, personally.)

We’ve also seen our fair share of relative busts. T-Pain was my worst, and others include Jamie Foxx (73 points on one single), Kelly Clarkson (5 points on one single), Alicia Keys (150 points on two singles–not terrible, but underwhelming for a first-round pick), and the consecutively-drafted Chamillionaire, Britney Spears, 2Pac and Dr. Dre, all of whom have yet to score a single point. Kanye West (79 points on one single) and Chris Brown (110 points on two singles) have also been underperformers thusfar, but with “Power” and “Deuces” still climbing the charts, and more singles presumably on the way, I don’t expect that to be the case much longer.

And of course, I would be remiss to not dedicate at least a little bit of time and space here to friend of the blog and PCFL team owner Victor, whose ill-conceived methods of preparation and general inattentiveness regarding current trends in pop music resulted in him fielding the pop music nerd equivalent to the ’09-’10 New Jersey Nets. We’ve all given him his fair share of crap for his unconscionably awful draft in real life, but it seems only right that it be properly documented on the internet as well. A stunning seven of Victor’s original twelve picks–Chamillionaire, Vampire Weekend, R. Kelly, Busta Rhymes, Toni Braxton, Wyclef Jean and Jason Mraz–have all put up a big fat zero in the scoring column so far this year. Victor’s actually done a fairly commendable job with mid-season pickups, thus saving his season from reaching its historic potential, but he’s still dead last in the league, over 500 points below his nearest competitor. Kudos once again, Big V.

Up next for the PCFL: The much-anticipated Winter Meetings, where we will discuss possible rule changes for the next year. Items on the docket will no doubt include fixing the waiver-wire process, changing the sizes of the rosters, eliminating retroactive scoring (meaning claimed artists can only score points for chart peaks they will reach, not ones they already have reached) and of course, figuring out what to do about Glee Cast. I’m excited.

In case you’re interested, here’s a list of the top 25 most valuable artists in the league so far this year. And if you live in the New York area, and you’re sufficiently nauseated by what is surely the smuggest article I’ve ever written for IITS…feel free to join up and teach me a thing or two next year:

1. Glee Cast (1465 Points, 39 Charting Singles)
2. Eminem (704.5 Points, 10 Charting Singles)
3. Rihanna (689 Points, 7 Charting Singles)
4. Usher (587 Points, 7 Charting Singles)
5. Justin Bieber (559 Points, 8 Charting Singles)
6. B.o.B. (503 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
7. Drake (492.5 Points, 9 Charting Singles)
8. Katy Perry (485 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
9. Ludacris (452 Points, 7 Charting Singles)
10. Ke$ha (394.5 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
11. Lady GaGa (361 Points, 3 Charting Singles)
12. Taio Cruz (355 Points, 3 Charting Singles)
13. Taylor Swift (350.5 Points, 4 Charting Singles)
14. David Guetta (348.5 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
15. Lady Antebellum (346 Points, 4 Charting Singles)
16. Black Eyed Peas (344 Points, 2 Charting Singles)
17. Lil’ Wayne (326 Points, 9 Charting Singles)
18. Nicki Minaj (316 Points, 10 Charting Singles)
19. Iyaz (306.5 Points, 5 Charting Singles)
20. Timbaland (282 Points, 3 Charting Singles)
21. T.I. (273 Points, 7 Charting Singles)
22. 3OH!3 (267 Points, 8 Charting Singles)
23. Trey Songz (247 Points, 4 Charting Singles)
24. Bruno Mars (245 Points, 3 Charting Singles)
25. Jay-Z (241 Points, 3 Charting Singles)

Yeah, I know you do. No one has ever successfully forgotten it. Well, time to throw another log on that fire, courtesy of the penultimate episode of season one of MTV’s The Hard Times of RJ Berger:

Never gets old, does it?

This show sucks, by the way. Significantly.

Hello, Andrew. It’s your #1 fan here. I’ve been thinking long and hard about my request line choices. I’ve tried to make them diverse and interesting while leaving plenty for you to mock, and I think I’ve done a good job, if I do say so myself, and I do. Here they are in semi-random order:

John Denver, “Annie’s Song”
Wham!, “I’m Your Man”
Seven Mary Three, “Water’s Edge”
For Squirrels, “The Mighty K.C.”

