I have been fairly pleased, today, to encounter this year’s selections for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees. One thing they all have in common is that they’re all beholden to an array of songs which are very near and dear to us — songs people lean on on a consistent basis, on an emotional level, and songs that are continually pumped in public places like bars.
Now, unfortunately, there’s not a “hipster pick” hall of fame, an entity almost sure to attact, for one, Joy Division. This is a band that, while being the favorites of the “culturally upwardly mobile,” as I’d like to tab them, has never really fomented up what I saw as a wealth of artistic quality. And now I’ve got a legitimate knock against them. Here’s… Johnny!
All jokes aside, I think that one thing working against JD is that their two most famous songs are pretty much nothing like each other. It’s “Love Will Tear Us apart” and some other song that was like a cringe-worthy attempt at white-boy funk (contrasted to the obvious lack of funky disposition on the part of the aforementioned). Let’s think of another two-hit wonder in history: [1] Vertical Horizon. Sh**, this band’s two most famous songs, “Everything You Want” and “You’re a God”; are practically the exact same song.
I for one happen to like Vertical Horizon better than Joy Division, which I anticipate possibly being an unpopular opinion online, especially since people who go online to read about music are the only people who have heard of Joy Division in the first place. Well, “You’re a God” happens to be the best break-up song in history [2].
This is important because it makes VH a better band than JD but it also lends itself toward my argument: that it’s important for bands to have at least two songs which are very similar to each other. The best song I can think of off the top of my head is “Penny Lane” by the Beatles, and its mother album, Magical Mystery Tour, is just crawling with similarly juicy, deliberate pop songs (“Your Mother Should Know”; “Hello, Goodbye”; “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”; “All You Need is Love”). Two songs on Modest Mouse’s album, which was kind of their artistic breakthrough, if not commercial, The Lonesome Crowded West, are pretty much the exact same tune: “Heart Cooks Brain” and “Out of Gas.” I think they have the exact same tempo and chord progression, actually. Then, of course, most famously, the band delivered the invincible lead single “Float on” from Good News for People Who Love Bad News, to then follow it up with “Ocean Breathes Salty”; a song so phenomenologically similar to “Float on” that the two would probably share the same UPC, were they two adjacent items on a grocery shelf.
But this gives you a sense of the band’s jamming. Can a rock band write a song without jamming? Yeah, that would be like Nirvana: and then the autocratic singer would end up doing a bunch of heroin and killing himself. I’m then reminded of Wolf Parade, a band with two primary, contributing songwriters, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, with not only voices but general songwriting modi operandi so similar that it’s almost eerie [3]. Pearl Jam is another example of a band whose songs by variant songwriters I might as well assimilate, for their likeness in energy and apparent influence genus.
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[1] Of course, calling the latter JD song a “hit” would be rather licentious but I’m doing it to prove a point.
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[2] “Free Fallin’” and “Ms. Jackson”; for their accounts, are disqualified for being recited in third person.
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[3] Of course, well all remember the classic Missy line about Timbaland: “We so tight that you get our styles tangled”.
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