" Paula Cole Releases ’90s-Summoning New Single “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.”
The follow-up to the Massachusetts-born singer/songwriter’s American Quilt (2021) is called Lo and the album’s first single will make ’90s music enthusiasts turn their heads. Titled “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.” the song chronicles Cole’s introduction to those bands by her late friend and musical mentor Mark Hutchins. Hutchins, who died in 2016, produced all of Cole’s early demos and was the one who introduced the singer to a wide array of alternative bands, like XTC, A Tribe Called Quest and Daniel Lanois. "In a statement about the single Cole wrote: “Mark exploded my mind. I literally heard the Beatles first with Mark. Also The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., A Tribe Called Quest, The Pixies, and a lot of gorgeous early-90’s alternative music folks might not associate with me. We connected in our love for Peter Gabriel’s music. I was mourning, honoring, celebrating Mark when I wrote this. I wanted to acknowledge him and his lasting influence in my life. Mark should have had an enormous career. I’m so grateful. The song needed to be fun, like he was.”
This inevitably reminded me of The House of Love's "The Beatles and the Stones"
But also - more appositely - of The Replacements's own "Alex Chilton"
That, then, was A/ quite clever and B/ indicative
Indicating the Replacements's perverse drive to fail in the marketplace, just like Paul Westerberg's revered forebear, the ironically-named Big Star.
But Big Star was only ironically named in retrospect - they really wanted to be big and thought they could be. Listening to the Anglophile distillate of Beatles-Stones that is their perfect first album, the fact that they did fail, that radio didn't embrace them - it seems so mystifying, so wrong. The music is full of self-confidence and sense of destiny.
Later on Chilton did - of necessity, through self-destructive impulses - make a right cult of himself.
But he and the rest of Big Star wanted to be big.
Plus he'd already been a pop star, in The Box Tops, with the massive hit "The Letter".
"Alex Chilton" the song is also a significant contribution to the canon of meta-pop - "I'm in love / With that song", it captures that feeling of being ravished through the radio. (Or in this case, it being Big Star, not through the radio). The chorus enacts what it rejoices in - the seizing of the ear, the endlessly renewing miracle of pop. Yet releasing a song titled "Alex Chilton" as a single virtually guarantees it'll never be a hit (except in the hearts of college radio deejays and fanzine editors).
As for The House of Love, doing a song titled "The Beatles and the Stones" and then releasing it as a single, it just seemed like a form of self-humiliation - as if the only way they could ever be mentioned in the same breath as the B and the S was by this ruse of titling a song after them.
Talking of the Beatles, here's legendary-era-of-blogs ex-blogger Owen Hatherley surprising us with an excellent piece in The New Left Review about the AI-concocted half-lives of the Beatles
"The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’....
"What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier.....
"The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors.
".... Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute."
11 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Thank god Paula Cole had a savvy nerd to initiate her into the arcane world of The Beatles, or her whole life may have passed totally unaware of the Fad Four.
Is The Nuum still a thing? Spending Listmas checking out everyone's 2023 faves (where's your list by the way?), I couldn't help noticing the conspicuous absence overall of club music, even in its deconstructed form of recent years (which may have been its final gasp). And even in the lists of musicians who are themselves known as producers of Bass music. Instead, there's an abundance of jazz/gospel/R&B inspired stuff repurposed in a sparse and introvert ambient form, and quite a few references to trip-hop, signaling a probable revival of that genre. I vividly remember encountering trip-hop for the first time at a D&B party when the DJ would now and then throw in a trip-hop track, resulting in a maddeningly incongruous switch between extreme tempos on the dance floor from fast-forward to slow motion. Happy days!
It's interesting that The Hath mentioned Sir Cliff as a still going concern, because I perceive him as person whose presence and legacy is rapidly eroding.
The sort of unworldly people who used to listen to Cliff (royalists, tennis fans, etc.) don't seem to form the kind of core audience that they used to - I can't think of anyone nowadays who caters for them.
Yes trip hop does seem to be having a moment again. I was watching some new quality TV series and it had both Portishead and Tricky on the soundtrack. New groups making that sort of sound.