Thank you! I have a birthday coming up….

Had to come out of my recent semi-retirement for a birthday request. Here goes.

I’m tempted to make some sort of call for (or at least make the suggestion of) some sort of critical re-evaluation of John Denver. Admittedly I only know the most famous of his songs, but it’s hard to think of too many other popular artists who so thoroughly succeed at what they set out to do. When you listen to a John Denver song, you feel the Rockies–the chilly breeze, the crisp, thin air, the general awe-inspiring beauty of nature. In fact, it’s entirely possible that that’s not even what the Rockies feel like at all–I’ve never been, and neither have many of his acolytes I imagine–but Denver’s music is so evocative of all that that it’s basically supplanted whatever the actual reality is in the public consciousness. If you read that any other artist’s biggest hit was written during a ten-minute wait on a ski lift, it’d seem ridiculous, with Denver, it just adds a weird sort of authenticity to the song.

Still, I’m sympathetic to the John Denver haters, because for me to insist that he’s far better than the monster that history and Charlie Rich have made him out to be would probably be somewhat disrespectful to the people who actually had to live through his reign on top. I find his voice to be generally light and refreshing the handful of times a year I come across it, but if I had to spend the entire 1974 calendar year listening to his nasal bray, my experience with JD would no doubt be a more complicated one. It’s the same deal as with Creed, really–looking back now, it’s hard not to feel a little affection for them due to just how un-self conscious they were, and how thoroughly pop music has gone away from them since. Try telling that to someone back at the beginning of the decade, though, when “With Arms Wide Open” was #1 and it seemed like they might be the biggest band of the 21st century, and they wouldn’t be particularly understanding. It’s hard to argue with.

Anyway, “Annie’s Song” isn’t my favorite of his–”Rocky Mountain High” is the only one I know more than the chorus to–but it’s pleasant enough. I do find it a little weird that it’s become such a wedding standard, though–the whole “You fill up my senses” lyrical conceit is kind of a weird one for a classic love song, especially because it really sounds like Denver’s way more in love with nature and animal life and weather and shit than he is with Annie herself. According to Wikipedia the song has become such an eternal-love classic “due to its grand imagery and the fact it could apply to anyone (Annie is not mentioned by name in any part of the song).” Fair enough, but in my book, the really great love songs have at least a certain amount of specificity to them, because nothing so impersonal can ever truly be that relateable. I want to hear at least a little more about Annie than the sleepy blue ocean or whatever. (And yeah, no love song should ever contain the line “Come fill me again”–doesn’t even make sense within the context of the extended simile.)

I do find it interesting that the song has apparently been adapted for about a million different English soccer chants. I guess you could interpret popular culture using “Annie’s Song” as a kind of all-purpose mad lib as either a statement about the power and adaptability of the song’s lyrical and musical core, or about the weakness of its details. Answer’s probably somewhere in the middle.

True now as it ever was–there was no fucking with George Michael when he was doing Motown. White British people were responsible for a good deal of the best soul singles of the 80s, and “I’m Your Man” was certainly one of Wham!’s finest contributions on that front. Its cool that it’s one of the few Ridgeley-era songs that Michael will still play live solo–though “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is certainly the more effervescent of their upbeat soul smashes, its unfiltered poppiness makes it downright cartoonish at times. “I’m Your Man” lacks the cultural cachet of “Go-Go” for a number of reasons, but it’s probably the stronger of the two songs–just a simple lyrical sentiment, a driving beat and some great chorus harmonies. (No lines about objects of affection “mak[ing] the sun shine brighter than Doris Day” in this one, either.) Not as memorable or as musically sophisticated as “Careless Whisper” or “Everything She Wants,” but you could certainly do a lot worse than having “I’m Your Man” as the best song in your second tier of hits.

Video inspires the same question that I have with any number of live-performance vids for 80s hits, though, and especially one that became a public embarrassment as quickly as Wham! did–how do the other people in the band mentally file this one away? Does the dreadlocked bass player try to hide this video from friends and prospective business partners? Does that weird dude sashaying with the bongo strapped to his waist deem this as his greatest accomplishment in the music business? Were all the male fans singing along in the video’s audience even vaguely aware of the implications of their actions? These are questions that need to be answered.

