LAY OFF NATALIE MERCHANT

Looking at it now, that song's actually not very abstract at all. It's about a famous Spanish bullfighter named Manolete. I maintain that if Oh-OK had written a song about Manolete and it had hip minimalist lyrics Christgau mighta loved it.

Where's Billy Mackenzie when you need him.

"hip minimalist lyrics"--what does this even mean?

Recitations of the alphabet. Which, in fact, Mackenzie did once, so my cri du coeur has a relevance I now realize.

"Homage paid to the victor of immortality/Cloaked in bold tones."

Dude, what's fuckin' minimalist about this? It works in as verse, not as song lyrics.

And combined with Merchant's high-pitched, ethereal voice it was well nigh unbearable.

no, he's saying that isn't minimalist, and that if something equally completely sophomoric and nonsensical and pretentious had, I guess, been written by a CBGB's habitue that Christgau would've loved it. there are loads of negative reviews of just those kinds of things that blow this theory out of the water.

But I doubt Christgau would have defended them anyway. Tom Verlaine wrote some goddamn abstract lyrics, but they didn't use thesaurus verbs like "clothed."

Ah, but he loved Oh-OK (who are actually a pretty decent band with whom to compare early 10,000 Maniacs). I SUSPECT that people could not (and still cannot) tolerate Natalie because of the Romantic connotations of her lyrics. It was so obvious that she was trying to be Lord Byron!

I doubt Christgau's purported aversion to Byron, Shelley, and Keats is to blame for his Maniacs hate.

after all, he liked Kate Bush and Bryan Ferry.

that must be why he hated Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell so much, then, eh? (xpost)

haha "thesaurus verbs"! can I steal this Alfred?

Right, but Kate Bush is goofier maybe? And so doesn't lend herself to these assumptions of pretentiousness.

x-post

um, no one in their right mind would call Kate Bush unpretentious!

If I'm feeling persnickety I could pretend to wince at "Marquee Moon"'s opening line ("I remember how the darkness doubled"); but the twin guitar interplay is so compelling that by the time those lyrics come around I'm in their sway.

With my blessing, Matos.

also no one in their right mind would call Patti Smith "goofy" either

But she is goofy! She's fuckin' daft! We love her because she's full of shit (and hate her for the same reasons).

right but her manner never suggests "goof" even when she's letting her hair down proverbially speaking. she's a visionary on a vision quest. (note: this is an attempt to parse her persona and is not an actual judgement on the author's part.)

"SUDDENLY JOHNNY GETS A FEELING HE'S BEEN SURROUNDED BY...HORSES! HORSES! HORSES!"

Right, Patti Smith worked because she was sort of deadly serious.

10,000 maniacs couldn't hold oh-ok's jock on their BEST day

patti smith was pretty goofy when i saw her in concert a couple years back but it was momentary, she went into season of the witch mode (ie. why people cared) and still pulls it off

stipe all over this thread

Sounds kinda sticky.

Athens vs. upstate!

Natalie = neither goofy nor deadly serious. Ergo, objectionable.

haha come on dude! that formula is stretching it BIG TIME

I was goofing.

not to mention that early Natalie (hell late Natalie) was deadly seriousness on toast (= much of her appeal)

OK, got it Tim.

She was one of the wonders of God's creations.

and natalie was like this autistic dowdy catholic girl who somehow landed herself a band.

Nice thread -- particularly great to see Nitsuh repping for the 'acs. Tried hard to get a promo of the best-of to write about for Pitchfork, maybe to kick-off a reappraisal, but Nitsuh is clearly the writer for the job.

some real good audio here -- scroll down to the "10,000 maniacs with natalie merchant" part. the 1990 hope chest peel session (w/ john lombardo in tow) is LOVELY.

the more i listen to this stuff, the more i miss how bloody good 10km used to be, even if just for three or four years.

somewhere upthread i disagree with something someone said, but i forgot what it is and i can't even remember if i like natalie merchant or not.

i do like one song off that natalie merchant solo album, however. the name of it escapes me. the song and the album, both.

this is part real forgetfulness, part pretend forgetfulness.

