#166) "Creep" by Radiohead - I can't find it anywhere unfortunately, but there's a weirdly poignant moment in an episode of Beavis and Butthead, of all things, where the two buffoons are watching the "Creep" video, waiting patiently for it to start "rocking" (Butthead assuring Beavis that it will at some point), and after several moments silently absorbing Thom York mumbling his self-loathing lyrics, Butthead mutters, seemingly perplexed (which is what makes it), "This guy is down on himself."
"Creep" is a great song. Great musicality, magnificent vocals. More than one person has told me that it's not even the best example of Radiohead, that I should explore some deep tracks to really get at the band's essence. I haven't done this, yet. I like this song so much, I almost don't want to associate the band with anything else (and this, reportedly, is not something Radiohead likes to hear).
It wasn't always a love affair. When it first was released in 1993, I saw "Creep" as just another contribution to the musically grim nihilism of the day, a member in good standing of the grunge movement, which, although lauded as a revolution, I still sort of view as merely giving voice to the anguish of America's privileged, and mostly white, middle class. Grunge was good for killing off hair metal, but I never bought into it entirely, as a state of mind or fashion statement....never understood just what Kurt Loder on MTV was creaming himself over. And I was part of what was likely a very small group of people under the age of 22 annoyed rather than grief stricken by Kurt Cobain's suicide. Not unsympathetic, but annoyed nevertheless.
As I familiarized myself with it, however, I started seeing "Creep" as something else, something more durable, touching on an important theme that transcends generations, styles, fads and fancies. Not since Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" eighteen years earlier, had there been such an apt anthem for those among us who get no spotlight, no attention, individuals for whom depression and self-loathing are not a stylized pose carefully sculpted from flannel and goatees (which essentially was how I saw, and dismissed, "grunge": beautiful people acting fashionably grungy...), but are instead the drab colors each and every day arrives dressed in.
That may or may not be what Radiohead had in mind with the song, but that's how I've always read it. In a rock and roll industry whose product has for, oh, sixty years now, been predicated almost exclusively on youthful vitality and beauty, driven first and foremost by raw, and often aggressive, sexual tension and attraction, "Creep" makes me stop and think about the people who don't fit in, can't fit in, won't fit in, and yet at the same time are not equipped with any means of capitalizing on their innate individuality, have no recourse, even, for "being different".
Everyone feels awkward and strange at some point (er, most people anyway...), but I'm not talking about teenage angst, restlessness, or unrequited love. I'm talking about the flightless birds out there, who well into adulthood bring no sparkle into a room, contribute nothing to any dialogue, never really hatch out of their egg, and view the world from within that shell, and yet, cruelly, aren't marginalized enough to fall into a category that might afford them help and support. They simply fall off the radar.
This I do not say in any kind of snarky way, nor am I trying to pretend I've always been the center of attention. I surely haven't. I've had my awkward moments, was not prom king by any stretch of the imagination back in school. And there is a point when everyone needs to try getting over the self-loathing, the self-pity, and find their voice, their identity, at all cost.
"Repeat after me," Butthead (the counselor...who knew?) mutters at the end of the video, "I am somebody."
I've just always felt lucky to have never gotten down on myself, even in moments, and there were plenty, when it was revealed perhaps I wasn't "so fucking special." The thought of people out there really seeing themselves as the individual in "Creep" sees himself, haunts me a little.
"What the hell am I doing here / I don't belong here..."
#167) "Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash - Speaking of the early 1990s, I remember the original version of "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden, only I don't remember the song at all...I only remember the video, notably the angry man wielding a pitchfork. I remember it being played over and over and over on MTV, and yet have little or no recollection of the song itself, a fact which says something, I think, about what's happened to the dynamic of popular music since the advent of "music television".
As far as I'm concerned, it wasn't until Johnny Cash's monumental cover version in 1996, from his monumental album Unchained, that the song came into being. Like Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" a few years later, Cash, with a little help from Rick Rubin, breathed aggressive new life into the song, gave it universal appeal, proving a) yes, Virginia, there are good cover versions, b) great things can happen in the back half of one's life, or in Cash's case, the tail end.
Seriously, how impressive was it for Cash to become the legendary "Man in Black" in the 1960s and 70s, then go through a fifteen year dry spell, endure waning popularity in a fast changing industry, only to come back in the 1990s with an artistic and creative flourish that allowed him to very much earn the reverently austere moniker, Cash?
"When the forest burns along the road, like God's eyes in my headlights..."