Extended 12″ version is pretty quality, as well. “See, baby, this is a magic car…” Oh, you kids.

Seven Mary Three were an ultimate End of the Road band. When a previously underground genre such as grunge bursts into the mainstream, with all its pretensions to artistic credibility, eventually the product will become diluted to the point that only the surface signifiers remain, the actual character and detail photocopied past the point of visibility. (Those who have seen the movie Multiplicity no doubt understand this “Clone of a clone of a clone” phenomenon.) Plenty of people could have perceived one-and-only Top 40 hit “Cumbersome” as being some sort of thinly-veiled satire on the entire post-Seattle boom, with its chunky chords, super-heavy-handed lyrical imagery (“There is a balance between two worlds / One with an arrow and a cross”), and quintessentially Vedderian “WAUUUUUGGGHHH“-type wailings. Luckily for us, Seven Mary Three couldn’t have been more straight-faced, allowing “Cumbersome” to reach its potential as the pinnacle of unintentional 90s alt-rock comedy, and the unmistakable death-knell for an entire era of rock music.

Truth told, I had not heard follow-up single “Water’s Edge” until writing this article, and I’m pretty shocked to find that it even has its own Wikipedia page. Can’t say it changes my perception of them terribly much–it’s a cute little attempt for 7M3 to write their own “In the Air Tonight,” but no amount of quick-cuts of woodsy imagery in the song’s video can make the song even a fraction as creepy as the Collins masterwork. Still, I definitely enjoy the song, especially on the verses. The riff is subtly reminiscent of my much-beloved Whitesnake’s “Is This Love?,” and the fact that the band went with an insistent, pushing tempo instead of the more predictable Temple of the Dog-style lighter-waving is a pleasant surprise. And the chorues, while stilted in comparison, still packs sufficient punch: “I can’t go to the water’s edge / I didn’t do it / I saw who did.” Bonus credits for (maybe) being about the classic End-of-the-World 80s teen drama River’s Edge, although if it was, it certainly fudged some of the plot points. Also, how difficult would it have been just to call it “River’s Edge” instead? Doubt Crispin Glover would have sued.

Done by a band like the Afghan Whigs, or some band that could better resist their WAUUUUUGH-ing tendencies, it might could have been a straight-up classic. As is, it’ll have to suffice for being the underrated follow-up to one of the ten dumbest songs of the 90s. And hey, Wiki says it was a regular cover choice back in the early days of future tour-mates Three Doors Down, so we have them to thank for that, I guess. (And I would’ve loved to go to one of those shows–hope they came out together as a Seven Mary Three Doors Down supergroup at one point. Bringing generations of mediocre sludge-ballad fans together!)

Heard this song about a half-dozen times before writing this article and another handful after and it’s still borderline-impossible for me to remember how it goes. Not that it’s bad or anything, but there’s no one quality to it that ever really stuck in my craw in any significant way. It’s a tribute to Kurt Cobain I guess, but without the title I doubt I would have ever even guessed at that, and I bet that just about every portentous-sounding rock hit from ’94 to ’95 sounded like a Cobain tribute in some form or another. I do like the little instrumental breakdowns in between the chorus and verses, I guess, and maybe I’d feel differently if I ever saw the song used in some pivotal scene in a Cameron Crowe movie or My So-Called Life episode or something, but the chorus is pretty boring and on the whole, there’s just not enough for me to really latch onto here. It’s not like my life is particularly lacking for one more great lost 90s alternative one-hit wonder, anyway.

But hey, apparently For Squirrels opened for Creed on tour during their later days. I guess that just about brings everything full circle here. Go listen to “Higher” again, it’s way more fun than this song. Sounds kind of like an optimistic Seven Mary Three, actually.

Because there’s no sense in waiting to give you my four songs, I’m just gonna plop them in this post’s responses section and see what happens:

Sade – “No Ordinary Love”
Creed – “One Last Breath”
Led Zeppelin – “The Wanton Song”
Dennis Madalone – “America We Stand As One” (song + video combo)

Well Garret, now this is happening.