You were saying something negative about the Hope Chest anthology CD, but you actually had not heard this collection when you made the comment.

; )

The song _Wonder_ was about someone NM saw in a documentary that was deformed (from thalidomide IIRC) but refused to let it interfere with her life.

haha a thalidomide baby! and you guys thought she was just bein' uppity.

The lyric to "What's the Matter Here?" -- you know, that song about child abuse -- drives me absolutely insane. Sure, it's only one line that gets my goat, but what a line: "Threats like: 'If you don't mind I will beat on your behind, slap you, slap you silly."

Yes, really. Because we all know that's how a mother who beats her child will speak to him: "'Cuse me, you don't mind if I beat on your behind, do you? Be a dear. Because I really need to have this line have an internal rhyme."

It's actually so bad it's good. I used to walk around picking fights in bars with that line.

that line is a wonderful, wonderful thing, JBR

thanks, m-w d!

Dude, the whole thing that's so great about her lyrics -- especially the early ones -- is that they're so collegiate creative-writing assignments; if I remember correctly, "Tension" was the first song she and Lombardo wrote, and they lyrics were in actual fact from an intro creative-writing class Natalie was taking. Memories spawned by looking through your grandparents' old things: is there anything more college-sophomore lit? Hence my comment about current-day "women's lit" up above, and same goes for the Catholic working-class thing that runs through so much of her stuff, this constant excavation of what the mid-century experience of that might have been like, as with the (fucking AWESOME, seriously) "Maddox Table," which is all about Union immigrant furniture-workers (the video was all cut-together colorized tourism and factory footage of Jamestown), or "My Mother the War." (Suddenly I'd be curious to hear what ILX Mary, who I think has some upstate-NY working-class Catholic roots, would think of some of this stuff.) Anyway: I still find that lyric approach pretty charming through most of the early stuff, and I think she's actually quite good at it; I can't imagine many college girls writing better songs about multiple personality disorder than "Katrina's Fair," I like her enunciation (which is at least interesting and a decent signature and AS IF BELOVED MARK E. SMITH ENUNCIATES LIKE A HUMAN), and "Death of Manolete" makes perfect sense and has loads of great details in it, enough that I can remember plenty of them even apart from my teenage Maniacs fandom -- "there were women holding rosaries ... teenage girls in soft white dresses, standing silent, peace-respecting." (Yeah, there's something way too on-the-nose about "bred for one purpose only / to die in man's sport," but it's totally outweighed by her chirping cadence on the "neck neck, hook, poles of wood / the picadors stood eyes ablaze" part, and still, I mean, c'mon, why do you people want to STOP people from writing cool songs about the deaths of toreadors? Seriously. If she'd written lots of boring songs about dating people -- which NB I find it hard to imagine she was doing a lot of back then, unless they were like 35-year-old creepy academics -- then you'd have nothing more to make fun of than the enunciation, so CREDIT FOR TRYING. How cutely and beautifully and period-piece early-80s collegiate is it that not one but TWO songs on Hope Chest had lyrics adapted from Wilfred Owen WWI poems?) Anyway again: the lyrics on The Wishing Chair are like massively not issue-type things, which may have been kind of a "first real album" backoff and may have been because of the weird upstate history-rock the band suddenly got into, and maybe that's a better place to see how Natalie's lit approach to writing lyrics could create some plain just good lines, e.g. just spend some time unpacking the twists on "the man who's left to divvy up time is a miser / he's got a silver coin, only let's it shine / for hours, while you're sleeping away," from "Back o' the Moon," which in terms of character-creation and period-history-creation is just plain the most nicely sophisticated moon-reference I can think of in a pop song. It's on In My Tribe where the issue-per-song thing starts to become a bit much, but it's still interesting there, if you ask kinda-biased me (and c'mon, don't get all snobby toward trad writing, there's some great stuff in "Verdi Cries," if not in, say, "Gun Shy," and the whole Verdi-through-the-wall thing is so nice that I decided at some point it must be lifted from a short story, maybe A.S. Byatt, but so far as I can tell it's not). And then basically with Blind Man's Zoo it's like GEEZ, okay, one-issue-per-song, yes, these songs are actually alright but take a step back, you've done alcoholism and illiteracy and now teen pregnancy and colonialism and Vietnam vets, lay back a little. I mean, like, "Hateful Hate" -- the best way to reconcile this kind of thing is to think of someone like Morrissey, where his moments of total self-parody ridiculousness are maybe kind of the charm, where laughing at his idiosyncrasies is like part and parcel of loving and enjoying them.