The still-a-thing-or-not status of the Nuum is a moot point. I think there's half-lives and traces and echoes, but there doesn't seem to be a big sound that you can point to as the continuumation. A lot of people seem to be into amapiano, though, and that seems to where that London audience has recohered.
There's still tons of club music being made, surely? But yeah maybe it's dropped off the radar of magazines that general in outlook, as opposed to specialist ones. I assume if you looked at DJ magazine or Resident Advisor, there would be a list choc-a-bloc with stuff.
I am hatching what I call Atemporal Faves, a list of things I loved in 2023 that includes a lot - maybe a preponderance - of things not actually released in 2023. From the year before or a few years before.... old stuff just reissued .... old just rediscovered or stumbled for the first time.
I found - and still find - ‘The Beatles and the Stones’ absolutely baffling. I had been a big HoL fan up to that point: played the Creation album to death, went to see them at the ICA. And then came this song which not only showed that the muse had utterly deserted them, but also announced it in the title and lyrics. Why would they do that?
Yes I also loved The House of Love. It wasn't a great song and above all it seemed undignified, this bid for reflected glory.
In 1990 or thereabouts, on the way to Manchester to interview 808 State, I ran into Alan McGee and along with playing me the Weatherall remix of "Come Together" and revealing that Primal Scream didn't actually play a note on it, he said apropos of seemingly nothing, "don't you think the Beatles are more relevant than ever?".
Which thought had never remotely occurred to me. I hadn't listened to - or even really thought about - the Beatles since around 1979, when I taped the two double-LP comps, the red and the blue, off a friend and played them over and over. During the 1980s the Beatles almost completely dropped away as a reference point for contemporary music makers, so it seems to me anyway, looking back.
The only exception I can think of is Husker Du covering "Ticket to Ride" for a free giveway NME single.
Then along came Stone Roses at decade's end, going about the Beatles. I think that's what House of Love were trying to tap into - a creeping conversatism that would ultimately result in Britpop.
Prior to the Stones Roses bigging up (and implicitly comparing themselves to) the Beatles, the Sixties referencing that happened during the 1980s was about relatively obscure groups. Velvets, Love, failures at that time, the stuff of cult love. Obscure garage punk and psych. Okay there was the Byrds. But nobody referenced the Beatles and the Stones, that would have been too obvious.
That reflexive linkage of “the Beatles and the Stones” is quite curious, as well. As you say, the Beatles were everywhere as an influence in the 90s, because of the Roses and Oasis and all their followers. But no-one in the UK really tried to emulate the Stones. Except for Primal Scream.
I'm going against the grain to say that I think "The Beatles and The Stones" is a great song and captures how I felt listening to them in my room as a teenager.
In fact it is the only HoL song that has made it onto my contemporary playlists.
I know there are songs that may be technically edgier, but I connect with the song.
Really....I laugh about the differences between the UK and US....kids here seem to like metal and rreaallyy bad hip hop....like with a 3 on it. Not close to funky. I'm 51 at least we had our own spin on punk rock and hip hop and other forms of American music...rock n roll blues jazz ..ya know. But as a whole....goddamn music sucks today..
I'd like to thank johnny lydon or rotten for being a talentless twit ....and forgetting about iggy who he copied except he wore gay men's bondage gear that his ...lover..Malcom..allegedly desired to see him in . Iggy was the punk rock creatir....proof is the song..I got a right..rock n roll is American johnny boy...man up twit. Icky ray soon to shite on ya grave.
11 comments:
Thank god Paula Cole had a savvy nerd to initiate her into the arcane world of The Beatles, or her whole life may have passed totally unaware of the Fad Four.
Is The Nuum still a thing? Spending Listmas checking out everyone's 2023 faves (where's your list by the way?), I couldn't help noticing the conspicuous absence overall of club music, even in its deconstructed form of recent years (which may have been its final gasp). And even in the lists of musicians who are themselves known as producers of Bass music. Instead, there's an abundance of jazz/gospel/R&B inspired stuff repurposed in a sparse and introvert ambient form, and quite a few references to trip-hop, signaling a probable revival of that genre. I vividly remember encountering trip-hop for the first time at a D&B party when the DJ would now and then throw in a trip-hop track, resulting in a maddeningly incongruous switch between extreme tempos on the dance floor from fast-forward to slow motion. Happy days!