Growing up, I never gave Sade a second thought. As far as I was concerned, she (and I know it’s technically a “they” but who the fuck cares and I’m not spending the next however-many words fretting about pronouns) was more of a musical punchline than an artist of any particular merit. At best she was the singer that the girls in my high school listened to feel deep or soulful, at worst she was the musical equivalent of Skinemax, or at the very least some very very sleazy late-night infomercial. “Sexual Healing” is my least or second-least-favorite song of all-time, and from the clips of it I heard in cheesy compilation commercials, “Smooth Operator” seemed not all that dissimilar. Eventually I heard “Operator” in full and realized it wasn’t so bad, but I don’t think it was until I discovered “No Ordinary Love” that I realized what short shift I had been giving Ms. Adu all these years.

First off, when considering the great missed opportunities in the history of musical collaboration, you have to rank Sade and Massive Attack as one of the all-time whiffs, no? The Attack have spent the entirety of their career seeking out these smoky, mysterious, dolorous sirens to wail over the top of their back-alley ballads–Shara Nelson, Tracy Thorn, Liz Fraser, Sinead O’Connor–but somehow they never hooked up with the queen of them all. This is a point painfully borne out by “No Ordinary Love,” which is essentially a dead ringer for Massive Attack’s single from a few years earlier, “Safe From Harm,” but with a vocal performance infinitely more layered, soulful (hard to get away from that word here) and suggestive than the impressively-piped but relatively-characterless Nelson’s could ever really muster. The music these people would have made together could have stopped the world in its tracks–assuming it was after 10:00 PM, anyway.

Yeah, night time, huh. I don’t know, a song like “No Ordinary Love” probably sounds pretty good on a sunny summer afternoon as well, but it’s the kind of song that twilight-hour “Between the Sheets” blocks on classic soul and smooth jazz stations were invented for. It’s alluring and seductive, but dignified and never cheap–Sade’s voice is so powerful and confident that everything she sings sounds borne of a lifetime’s worth of sexual exploration, so when she insists (in effectively over-ennunciated syllables) that “This. Is. No Ordinary Love.” she commands such authority that we really have no choice to believe her. Maybe an even more interesting collaboration for Sade would have been with Prince as a songwriter–how would the Purple One have handled a female conduit who didn’t need Sugar Walls, Sex Shooters, or any of his other exhausting single-and-a-half-entendres in order to sound impossibly sexy?

Of course, I need to devote at least one paragraph here to the Deftones cover of the song, which I at least heard of before I heard the original, and which I believe to be fairly close to the equal of Sade’s version. The Deftones are the only–Repeat, The Only–metal band of note who could have covered this song without it coming off as schtick, but given the band’s proclivity for tortured, heavily-atmospheric love songs (See: Every other song covered on B-Sides and Rarities) the choice makes perfect sense. And while Chino’s broken warble obviously gives the song a different spin than Sade’s stately siren call, turning it into more of a lament of crippling obsession, it’s a credit to the original song being dense enough to being easily open to such interpretations without it coming off as parody or obvious revisionism. What’s more, it shows just what a jam the song is–the Deftones version really punches up the rhythm track, making the Massive Attack comp totally unmissable, but the song’s seductively low-key shuffle was there all along, not unlike INXS’s classic after-hours hit from the same year, “Not Enough Time.” (And trust me when I say I mean that as a compliment.)

Good stuff. And if any of you out there have continued to sleep on Sade’s recent comeback single, “Soldier of Love,”  know that it’s a near-lock Top Ten single of 2010. Ol’ girl’s still got it, for serious.

It should come to the surprise of absolutely no one that my stance on Creed has softened significantly over the years. I mean, yeah, they kinda sucked–probably more as people than as musicians–but really, how much of a grudge can you hold against a band as ridiculous as this? There’s something to be said for human beings with absolutely no concept of irony–a decidedly retro mindset given the era in rock music that Creed came from–and their willingness to demonstrate that ignorance with every single and music video. Plus, the riffs were kinda righteous (I’ve ranted before about how a certain pop-punk band ripped off the “Higher” intro for their breakout hit) and, uh, Scott Stapp’s feud with 311 was pretty funny. I dunno, maybe it’s just the whole “comedy = tragedy + time” formula at work, but I can’t help but rally a little behind a band who was going Diamond just a decade ago and has since been so systematically written out of rock history that it feels like they pre-dated the hair-metal era, at the absolute latest.