Re: Rob Buck's guitar playing, I dunno about bum notes on Unplugged, which I've never heard, but his squealy sustain tone on the early stuff is just terrific, I think, and his superfast scale-playing solos on a lot of songs ("Death of Manolete," even) is pretty terrific. Basically it occurs to me that he was always kind of ahead of the curve on guitar sounds and tended to always sound great doing it, from those new-wave-isms to something like "Don't Talk," with those big sweeps of guitar -- I said earlier that "Maddox Table" puts Marr to shame, which would make "Don't Talk" something like their "How Soon is Now." (And again, the fucking guitar playing on "Maddox Table" -- COME ON, that spindly shit is TIGHT, let's not even get into it.) Beyond which I guess he kinda blanded out into blah, which is fine, though it was funny to hear little touches of his old high-up on the Gibson neck new-wave stuff come through later, like at the end of the solo on "What's the Matter Here."

GIANT post is mostly just cause it's late at night and I'm typing rapidly as a break from deep-cleaning my apartment, but mostly because yes, it's true, this was maybe the first band I was seriously obsessed with, so even with the stuff I don't think is so great anymore I can still very vividly remember how one might have appreciated it at the time.

Also interestingly I think "Don't Talk" is like half-secretly and half totally non-secretly this huge 80s pop-radio ballad thing, and really great and sophisticated for it; I could really imagine it having been some sort of minor smash for some Alannah Myles type figure. And not just for the big smooth sound, through that's certainly part of it -- what's more interesting is how the whole alcoholism lyric kinda treads this line between being a standard 80s-style relationship-drama and being one of her issue-pieces, so it sits in this really interesting space. The illiterate dude who comes a little down the line sounds like a construct, you know, someone singing About Something (this is the whole problem that developed, yeah), but "Don't Talk" sounds more like a song she could be singing in conventional pop fashion.

(Also yes I'm ashamed of myself; there was that thread for like "what album would you write about in a 33 1/3 book," and I went on about Max Tundra but the truth is that YES, I might sadly be most qualified to do In My Tribe.)

so what you're saying then is "the reason the lyrics are great is that they're totally fucking awful!" not an argument I'd make, but I have to say it's got moxie.

You're making the assumption that there's something wrong with collegiate creative-writing assignments! They're just kind of a genre, a very lovable genre. They're like punk, man. Or really more like listening to lo-fi indie outfits who don't know a lot about playing their instruments yet, but the spirit is there and the adorably overabundant enthusiasm about their ideas is kind of charming, kind of like a whole style of its own. Which is also ultra-collegiate, and I suppose I haven't done much of either since I got a real job.

I feel a need to note that I'm half-kidding about inept indie bands.

WHAT A FREAKING GREAT POST (THE LONG ONE ABOVE), NABISCO. U R THE MAN.

Not sure how to reconcile this ...

"so what you're saying then is 'the reason the lyrics are great is that they're totally fucking awful!'"

... with these quotes from the post in question:

"I still find that lyric approach pretty charming through most of the early stuff, and I think she's actually quite good at it; I can't imagine many college girls writing better songs about multiple personality disorder than 'Katrina's Fair,'"

"'Death of Manolete' makes perfect sense and has loads of great details in it. enough that I can remember plenty of them even apart from my teenage Maniacs fandom -- 'there were women holding rosaries ... teenage girls in soft white dresses, standing silent, peace-respecting.'"

"How cutely and beautifully and period-piece early-80s collegiate is it"

"'Back o' the Moon,' which in terms of character-creation and period-history-creation is just plain the most nicely sophisticated moon-reference I can think of in a pop song"