Into a world with "Friends", "Frasier" and "Seinfeld" on TV, "blazing fast!" 56K technology taking the Internet by storm, and everyone drinking fancy coffee in a fancy coffee house and planning to publish a poetry book, Smash Mouth released "Walking on the Sun", a never unlistenable little jam that says more about the let-down of the 1960s than a lot of painstakingly rendered historical documentaries. I feel the second verse in particular distills the unfortunate road society has taken since that time (idealism crushed cruelly beneath the boot heel of corporate-controlled consumerism) down to a simple, deceptively rhetorical question:
"Twenty-five years ago they spoke out and they broke out of recession and oppression
And together they toked
And they folked out with guitars around a bonfire
Just singing and clapping, man, what the hell happened...?"
Drop the mic, boys...
"Because fashion is smashing the true meaning of it..."
#278) "Drinking Song" by Loudon Wainwright - Though it might be considered a deep track (truthfully every one of Wainwright's songs, other than 1972's "Dead Skunk", which for better or worse is probably what he'll be remembered for, might be considered a deep track), "Drinking Song" encapsulates everything I've loved about the man and his music over the years.
It is quintessential Loudon. He treats the guitar as much as a percussion instrument as a string. The song starts like any other of his ditties - a little anxious but also a little clever and wry, nothing if not comical. But like all his music, the best of it at least, "Drinking Song" has a way of turning overcast as it wears on. By the end, that trademark anxiety Wainwright employs to fuel his music has gotten itself onto you, like a musty smell, and you are left sort of wondering why you were laughing at all.
Drunk men stagger, drunk men fall, drunk men swear and that's not all / Quite often they will urinate outdoors..."
