#142) "Old Hippie (The Sequel)" by The Bellamy Brothers - The middle installment of what's become - over thirty years - a story in three acts, Old Hippie (The Sequel) is the most cathartic of the trilogy. The first part, released in the mid 1980s, finds the 'Old Hippie' in his mid-thirties, feeling his age for the first time, lamenting how things have changed since his youth, not sure how he should respond exactly, but still young enough to give the world the finger the way he did when he was 18, to determinedly keep it real (as his grandkids might one day say...).
In ...Sequel, released ten years later, the Old Hippie is now in his mid-40s, and feeling even more marginalized from the direction 1990s America has taken. It's clear his lament has turned to sorrow, and generated a certain anxiety. With 'yuppies in the White House', and a world 'selling sex in youth...', the Old Hippie has been left wondering 'what to pay attention to, and what should he ignore...'
Which, nearly twenty years on from that point (is that possible...?!), has more or less become SOP for all of us, in any generation.
The third installment, released in 2007, reveals that the Old Hippie, perhaps not surprisingly, has found Jesus, and is now biding his time, awaiting salvation. That's all good, but it's The Sequel that I will be taking along, and pondering, on 1/48/50. In as far as it could be, or was even meant to be, it's the most trenchant of what might be considered a generation's swan song.
"And his eyes are on the future, but it's looking pretty sad / And with every day that passes, he becomes more like his dad..."
#143) "The Sweetest Thing (I've Ever Known)" by Juice Newton - I have some sun-drenched memories of this song playing through at least two summers' worth of picnics and cookouts when I was nine and ten years old. And I remember feeling pretty sophisticated listening to it, felt it provided me my first glimpse into the 'adult' world.
What can I say? I was a weird kid, I guess. But 30-plus years on, The Sweetest Thing holds up in a way country ballads don't always. There's an urgency generated here, as the lyrics rock climb their way to the top of the melody, an urgency that gets you believing what the woman is saying in the song, gets you feeling her vulnerability.
If nothing else, it will always remind me of pop cans in a bucket of ice, hot dogs on paper plates, fruit salad in Tupperware, and being ashamed of my fish belly. ;-)
Speaking of the lyrics, I was recently proven wrong about them. What a wondrous age we live in, huh? This 'age of information', which simply doesn't allow anyone to argue on blindly, even if they think they might be wrong.
Maybe that's a good thing. Years ago, I got into a heated discussion with someone about a single line in The Sweetest Thing..., and wouldn't, or couldn't, let it go.
I was hearing, You're my sunshine, you're my babe...
Someone corrected me, said the line was actually, You're my sunshine, you're my rain....
Even at the time, I admitted '...rain' made it a better line, but I was sure I was hearing the hard 'b' sound that could only make the word, 'babe'. It didn't matter that it was awkward and unlikely, and didn't even rhyme to boot, I was never too keen on admitting I was wrong in those days. I kept pushing and pushing and arguing and arguing.
Now it would seem, according to all the lyrics websites crowding the very first page of this particular Google search, that I was wrong. Embarrassingly so, looking back on how I allowed (or forced) the discussion to escalate.
"And as we lie here, just two shadows, in the light before the dawn..."
#144) "Seven Year Ache" by Rosanne Cash - This song too evokes very specific memories from a very specific time in my childhood, a time when lunch with Kool-Aid was a big deal, bikes were rocket ships, trees were mountains, swimming pools oceans, summertime a lifetime, and AM radio was always playing in the background.
On the surface, it could readily be dismissed as a synth-country throwaway like Sylvia's Nobody, but there are some interesting things going on in Seven Year Ache, musically, and lyrically.
Mind you, I don't know what the lyrical stuff is, exactly. I don't know what Cash is talking about...a guy going through a mid-life crisis? A husband she's about to divorce?
Is she the wife in the story?
Is she one of the girls in the bar?
His friend? His lover?
But the music has always compelled me to keep listening. There's something about the synthesized arrangement that gets into my blood. When I was a kid, it was playing while I was sick with a fever, and to this day, it still makes me think of melting, which, when you listen to it, makes perfect sense, I think.
"You act like you were just born tonight, face down in a memory but feeling all right / So who does your past belong to today? Baby you don't say nothing when you're feeling this way..."
#145) "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes - A notable punctuation to Jack White's notable contribution to music as a whole, Seven Nation Army has the dubious distinction of being the song that ushered me into middle age.
Several years of feeling crazy cool jamming out to The White Stripes, regarding them as my tether to new, innovative, cutting edge, 'alternative' music, all came crashing down about two years ago:
The song played on my phone at work, and a kid working for me, all of eighteen, smiled brightly and said, Hey! We played this song in pep band!
"And that ain't what you want to hear, but that's what I'll do..."
