Somehow, on this evening, I’m getting one of those diamond-in-the-rough feelings of squalid freedom, in my everyday life. For this occasion, as it were, the Stone Temple Pilots song “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” popped into my head, as is perhaps appropriate: “I’m not myself / But I’m not dead and I’m not for sale”.
This song comes from Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop (1996), the band’s third album, and the catalyst of enough critical spite to warrant two separate “critical response” sections on its Wikipedia page. Yes, folks, the music intelligentsia was so jealous of Weiland and crew upon this album’s release, an album which features, not to the least results, “Lady Picture Show”; a celestially gratifying song about a woman who got gang raped complete with a spectactular guitar solo, that they issued a herd of unconscionably low ratings thereto, the type of qualitative statures obviously not applicable to such a great, eternally playable record.
It kind of gets you thinking though: maybe we don’t give commercially successful artists enough credit. According to Everett True’s Nirvana biography, that is, a lot of people completely stopped liking Kurt Cobain when his band hit it big, people who had formerly been his friends in indie-friendly places like Olympia. (Granted, Cobain was a huge a**hole to Axl Rose and Eddie Vedder, for reasons along the same lines, so perhaps it’s poetic justice, in a way.)
Along these lines, I just last night noticed a second instance of a mainstream artist producing material that would be, essentially, copied by somebody in the indie sphere. Now, of course, this is certainly not to say that the reverse hasn’t happened umpteen times, as Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo were obviously very original and influential musical phenomena, of themselves. Anyway, the exact heist I uncovered last night was, of all things, related to an Ace of Base lyric, “Life is demanding / Without understanding”; which was in turn manifested by the albeit mighty Sebadoh in what I still consider their greatest song, “Flame”: “It’s a world that demands / And doesn’t stop to understand”.
The other case of this indie lifting mainstream I’ve observed in my life is probably one I’ve discussed on this blog before: Califone perfectly transcribing an Oasis riff from “She is Love” in their, again, fantastic and gorgeous “Sunday Noises.” And I mean, sheesh, “She is Love” is from Heathen Chemistry, which, to hear it from the vaunted “critics,” is to be treated like radioactive waste, more or less. Does it matter if one band rips off a component of another song like this? Don’t ask me… ask your iTunes “Total Plays.”
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