Song of the Day: Silkk the Shocker, "It Takes More"

Back when I was an aspiring music theater performer, I took voice lessons once a week at the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music. I started before I had a driver's license, but once I got access to a car that weekly trip became one the perpetual highlights of my week. I liked voice lessons enough, though the real thrill for me was the drive itself. The trip to Hartt was close enough to be convenient but just far enough away to really tuck into an album (generally, it was about a half hour of car time). The route also afforded me a handful of fast food outlets where I could treat myself, strange enough traffic patterns that would allow me plausible deniability should I disappear for longer than usual, and one glorious record store. 

I'm pretty sure the shop was an outpost of a local chain called Record Express (there was another one within walking distance of my summer job at a bank in downtown Hartford), though it's possible it was just a Musicland or a Sam Goody. Either way, it was a very fine compact disc emporium with an exceptionally large retail footprint tucked between a Boston Market and a liquor store. I spent an insane amount of time and money in that place, and thinking back I'm amazed at its selection. That was the store where I found a lot of indie rock releases and a handful of new albums by forgotten bands (I distinctly remember the thrill of finding Crash Test Dummies' 1999 magnum opus Give Yourself a Hand, which I could not find anywhere else because nobody cared about Crash Test Dummies), but they also stocked a ton of hip-hop, and that is the place where I got a lot of my rap music education. A lot of the new rap was sold at a deeper discount than anything else, so I felt free to take flyers on a handful of big-selling but radio-unfriendly MCs.

In 1999, that meant brushing up against Master P's No Limit roster, and on the ride home from a voice lesson one night I traded a couple of bucks in my wallet for a copy of Silkk the Shocker's chart-topping album Made Man. Silkk had what I assume was an accidentally inventive flow, full of staccato hiccups and illogical shifts in speed and cadence. But he was a commercial force because he was Master P-adjacent (in fact, Silkk is P's younger brother), and Made Man debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 despite not having a big crossover single to break it in. I thought about 75 percent of Made Man was junk, though I did start to develop an appreciation for the minimalist bombast No Limit's Beats by the Pound production crew, and "It Takes More" is a great example of that: gangster movie strings, Miami bass thump, rickety snares, and a paranoid piano loop. It's a spartan masterpiece that I found unrefined in '99 but now wish was still the in sound of the moment. 

Song of the Day: That Dog, "Long Island"

That Dog's Retreat From the Sun turned 20 years old on Saturday, and they celebrated with a front-to-back performance of the album with a concert at the El Rey. It was awesome, full of aging hipsters like myself who made special plans to go out and shout along like they used to. 

On the surface, That Dog sound like a relatively typical post-grunge alt-rock outfit, and their biggest hit "Never Say Never" is one of their least evolved—it's sonically fierce but reliant mostly on a big honking riff in the chorus. (Tellingly, the band sort of breezed over it during the set, partially because it comes pretty early in the tracklisting but also because it doesn't seem that interesting to play.) But they actually deploy quite a few bits of sonic weaponry, including a knack for off-kilter harmonizing and a willingness to flesh out their guitar/bass/drum arrangements with various strings (band co-founder Petra Haden, who is no longer a member of the group, is a classically-trained violinist). "Long Island" has a big hook in the chorus but also features a handful of harmonic dips and structural dives that would have confused modern rock radio programmers in 1997. But it's a smash from a parallel universe, particularly with lines like, "By definition a crush must hurt, and they do/ Just like the one I have on you." Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out also turned 20 on Saturday, and while it remains a more definitive historical hitching post in female-fronted rock, Retreat From the Sun shouts, frets, and shakes it off with just as much aplomb. 

Song of the Day: Fall Out Boy, "Hum Hallelujah"

Over the course of their first three albums, Fall Out Boy followed a jaw-dropping arc: Their 2003 debut Take This To Your Grave was a mildly rugged bit of Warped Tour hardcore that got blown up to an IMAX version of itself on 2005's From Under the Cork Tree (that's the one with radio and MySpace staples "Sugar, We're Going Down" and "Dance Dance") and finally rode a rocket through the agit-pop ozone on 2007's Infinity on High. The band who made "Hum Hallelujah," the Leonard Cohen-winking album cut above, bears almost no resemblance to the one that banged out buzzy emo in Chicago basements. But that was always the plan, as the members of Fall Out Boy (and particularly bassist/lyricist/Internet penis icon Pete Wentz) were always thinking bigger. In fact, the band had already signed their major label deal when they put their first album out on Fueled By Ramen; Island allowed Take This To Your Grave to come out on an indie in order to bank some credibility, an age-old tactic that was also practice by fellow Chicago band Smashing Pumpkins a generation earlier.

