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The Dozens (+ Julianne Shepherd)

12) "Holding Out For A Hero," Frou-Frou (Shrek OST)
11) "Roller Girl," The Little Rabbits. The same way Japan has the story of the 47 ronin, and remakes it over and over; France has Serge Gainsbourg songs. It's frightening to hear a mod try to sound louche, but the instruments make all the right choices. Stupid.
10) "Hallelujah," Rufus Wainwright.
9) "Going To Marrakesh," The Extra Glenns. Proof that you can have a good song with th line "our love is like Jesus."
8) "B.O.B.," Outkast. In one invented word, laying bare how immoderately the considerable chatter about "American exceptionalism" in the This Is Pop anthology believes in countries but doesn't think much about social class: inslumnational.

7) "Girl from Ipanema," vocals by Astrud Gilberto. The guy who wrote the original words also wrote the Brazilian New Wave film Black Orpheus. It's all about looking and looking back and looking black, or dark. The song, I mean.
6) "Volcano Girls," Veruca Salt. The coulda-been perfect song. If I could go back in time, I would grab Bob Rock the day he mixed this, and beg him to pot down the hi-hat and ride. Sweet Jesus.
5) Carrie Brownstein writes movingly in This Is Pop: It is hard not to be reduced to the category of "women in rock." I didn't feel like I could be rock'n'roll. Instead, we were women imitating and participating in rock'n'roll, something we didn't create.
4) "Roller Girl," Anna Karina. And yet somehow, Karina, the actress, is rock'n'roll absolutely, for a couple minutes. In this original version, the way Gainsbourg ripped off "Get Off Of My Cloud"" is obvious, except it's better. That's how Gudrun Ensslin looks in snapshots from 68-69; not a Baader Meinhoff terrorist, but a Rolling Stones terrorist. Begging the question: do you have to play rock to be rock'n'roll?
3) "Terminal Grain," The Extra Glenns. "It was so easy and it was so hard, you were clutching your copy of Kierkgaard: Repetition, repetition," and then the guitar repeats an 8-note figure several times, exactly, as if locked up in fear. Wouldn't you know it, the piano trembles. That it happens at an Iowa train station makes it all okay. No, not okay.
2) "En el Muelle de San Blas," Mana
1) "Hallelujah," Jeff Buckley. Heard by me, as best I know, for the first time just this week, under the season's last scene on The O.C. This is the ideal situation to hear any song.

Click on the link immediately below to read Julianne Shepherd's freestyling limnation of "I Love Your Smile," by Shanice. Alas, we have no pix of her terpsichore.

SHANICE’S “I LOVE YOUR SMILE”: MY TIME AS A DEMOGRAPHIC.

I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place I will forever refer to as a “cultural island.” In 1992, I was part of a performing dance troupe, with many other 14-year-olds, called “CHEYENNE STARSTRUCK.” We performed in malls. Parking Lots. Halftime at University of Wyoming basketball games. Cheyenne Frontier Days. We performed anywhere that would book us, really, that we could legally enter. I believe we even performed at the Wyoming Territorial Prison—a prison for tourists, but a prison nonetheless.
Our instructor, a local community college student named Stacey, called her choreography our “language”; fittingly, we spoke in the parlance of the times, usually in some variation of the Roger Rabbit, the Running Man, and that weird face cutting thing Janet Jackson did in the “Pleasure Principle” video. [demonstrate] We danced in grand thematic routines and wore red sequined leotards, and smeared Vaseline on our teeth to keep us smiling.

This, in 1992, was one of our songs; the routine went a little something like this:
[demonstrate 1992 choreography; pretend you are wearing Hammer pants]

This is the happiest music ever made. In 1992, Shanice’s “I Love Your Smile” was the first cassingle I ever shoplifted, from the Musicland in the Frontier Mall; I had no money (this was back before tweens started making lots of money) but I wanted to practice. In the shadow of the Gulf War and the barren vacuum of Wyoming, “I Love Your Smile” was the consummate escapism music, akin to reading my Bible-at-the-time, YM Magazine, back when the “M” stood for “Miss” and not “Modern.” I was a young miss, and Shanice showed me how. She was liberated by this boy, whose smile she adored—so liberated, in fact, she went buckwild “putting that new black mini” on her charge card—a whole and unfettered action of consumption without remorse, exactly what it meant to be a middle- class teen girl in Anywhere USA. Together, in that moment, Shanice and I lived the perfect girl-dream, crushing on boys, wearing cute clothes, dancing when and wherever we pleased, freed from our depression (depression evidenced by the MIDI thunderstorm in the bridge). Freed through the sparkling teeth of “your smile.”

But the danger in escapism—and the mall, and the pages of YM—is that they all smell so uniformly sweet. And the right force can rip you, irreparably, from their baby-tender crush. “I Love Your Smile,” for me, was a fulcrum; as the Gulf War wound up, rage burned, Nirvana released Nevermind and I surged from the teen-dance circuit into America’s collective tumult: the safety unclasped.

Posted by jane at May 8, 2004 08:45 PM | TrackBack