Everything scares me.
Small talk? Yup.
The thought I will some day look back at the end of my life and have regrets? Dreadful.
Taking risks in order to avoid having regrets? Terrifying.
When I was in high school I read every Rolling Stone article about every band I could. Nothing intimidated me quite like one yellow banana.
That banana being the iconic cover image of The Velvet Underground and Nico’s self titled album, designed by Andy Warhol.
Everything I read made the Velvet Underground sound like it was a band that was so cool, so aloof, so possibly dangerous that you couldn’t even listen to their music without them scoffing at you.
“Silly pre-teen, what do you know about nodding off between sets?” – Lou Reed maybe?
Story after story made me more and more uncomfortable with approaching their music.
- They played a high school prom and did a full rendition of their 7 minute opus “Heroin”
- They were Andy Warhol’s “house band” at the Warehouse – a building that contained a universe, located a universe away from Milwaukee, WI
- Lou Reed was scary in interviews
- How only a thousand people bought their debut album but everyone who did started a band (is this a cult?)
- How I thought the entire band was on heroin and wrote songs about waiting for their drug dealer
It was all very intimidating to a tween already scared of everything.
So I stayed away.
Subconsciously I just put off listening to them. Judging by their name, press pictures filled with sunglasses (terrifying!), and all these articles I was reading, I was sure they were a heavy, impenetrably dark rock band and “Sweet Jane” was simply a pop fluke meant to lure in disaffected youth.
When I finally listened I found some of the most beautiful pop rock music I’ve ever heard.
I was angry.
I was Arsenio Hall tasting cheese angry.
He didn’t know the cheese was that good. NO ONE TOLD HIM the cheese was so good.
Now, the difference is that people did tell me about how good The Velvet Undergroudn was.
Far from the heavy metal – or whatever I thought they were, maybe a Deep Purple analog? – I found their instrumentation on songs like “Sunday Morning” to be almost flowery.
I found sad, mournful lyrics about how the sun doesn’t make everyone happy (“Who Loves The Sun?”). I found soft beautiful organ work and backing vocals that belied the danger of the “Femme Fatale”.
I found songs written and arranged so well they seemed effortless, as if the band had hundreds of them, just waiting to stumble forth from their fingertips, hence the meme about how everyone who bought their first album started a band: The Velvet Underground made it look easy.
Sure, there’s jarring riffs like “Venus in Furs”, or pre-Punk straightforward Rockness on “Waiting for the Man” but the sheer diversity of their music meant these songs were surrounded by soft, pretty popcentric compositions.
That first album seems impossible now.
How can anyone put together such great music of seemingly disparate genres while maintaining an overall coherent “sound”?
It was one of those rare moments in life where not only is something better than you expected, it’s the complete opposite in every positive way.
Like turning over a rock and finding a rainbow instead of slugs.
It’s one of those moments that makes everything else seem not just possible, but probable.
After listening to Velvet Underground & Nico I was sure the world was made up of the beauty of sunsets and the deep, secret meanings that poetry said it was.
And then of course, life happens and you realize you have to fight for every moment of beauty you can get your hands on.
Speaking of Fighting
I remember seeing a kid in middle school wearing a T-shirt that said “Wu Tang Clan” and had pictures of all 9 members in a circle around the logo.
I laughed at him – to myself – because the name sounded silly.
I was wrong. I was the one who was stupid.
Little did I know that Wu-Tang Clan was nothing to fuck with.
By the time I came back around to them in High School I had a different approach. Watching a clip from “C.R.E.A.M.” or “Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthing to F’ With”, it’s easy to see why one might be intimidated.
Wu-Tang – however much they are “for the children” – are trying to intimidate you.
So I feared them, again, as I did with Velvet Underground, thinking their music was HARDCORE, the hip hop equivalent of my imagined Velvet Underground sound: heavy, angry, impenetrable.
But then, one of many friendless high school nights spent at The Exclusive Company (my only friend), I came upon the Wu-Tang Clan section. Wanting to buy Wu-Tang Forever because I was more familiar with it, but finding it not in stock, I (how dare I write this) “settled” for Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the groups new-school defining, groundbreaking debut album.
When I got home and actually listened to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)?
I heard the funkiest, bounciest hip hop I had ever heard (“Shame on a Nigga”), the densest, most complex lyrics (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin’.”), and a level of hype and excitement I didn’t know was possible (“Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthing ta F’ Wit”). Not to mention they could get deep when the music called for it (“Can It Be All So Simple”, “C.R.E.A.M.”, “Tearz”).
Their shit was musical.
The way their bass lines bounced in and out of the drums, the way each rapper had his own flow, own voice, and even had their own unique mix on their vocal tracks, making sure every 2 bars of every song brought in some new exciting sound or change.
It didn’t matter that the mix of the album would be considered sonically “muddy” or “raw”.
That was the point.
Underneath the image of a New York City crew, raised on the streets, running around forming clans and toting automatic weapons in MPVs, Wu-Tang created one of the most complexly beautiful set of songs anyone has created since the birth of Rock n’ Roll.
Also, being able to be a person who had never heard of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and I mean be completely oblivious, is something I am very envious of 13-year old Jordan for.
Can you imagine a world where you stumble upon what will become one of your favorite albums at a records store? That experience almost doesn’t exist anymore.
What Do These Two Completely Different Group Of Artists Have in Common?
Much more importantly than my fear of them, these two New York groups should be there to remind us that at the end of the day, music is music.
It’s beautiful.
At its best it provides relief from the exact emotions it expresses.
Sad songs relieve us of our sadness by letting us feel our way through it. Aggressive songs help us get out our aggression without taking it out on the world around us. Happy songs, well, no one’s protesting happy songs, except goths and also everyone when Pharell’s “Happy” was on the radio 24/7.
It may seem childish now (because it was) but there was an entire movement led by Tipper Gore that set out to tell parents and their children that the music they were listening to was destroying their lives.
This was all I heard about growing up. The world I grew up in was replete with burning records, cancelling gangster rap, and Uncle Luke becoming a beacon of free speech rights. It was confusing to a child to say the least.
Watching the clip above makes it almost seem like there just wasn’t enough shit to worry about in the world at the end of the 20th century. (Hint, there was).
Also, leave it to Tipper Gore to make “not a woman but a whore I can taste the hate/ well now I’m killing you/ watch your face turning blue” sound even worse than it sounds being sung.
The only thing that lyric is guilty of is being not a very good lyric.
Good music is always more musical than you (and I mean, I) have expected. It’s never something to chastise someone for listening to, it’s not there for you to define yourself by not listening to it (as teenage Jordan would now be very upset with grown-up Jordan singing along to “I Want It That Way” at bar close). It’s there only to be enjoyed by the people who find it enjoyable.
So go ahead, listen to that indie band you think is too hipster for you, listen to that country song you think is too corny for you, listen to that house music that you have no business liking as much as you do.
Life is too short and difficult to miss out on any of its beauty.
As John Lennon said, “whatever gets you through the night including all the heroin I do”.