Those stylistic and commercial leaps were calculated, but I find them no less laudable; in fact, if I had a band, that's exactly the journey I would want me group to follow with its opening triptych: a mildly unpolished debut followed by a reach for an arena-sized brass ring and finally settling on a blast of hybrid pop weirdness. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about Infinity on High (it's not like it's OK Computer or anything), but when it came out in 2007 it carried with it a bit of surreality that neither the emo devotees nor the top 40-listening newcomers knew how to process. It feels typical now (just about every band on Alt Nation sounds like their trying to ape the electronic punk mishmash of Infinity), but people were confused by its odd structures and chest-thumping swoop. 

Fall Out Boy arrived a little too late to matter to me. By the time "Sugar, We're Going Down" got them onto the cover of Spin, I was already an adult with a job (at Spin). But songs like "Hum Hallelujah" do provide me with a bit of emotional tourism that simultaneously feels satisfying and kind of gross. Fall Out Boy were not a part of my youth, but they easily could have been. I didn't have much of an affinity for emo when I was growing up—I had processed Sunny Day Real Estate and had a compilation that had a Jawbreaker song on it, but I don't think I really processed the scene until much later (I'm still not sure I've ever listened to Rainer Maria). My hardcore friend Joe used to use "emo" as a derogatory descriptor for a song he found too pop leaning; this epithet was generally reserved for Rancid songs that ended up on the radio. But I was always a pop fetishist at heart, and I loved enough Green Day and Blink-182 tunes to know that had Fall Out Boy arrived in '98 I would have definitely been obsessed. 

I still get a charge out of hearing the hook of "Hum Hallelujah," but it's a simulacra of a real, deeper feeling. (I recognize this as a problem with me, not with Wentz and the gang.) When Weezer's "El Scorcho" pops up on a playlist, I appreciate it both on an objective level (because it is a well-constructed bit of garage pop) and on a deeply personal one (because I am internally transported back to the thrill of discovering the song, diving into Pinkerton, and using the track as fuel to help me get over a girl). It's fundamental nostalgia, gently brushing against an old bit of my psyche and illuminating a mild throb in my memory. When I listen to "Hum Hallelujah," I get that same kind of satisfaction, but my brain has to make an active leap to get there. I am essentially projecting the song into my own past, and recognizing that if it had existed alongside some of the other songs that were actually there in real time, then it would have the same effect on me now. I'm essentially tricking myself into believing that "Hum Hallelujah" was a part of my youth even though it absolutely was not. 

Why am I able to fool myself like this? Most likely because I recognize that a handful of Wentz's lyrics would be the sort of phrases I would have scribbled in the margins of my AP Government notes and possibly tried to pass off as my own turns of phrase. I guarantee that 16-year-old Kyle would think that "I thought I loved you/ It was just how you looked in the light" was a brutal burn, and he would have daydreamed about getting a tattoo with the line "One day we'll be nostalgic for disaster." (If you couldn't tell by any of this, 16-year-old Kyle was a complete asshole.) Ironically, the lyrics of "Hum Hallelujah" keep me from fully enjoying the song as an adult. In high school, I would have forgiven the line "A teenage vow in a parking lot/ Til tonight do us part," but now today it just feels clunky and leaden. "Hum Hallelujah" makes me feel it without feeling it, but I'll take a pristine fake if I don't have to think about it. 

Song of the Day: Nine Inch Nails, "Closer"

I have not been sleeping well. Or rather, let me rephrase that: I fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up (relatively) well-rested, But lately while I am asleep, I have been accosted by nightmares. They range in emotional spectrum from mildly eerie to alarmingly terrifying, but they all have an intensity that is undeniable and far more vivid than anything I have experienced in the past. Maybe it's my diet, or maybe this is all part of the aging process. 

If there's any upside to this, it's that I now really understand the interior logic of the video for Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." Released as the second single from The Downward Spiral in 1994, "Closer" remains as unlikely a hit as there ever has been. "Closer" wasn't just a rock radio hit (it landed at number 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart) but also a bizarre pop crossover (it somehow climbed to number 41 on the Hot 100 and remains Trent Reznor's third highest-charting pop tune). That's a particularly impressive turn for a song whose chorus is "I want to fuck you like an animal." 

