It surprised me immensely, as, I imagine it would a lot of people, to learn that Nirvana did not win “Best New Artist” at the 1992 Grammys [1]. It was “the dude who wrote ‘Walking in Memphis,’” as a lot of people might have referred to him, the epitome of one-hit-wonder, Cleveland-born and New-York-based Marc Cohn. His debut album of the year before had been handled fairly graciously by critics, and his bread and butter, album opener “Walking in Memphis,” had peaked at #13 the previous summer on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Still, Cohn is about as associable with this era, on a cultural level, as leisure suits and black-and-white TV’s. I was only eight when this song reached its height, in 1991. Since then, I’ve cycled through many different phases of music listening — rap, Hootie, grunge, indie rock — but none of them featured Cohn, and really, despite how catchy and curiously original this song is, nobody would be too surprised by this ambivalence toward this early-’90s soft rock gem.
Why would a song of this quality and administrative accomplishment be so greatly just thrown under the bus? I’ve heard the term “dad rock” applied to my favorite band, Wilco, and such a moniker probably isn’t too inconceivably applied to Cohn himself. It’s even tempting to call it “old people music,” sure. It’s not music to which a new concert technique would be invented and propagated, like crowd-surfing was, in grunge. It’s not music that would spawn a widespread shift in the fashion world [2].
The extent to which the grunge explosion really hurt Cohn’s credibility would be exemplified, theoretically, by the sort of goony, frat-boy sector of alt fans likely to make fun of “soft rock,” and, perhaps, liken Cohn to Kenny G, or Bryan Adams, maybe. The aesthetic fabric was just doomed, in other words, ignored for its tame, approachable disposition by rock radio and awkwardly juxtaposed on MTV next to guitar feedback and screaming.
To hear it on satellite radio, though, in 2009 in the grocery store where I was working, didn’t seem accidental. It also seemed like an eye-opening episode of encountering a lost gem, like the further unpacking and imbibing of its stark melancholy, haunting imagery, originality and genuineness, would formulate itself as a black eye on all of us, for not acknowledging this sooner. There’s a reference to a strip club, a nugget of spiritual posturing, and that endless, incessant “pouring rain.” Cohn cannot get the rain out of his psyche — it’s like an incessant gossamer hanging over his psyche and his fledgling ability to assume, mentally, the part of Elvis, and to see the city of Memphis the way the pop culture world idealizes. It’s a song about when everything seems to be falling apart at the stitches, when nothing as it seems, and when we, ourselves, are forced to step out of the dark and infuse the world with some grace, some light, some inspiration of our own, the type of thing that’s sure to leave anybody exhausted and disillusioned. Luckily, we’ve got this pop gem here, rife with the beleaguered, worldly melancholy inherently essential to any great rock and roll.
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[1] Granted, for the Grammys vendetta against grunge, I suppose I should have just looked to their complete indolence to Pearl Jam’s first two albums, and all the songs from them.
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[2] Alarmingly, in the early ’90s, Joan Rivers could be seen in Vanity Fair wearing a flannel shirt. Now, I think we know the unruly parties responsible for this.