It's interesting that The Hath mentioned Sir Cliff as a still going concern, because I perceive him as person whose presence and legacy is rapidly eroding.
The sort of unworldly people who used to listen to Cliff (royalists, tennis fans, etc.) don't seem to form the kind of core audience that they used to - I can't think of anyone nowadays who caters for them.
Yes trip hop does seem to be having a moment again. I was watching some new quality TV series and it had both Portishead and Tricky on the soundtrack. New groups making that sort of sound.
The still-a-thing-or-not status of the Nuum is a moot point. I think there's half-lives and traces and echoes, but there doesn't seem to be a big sound that you can point to as the continuumation. A lot of people seem to be into amapiano, though, and that seems to where that London audience has recohered.
There's still tons of club music being made, surely? But yeah maybe it's dropped off the radar of magazines that general in outlook, as opposed to specialist ones. I assume if you looked at DJ magazine or Resident Advisor, there would be a list choc-a-bloc with stuff.
I am hatching what I call Atemporal Faves, a list of things I loved in 2023 that includes a lot - maybe a preponderance - of things not actually released in 2023. From the year before or a few years before.... old stuff just reissued .... old just rediscovered or stumbled for the first time.
I found - and still find - ‘The Beatles and the Stones’ absolutely baffling. I had been a big HoL fan up to that point: played the Creation album to death, went to see them at the ICA. And then came this song which not only showed that the muse had utterly deserted them, but also announced it in the title and lyrics. Why would they do that?
Yes I also loved The House of Love. It wasn't a great song and above all it seemed undignified, this bid for reflected glory.
In 1990 or thereabouts, on the way to Manchester to interview 808 State, I ran into Alan McGee and along with playing me the Weatherall remix of "Come Together" and revealing that Primal Scream didn't actually play a note on it, he said apropos of seemingly nothing, "don't you think the Beatles are more relevant than ever?".
Which thought had never remotely occurred to me. I hadn't listened to - or even really thought about - the Beatles since around 1979, when I taped the two double-LP comps, the red and the blue, off a friend and played them over and over. During the 1980s the Beatles almost completely dropped away as a reference point for contemporary music makers, so it seems to me anyway, looking back.
The only exception I can think of is Husker Du covering "Ticket to Ride" for a free giveway NME single.
Then along came Stone Roses at decade's end, going about the Beatles. I think that's what House of Love were trying to tap into - a creeping conversatism that would ultimately result in Britpop.
Prior to the Stones Roses bigging up (and implicitly comparing themselves to) the Beatles, the Sixties referencing that happened during the 1980s was about relatively obscure groups. Velvets, Love, failures at that time, the stuff of cult love. Obscure garage punk and psych. Okay there was the Byrds. But nobody referenced the Beatles and the Stones, that would have been too obvious.
That reflexive linkage of “the Beatles and the Stones” is quite curious, as well. As you say, the Beatles were everywhere as an influence in the 90s, because of the Roses and Oasis and all their followers. But no-one in the UK really tried to emulate the Stones. Except for Primal Scream.
Oh, and there was a bit of a vogue for mid-60s psych Stones, with World of Twist covering She’s a Rainbow, and the Soup Dragons doing I’m Free.
I'm going against the grain to say that I think "The Beatles and The Stones" is a great song and captures how I felt listening to them in my room as a teenager.
In fact it is the only HoL song that has made it onto my contemporary playlists.
I know there are songs that may be technically edgier, but I connect with the song.
Sorry!
Really....I laugh about the differences between the UK and US....kids here seem to like metal and rreaallyy bad hip hop....like with a 3 on it. Not close to funky. I'm 51 at least we had our own spin on punk rock and hip hop and other forms of American music...rock n roll blues jazz ..ya know.
But as a whole....goddamn music sucks today..
I'd like to thank johnny lydon or rotten for being a talentless twit ....and forgetting about iggy who he copied except he wore gay men's bondage gear that his ...lover..Malcom..allegedly desired to see him in . Iggy was the punk rock creatir....proof is the song..I got a right..rock n roll is American johnny boy...man up twit. Icky ray soon to shite on ya grave.
How's that serve him Joey RAMONE? JAHAGAHAAA
The clash and Ramones is a cool song.....by the railroad spikes
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