Part of what made "Closer" a larger cultural moment was the music video, which was directed by Mark Romanek and was immediately placed into heavy rotation on MTV when it arrived in May of '94. The clip pulls from a handful of inspirations, particularly the decay-infused art of Joel-Peter Witkin and the creepy short films of the Brothers Quay. There's no real narrative—Reznor just sort of poses, sings, and hangs around a dusty storage facility for sideshow performers. Thanks to a healthy amount of nudity and one particular instance of implied animal torture, a lot of the "Closer" clip had to be edited down in order to meet MTV's strict broadcast requirements, and while a handful of images are simply blurred out, there are a handful of moments in the video wherein the footage is simply replaced by a placard that says "Scene Missing." It has a Nine Inch Nails logo on it, so it felt like a legitimate part of the video and not an artificial drop-in. Strangely, that legitimacy made the clip feel even eerier than it already was. My thought process was, "Considering how messed up some of the other images were in the video, what could possibly be disturbing enough to eject entirely?"

I showed up somewhat late to the "Closer" party, as I didn't see the clip until the end of 1994 as part of MTV's year-end countdown. It was relatively late at night and I was by myself, and the stillness of the evening and the darkness of the room made "Closer" feel like a broadcast from a parallel dimension—a dimension full of steampunk organs and roaches caked in sawdust. It unfolded like a nightmare—odd, upsetting, and yet still curiously intriguing. The "Scene Missing" placards were certainly part of it, and by the time I finally got around to seeing the unedited version of "Closer" (which is the only one you can find anymore) when I was in college, the whole thing seemed a little anti-climatic, and the stuff that was taken out seemed tame in comparison with the blankness my imagination had to fill. I should have known that kind of darkness can only come from within. 

Song of the Day: Sleater-Kinney, "Buy Her Candy"

For me, Sleater-Kinney was one of those bands I read about for years before hearing any of the actual music. That was a general pitfall of music access when this album arrived in '97. My beloved Spin had declared Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss an extremely good and important group largely based on their third full-length Dig Me Out. But though I was able to read quotes from the women and follow the arc of their career and do close readings of the criticism surrounding their music, I could not physically find a copy of Dig Me Out to save my life. Mail order was available but felt sketchy, and though CDNow was operational, this was still in the era before everybody felt comfortable buying most everything online. 

This was not an unusual development for me during my high school days. There were a handful of oft-referenced bands about whom I knew many intimate details but could not whistle one of their songs. Pavement was a good example—since rock writers adored Pavement, they were often held up as a point of comparison or as a sideways reference. So though I knew about Stephen Malkmus' affinity for Boggle and was familiar with the lyric sheet from "Range Life," I don't think I actually heard a full-length Pavement album until 1999, and even then it was the limp finale Terror Twilight. (Freshman year of college, which brought with it my first high speed Internet connection and a Napster account, was when I finally heard Slanted and Enchanted in full.) This cycle dissipated roughly around the arrival of higher-quality streaming audio in 2001, as I recall the last band whose sound I had to construct for myself based on words written about them was the Strokes (and even then I failed miserably—I expected Is This It? to sound like Aerosmith's Rocks). 

Such was the case with Sleater-Kinney, though I did manage to finally get around to hearing Dig Me Out even as they were becoming slightly bigger stars in the aftermath. At some point during the summer before my senior year, I was sent on an audition to do voices for a computer game called Rescue Heroes (it's a franchise that later became absolutely fucking gigantic). I got completely lost on my way to the studio (it was somewhere in western Connecticut, an area I knew little about). I have no idea what town I was in, but I do know that I passed by a record store that was going out of business. Assuming I was already late and may never arrive at the audition anyway, I popped in to get my bearings and to sample the wares. The selection had already been pretty thoroughly picked over, though the one place where the greatest cross-section of bargain and selection was in the racks of cassettes. Since my car still had a tape deck, I tended to make myself mixtapes for driving but did pick up the occasional album in the format, which I thought had been long dead but still survived (there were brand new albums on tape in the racks at this place). For two bucks a piece, I grabbed a copy of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (still the only classic jazz album I've spent any time with), Deftones' Around the Fur (easily one of the five best albums from the nu-metal era), and Dig Me Out. I listened to the Sleater-Kinney first, as it had been the most built up for me and felt like the climax of a particularly grueling development period. It was well worth it, as everyone knows now that Dig Me Out is a pretty perfect collection of jittery garage punk drizzled with just enough caramelized pop sugar to make the rabble-rousing go down smooth. I love the stark savagery of "Buy Her Candy," the track that stood out to me most on that first listen. I was transfixed by Tucker's remarkable voice, which always sounds like it is on the verge of collapsing but is powered by a combination of nervous energy and the sheer will of necessity. The one bummer about "Buy Her Candy" is that it has no drums, which puts the bone-breaking Weiss on the sidelines. Otherwise, it was the perfect entry—one that proved elusive but ultimately made sweeter by the quest.