A good way to tell if a radio rock song is of debased, empty artistic inspiration, sometimes, is an examination of the lyrics with specific attention to a contingent quest for a really regular sort of victory or superiority. I mean, as in the case of Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bit**”; do we really need a song reasserting the pleasure aspect here? It should be understood already that what the singer is claiming to do here beats watching paint dry or scrolling on Facebook. The intrinsic value in the song’s semantics bespeaks less purpose, in other words, in the maneuver of pointing out its value lyrically.
In a similar vein, I would point to the Tom Petty binary of “I Won’t Back down” and “Free Fallin’.” In “I Won’t Back down”; you have pretty much a Carl Winslow blueprint, a verbatim transcript of a man strives to be, in terms of convention. It doesn’t warrant commentary in music, and, not coincidentally, “Free Fallin’”; a tune which captures a songwriter who’s more or less miring in a state of misery, is the enterprise covered by John Mayer, to high profile, played by friends more often around bonfires, and transmitted to the karaoke realm, with more frequency. I happen to have sung “Free Fallin’” on karaoke before, as it turns out.
Further, for proof that sadness is a necessary component of good rock ’n roll, we need only look to Chuck Berry’s invincible catalogue, and “Oh Babydoll”; in particular, arguably his best tune. You won’t find a better guitar/bass/drums anthem than this if you look the wide world over and it’s the very EPITOME of sadness: handling the topic of all the magic and freedom of summer break ending and giving way to the doldrums and emotional oppression of the school year. It was puerile and foolish, sure, until the godfather of rock ’n roll made it epic and classic. Now the vehicle has wheels and that summer break will stand as invincible, forever, in its own ironic way, by way of the music. Art fills voids in everyday lives — it’s an antidote to the pain and suffering inevitable in this life we’re living on this planet.
Finally, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite figures, as a way of illustrating the value and effervescence in a generall “sadness” element populating the rock music we spotlight and enjoy as people. This figure is Kevin Cadogan, the original guitarist in late-’90s alt-rock juggernaut Third Eye Blind. This was and still is a band which features an extraverted, highly talented and enigmatic vocalist, Stephan Jenkins, who actually originally started out as a rapper, in the industry, in Puck & Natty, and often employs a rapping technique is the group’s flagship hit single, “Semi-Charmed Life.” Without question, it’s a singular thing he brought to this track, something of which most frontment just aren’t capable. He also happens to be a genius out of the studio, having graduated valedictorian from Cal Berkeley (to then ironically become what he himself pegs as a “starving wannabe rapper,” amusiningly enough).
“Semi-Charmed Life” was a big hit in the summer of 1997, and I can still envision being at Camp Eberhart that summer, as a 13-year-old kid, and having the song just SEEM like a momentous occasion, me and this random dude I didn’t even know standing around and humming along to it, as it emanated from an iconic canoe or rowboat, about 150 feet or so from shore in Corey Lake in Southern Michigan.
So what is it that Cadogan brought to the band? In this capacity, things become more subtle, and hard to define. As it happens, I don’t even enjoy anything the band has done without him in the lineup, following his firing in 2000, on the tour in support of their second album, Blue. Inevitably, anyway, summer always dissipates in favor of winter, and I remember the single “How’s it Going to Be” surfacing later in the year, to soundtrack the colder weather, and it just had the perfect vibe, I thought, for capturing that cafe “cool” to accompany the sort of well-rounded, emotionally complete music which always makes things seem like a zeitgeist, which they strangely did around this time, with The Verve and the movie Good Will Hunting helping to richen the general arts landscape.
And Cadogan just LOOKED so cool, on one of the late-night shows playing that riff to “How’s it Going to Be”; no expression on his smooth, focused face, body rocking back and forth as his nimble fingers navigate the run and modify it effortlessly by adding a half-step trill toward the end. It depends how much credence you give to the guitar riffs he wrote, like the one to open the indefatigable “God of Wine”; the closeur on their self-titled debut album, and, again, the very picture of hopeless desolation and the sense of urgency that comes from nothing working out in one’s life. It’s the antithesis of empty braggery, in other words. Making things even more compelling, here, and significant, in my opinion, is the way Cadogan was right-off-the-bat a victim of Jenkins’ greed, in the way of the latter’s establishment of a private corporation, in which he’d embezzle all the band’s funding [1]. The sociological position of blacks around this time, certainly, lends itself to the idea of the oppressed being the most vital creative artists, an element then present Cadogan’s position here as a sort of sacrifical lamb, something more conducive to artistic greatness than might be admitted by our general, corporately-endorsed rubrics of what defines great rock music in this country.
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https://www.antimusic.com/news/2000/june/item29.shtml.
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