Rating My Life Away: Van Halen, STP and Bob Dylan's Street Legal
In 1994, Chuck Klosterman wrote an insightful and very funny piece for Spin entitled "Give Me Centrism of Give Me Death!" where he argued:
If you are the kind of person who talks about music too much, there are two words that undoubtedly play an integral role in your workaday lexicon: "overrated" and "underrated." This is because those two sentiments pop up in 90 percent of all musical discussions...
I am not interested in overrated and underrated bands.
It's too easy, and all it means is that somebody else was wrong. I'm obsessed with bands that are rated as accurately as possible-in other words, nobody thinks they're better than they are, and nobody thinks they're worse. They have the acceptable level of popularity, they have attained the critical acclaim their artistry merits, and no one is confused about their cultural significance."
He then goes on to list the 10 most accurately rated bands, number one being Van Halen. It's worth reading; Chuck's definitely got a point, and he definitely has my number. I'm guilty of loving the underrated and dismissing the overrated, always arguing for some album or film or book to be given more attention. Musically, I frequently find myself championing some maligned period of an otherwise highly rated artist's career: Michael Jackson in the 90s, post-Smiths' Morrissey, Stone Temple Pilots (in any period), preferring Use Your Illusion to Appetite, you get the idea.
Why? What draws a person to this material?
Certainly it's a comfortable place, a more-often-than-not elitist place, ripe with all the identity markers usually filed under "taste". Perhaps I just like taking the hard cases, to see if I can argue them. But no one likes a contrarian, and anyhow, I'm not sure that explains why I find myself spending hours sorting through hundreds of Elvis' movie soundtrack songs in the hopes of finding one diamond in the rough. If it were solely an attempt to feel special (justified), I'm not sure it would be such an enduring hobby. Certainly not such a private one. Plus, I still love this stuff once it finally gets the acclaim they deserve, e.g STP.
I almost shudder to say so, but perhaps there is something vaguely religious/spiritual about these Nazareth phases of an artist's work. Something good coming from the least expected place, and the real hope that comes from discovering that one redeeming element of a great artist's worst output, making it all the more precious. Less polished (at first glance) equals more loveable etc. These sort of songs usually have a better chance of catching you unawares and breaking through your emotional and aesthetic defenses, and letting you really connect to the material. Or perhaps it's just identifying with someone being their own worst enemy, of working against themselves and losing that battle, unable to cover their tracks completely. Alex Chilton being a prime example. Or maybe it's just the extreme case revealing what's true more generally (along those lines, keep your eyes peeled for our Grace In Addiction: What The Church Can Learn From Alcoholics Anonymous - available next week). I'm not sure exactly.
All this brings me to Bob Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal. It's my favorite record of his. I would never call it his best, but it is definitely the one I find myself listening to the most (a close second being Planet Waves). The 'big band' production was panned at the time, and the tour behind it was the one where his born-again period was, um, birthed. So the critics hated it. But the sound has aged remarkably well, and as much as I wish it weren't the case, the songwriting is considerably more inspired than on the Christian records which immediately followed (discounting the unreleased material). "Changing Of The Guards", "True Love Tends To Forget", "Senor" and "Is Your Love In Vain?" are all top-drawer Dylan, and contain plenty of rumblings of what was about to go down. The only dud, IMHO, was "New Pony" but even that one had some great lyrics - the most explicit references to his change of heart... Street Legal also begins Dylan's criminally underrated late 70s-early 80s period. The song "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" in particular should have been a classic and sort of illustrates what I'm trying to say about this rating talk. A Nazareth of a song (no, not that Nazareth), it describes the dark night of the soul in a distinctly theology-of-the-cross kind of way. A few lines:
The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure,
To live it you have to explode.
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed,
Sacrifice was the code of the road.
So what do you like that's underrated and why?
P.S. Dangerous Territory: What's the most underrated moment of the Gospels? Jesus cursing the fig tree? The opening of Matthew? Or what's most underrated parable? Epistle?
I am not interested in overrated and underrated bands.
It's too easy, and all it means is that somebody else was wrong. I'm obsessed with bands that are rated as accurately as possible-in other words, nobody thinks they're better than they are, and nobody thinks they're worse. They have the acceptable level of popularity, they have attained the critical acclaim their artistry merits, and no one is confused about their cultural significance."
He then goes on to list the 10 most accurately rated bands, number one being Van Halen. It's worth reading; Chuck's definitely got a point, and he definitely has my number. I'm guilty of loving the underrated and dismissing the overrated, always arguing for some album or film or book to be given more attention. Musically, I frequently find myself championing some maligned period of an otherwise highly rated artist's career: Michael Jackson in the 90s, post-Smiths' Morrissey, Stone Temple Pilots (in any period), preferring Use Your Illusion to Appetite, you get the idea.
Why? What draws a person to this material?