Anyway, believe it or not, I’d never heard “One Last Breath” before. Crazy, I know, but the height of the song was during my Popular Music Blackout period of the first few years of the 21st century, and by the time I came back, Creed were so popularly shunned that I can’t imagine what radio station would have dared to play them. (And unlike many other songs of the period that I missed, I never had the heart to search it out on my own.) To their and my defense, this is certainly a fairly terrible song, with a mediocre riff that finds the exact mid-way point between their own “What’s This Life For?” and “My Sacrifice” (which both also kind of sound like every other Creed power-ballad–variety was not a strong selling point for the band), a pointless “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying”-type message (or maybe it’s just “Kill Yourself,” not entirely sure), and a chorus that gets far too hung up on metric logistics. Listening to it for the first time I assumed I’d eventually recognize it as one of Those Songs that I’d heard a million times but couldn’t identify, but a minute or so in, it became clear it would be a song I probably never had and never would hear played voluntarily by someone else.

Still, it’s kind of fun, isn’t it? That’s the great thing about self-righteous rock music–even at its absolute worst (and maybe especially at its absolute worst), it’s still guaranteed to pack some kind of divine punch, especially come chorus-time. Now that I’ve heard enough to be relatively familiar with it, there’s no way I could ever resist belting out that chorus on the super-off chance that I ever heard it on the radio or a bar jukebox or something. And the video…my lord, the video. Just read the Wikipedia summary:

The video for One Last Breath starts with each band member on individual rock formations. Scott Stapp’s rock collapses, and he falls. Just as he hits the ground below, he and the band are hit by a sandstorm. When the storm clears, Stapp approaches fragments of a large statue, and various people are convened around it. Finally, Stapp is standing at the top of a long stair overlooking the land.

I mean, what other band would ever have a music video whose description hinged on the phrase “individual rock formations”? (Okay, maybe Linkin Park.) Just about any single frame in this video is guaranteed to be hilarious–faces forming out of sandstorms, muddy statues reaching from the sides of cliffs, women crying tears of blood. It’s like a nightmare someone would have while feeling guilty about sleeping through church, except with lousy CGI special effects. And really, the funniest part of it all is Scott Stapp, just…doing his Scott Stapp thing. Say what you will about the man, we’re not likely to see his equal again anytime soon.

Plus, you know, the guy from Slate likes them.

Showing off. That’s what “The Wanton Song” is all about. It’s a band that had written so many of the greatest riffs and grooves in rock history in their first five-six years of existence that they deemed it necessary to flex a little. That little second in between fret-board-racing that takes place during the song’s main riff–that part where it’s just Bonham working the drums before Page comes zooming back in–it’s a taunt. It’s Led Zeppelin (Page specifically) saying “Yeah, we’re the greatest band in the world, we can totally fit in a totally kick-ass riff into three beats of a measure and just take the fourth beat off because why not.” Same goes for that flat-sounding chord (you know the one) in the song’s bridge. Whatever. What are you going to do about it? Say it’s not awesome? It is awesome, if for no other reason than because it’s awesome. This is Led Zeppelin in 1975, and there’s not shit that you or anyone else can do about it.

It’s showing off because I’m not even really sure there’s a song attached to “The Wanton Song.” I’ve heard the song dozens of times but couldn’t sing a single word–much less a whole line–that appears in it. I don’t think there’s a chorus or a bridge or even much of a verse to be found vocally. I used to think the song was called “The Wonton Song,” and as far as I can tell the song has just as good a shot as being about delicious Chinese soup as it does about what, lust or something? Who the fuck knows. It’s just riff after riff of a band at the absolute top of its game, the confidence brimming from a truly historical and absolutely deserved high. ‘Coz “The Wanton Song” is fantastic, a groove 99% of 70s hard rock bands would have absolutely killed for, but I can easily name 15-20 Led Zeppelin songs off the top of my head that are obviously better, and probably another dozen or so that convincing cases could be made for. It’s a self-perpetuating cockiness that can get dangerous if unchecked for too long (ahem, Presence, ahem) but can make for a fairly intoxicating contact-high when performed responsibly.

Physical Graffiti. No bad songs on that one.

Eh. I like the Creed video more.