Certainly it's a comfortable place, a more-often-than-not elitist place, ripe with all the identity markers usually filed under "taste". Perhaps I just like taking the hard cases, to see if I can argue them. But no one likes a contrarian, and anyhow, I'm not sure that explains why I find myself spending hours sorting through hundreds of Elvis' movie soundtrack songs in the hopes of finding one diamond in the rough. If it were solely an attempt to feel special (justified), I'm not sure it would be such an enduring hobby. Certainly not such a private one. Plus, I still love this stuff once it finally gets the acclaim they deserve, e.g STP. I almost shudder to say so, but perhaps there is something vaguely religious/spiritual about these Nazareth phases of an artist's work. Something good coming from the least expected place, and the real hope that comes from discovering that one redeeming element of a great artist's worst output, making it all the more precious. Less polished (at first glance) equals more loveable etc. These sort of songs usually have a better chance of catching you unawares and breaking through your emotional and aesthetic defenses, and letting you really connect to the material. Or perhaps it's just identifying with someone being their own worst enemy, of working against themselves and losing that battle, unable to cover their tracks completely. Alex Chilton being a prime example. Or maybe it's just the extreme case revealing what's true more generally (along those lines, keep your eyes peeled for our Grace In Addiction: What The Church Can Learn From Alcoholics Anonymous - available next week). I'm not sure exactly.
The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure,
To live it you have to explode.
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed,
Sacrifice was the code of the road.
I fought with my twin, that enemy within,
’Til both of us fell by the way.
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way.
Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes,
The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean.
It felt outa place, my foot in his face,
But he should-a stayed where his money was green.
I bit into the root of forbidden fruit
With the juice running down my leg.
Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss
And who always was too proud to beg.
There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars.
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise,
Remind me to show you the scars.
’Til both of us fell by the way.
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way.
Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes,
The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean.
It felt outa place, my foot in his face,
But he should-a stayed where his money was green.
I bit into the root of forbidden fruit
With the juice running down my leg.
Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss
And who always was too proud to beg.
There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars.
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise,
Remind me to show you the scars.
There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived.
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?
So what do you like that's underrated and why?
P.S. Dangerous Territory: What's the most underrated moment of the Gospels? Jesus cursing the fig tree? The opening of Matthew? Or what's most underrated parable? Epistle?
posted by DZ at
12:46 AM
5 Comments:
Totally right that "Godzilla" is a great song and that BOC's more famous song is pretty lame.
I only have a little bit of a rooting for the underdog/overlooked stuff. By the mid-1990s I loathed Disney and was rooting for Pixar to assimilate or annihilate Mouse House. I also wanted Studio Ghibli's films to get more Western circulation. Ironically through Michael Eisner's management style BOTH things came to pass. Fortunately now that I've gotten what I wanted I'm still pretty happy! No one would reasonably be able to accuse Hayao Miyazaki or Pixar of being over-rated. They're pretty much exactly where they are for reasons nobody would dispute.
In classical music my favorite composers tend to be considered second tier people in their period. Most people pick Beethoven or Mozart over Haydn yet Haydn is my favorite of the three Classic era giants. He had to invent and solidify the forms his two pupils could take for granted and innovate.
While I love Stravinsky my favorite 20th century composers are Hindemith, Bartok, and Shostakovich, almost universally considered second-tier by musicologists who put Webern, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg at the top of the heap for 20th century modernists.
In Baroque music my favorites are J. S. Bach (the most accurately rated composer in the entire canon of Western music) and Heinrich Schutz (anyone who sets all of Ps 119 to music for double chorus is awesome on principle!).
I've spent so much time getting into classical stuff over the last fifteen years that non-classical music only catches my attention if there's 1) a new Portishead album or 2) there's another posthumous Johnny Cash release.
Heh, and I'm one of those snobs who thinks that Handel's Messiah is overrated. I also like Blind Willie Johnson better than Robert Johnson even though "objectively" all blues historians would say Robert is more important.
David, "new pony" isn't that bad. Isn't the New Pony his new-found Christian faith, the changed guard? We know who Senor is (abba, not the band).
I've always been as contrarion in my musical tastes as was seemingly possible, justifying it along the grounds that great art will never appeal to the masses. It's a high-school-ish argument, and calling the stuff I like "great art" requires a well developed sense of irony, but, in my favor, there was a documentary made about Phish in the early 2000s called "Bittersweet Motel", which makes my (juvenile) point for me brilliantly. Can so many people be so obviously wrong? Yes. Watch that flick and see. You've never seen so many people chasing a wind-egg!
A wind-egg?
Dave, this overrated/underrated thing is really big in sports as well. In fact, in sports, there is this phenomenon when a player or team becomes recognized as underrated, but then everyone agrees and starts talking about them being "underrated" all the time, and suddenly they become overrated. Strange thing! I'm sure you can think of musical artists to whom the same principle applies.
Most underrated part of Matthew? 27:52-53, or, as one of my profs likes to call it, "the Thriller passage."
Colton: Ole Miss, Arkansas and pretty any mid-tier BSC team are good examples
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