As with virtually all music once accused of inciting inappropriate sexual arousal in days gone by, 1959's "Teach Me Tiger" sounds tame today. Of course, the erosion of mores in our society is generational. April Stevens' breathy cooing was followed a decade later by Robert Plant's fake orgasms, and fourteen years after that astronauts aboard the Challenger, upstanding golden paragons of American virtue to a one, requested "Teach Me Tiger" as their day 3 wake-up call while in orbit around God's Green Earth. The "millennials" probably already think we're a bunch of lame-o's for ever getting worked up over pantomime fellatio and Trent Reznor saying exactly how he wants to fuck people. Unless "lame-o" now means "super cool" and "cool" means "hot" and whatever the hell.
"Teach Me Tiger" is still capable of provoking outrage, of course. In me. When someone insists that it's a Marilyn Monroe song, which happens a LOT. Look, even though everyone is aware that nobody had sex in the '50's except movie stars who later OD'd on pills, that doesn't mean that one lady was responsible for every media artifact from the time period that sounds remotely naughty. Quit stealing from April Stevens to feed your idiotic Bernie Taupin-esque tired icon fetishism. Marilyn Friggin' Monroe, blah blah BLAH, happy birthday mister stupid president already.
What's most infuriating is that it's such a lazy comparison. Stevens's voice is much more playful than Monroe's, coyer, more girlish. And when you hear her claim that she doesn't know how to kiss, how to tease, how to touch, all while her delivery is reaching right down the front of your pants, it's clear that she's also a much better actor than Monroe. And probably a better lay.
There was once a time, not so long ago, when grown-ups could consciously decide to form a pop group, for the purpose of scoring pop hits on the pop charts. People could do this without having to be celebrities already, or otherwise constructing a defined public image for the media to eat up (though, of course, that never hurt in the MTV era). With a professionally developed sense of melody, you could find yourself all over radio, landing in the Billboard Top Ten, and thoroughly permeating the popular consciousness, despite your relative personal anonymity. Critics often lambasted music they couldn’t identify as the product of a personal artistic vision, but critics weaned on rock in the ‘60s or punk in the ‘70s often seemed to expect every goddamn record to change the fucking world or it wasn’t worth anyone’s while.
Boy Meets Girl were a husband-and-wife songwriting duo who got their start penning Whitney Houston’s two best songs, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “How Will I Know.” For their own material, George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam adopted a suitably generic name that alluded in vague terms to their own real-life coupling. So much the stuff of romantic songs and long-distance dedications, they even MET at a wedding! Unlike many such hookups, however, they continued to date long after the wedding atmosphere (“Love and romance are in the air!” mixed with “Oh God, I’m so alone!” mixed with “Shit hell, I’m drunk!”) had faded.
Boy Meets Girl’s lone hit was the Top Fiver “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” an effortlessly catchy amalgam of light dance-pop and late-‘80s adult contemporary. The song kicks off with that typical, awkward ‘80s juxtaposition of a real live saxophone with an almost completely synthesized backing track. The lyrics are standard-issue romantic longing, and if you don’t remember this song by its title, you may well have thought it was called “In My Arms Baby Yeah” if you ever listened to a pop radio station or attended a junior high school dance in the late ‘80s. For my money, the highlight is that hallmark of the lost art of professional songwriting, an absolutely killer bridge (around 2:45 in) that’s every bit as memorable as the chorus (and also proves that George and Shannon don’t sound all that different from one another).
The downside of lacking a marketable image or soap-opera private life is that you sink or swim on your ability to keep coming up with great melodies. And if you run out of those, well, thanks for playing. Boy Meets Girl just seemed like nice people making nice music, and they joined hair metal in getting fucking obliterated by Nirvana. Alas, when their career ended, their romantic partnership went the way of the creative one, proving yet again that popular love songs are a cruel prank on the American psyche.
Oftentimes, pop songs walk the delicate line between "romance" and "stalking" or "desire" and "rape-y sounding". "Hungry Eyes," off the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, gets real close to crossing the line. It starts out innocently enough, but isn't every road to hell paved with the best of intentions? Eric Carmen quietly delivers "I've been meaning to tell you, I've got this feeling that won't subside." Awwww, he's admitting his feelings to his crush. Sweet! But then gets darker, FAST. "I look at you and I fantasize. You're mine tonight. Now I've got you in my sights...with...these...hungry eyes." Maybe this girl is down, but his tone is a pleading one. He continues, "I want to hold you so hear me out." Sounds like the objection of his affection was interested in leaving. If a boy I liked professed his love for me, he wouldn't need to ask me to stay; I'd be sitting there smiling! Eric Carmen sings "Did I take you by surprise?" but doesn't wait for a response, only answers his own question, "I need you to see this love was meant to be." I'm of the opinion that if a love is meant to be, both parties involved are willing participants that don't need to be convinced once feelings are laid on the table. Although the saxophone solo makes a strong argument.
Needless to say, I loved this song when I was 8 years old and someday imagined a boy singing it to me. I remember my sister guffawing at me, "You want a boy to sing you a song?! That's ridiculous Camille. Do you know how ridiculous that would be?" Time has passed and I am now a woman, but I still wouldn't mind having a guy sing me a song. Just not this song. If a guy is singing me this song, well, I'd probably be trying to dial 9-1-1 on my cell phone. I mean, just look at Eric Carmen's mug shot below. This guy is NOT messing around!
As the Internet has very little information on this video, I can only imagine how this cartoon / live action extravaganza of a song came to pass. However, I think we all know how it went. By the late 70s, the Schoolhouse Rock animators were riding high on the hog. The goverment / Public Television was giving out mucho dinero for educational cartoons. Those guys became International Jetsetters! There were Pina Coladas in Fiji followed by aperitives in gay ol 'Paris. One night in Rome, a drunk schoolhouse rocker came into contact with cute-as-a-button Rita Pavone. "Hey baby!" he shouted at her. "Do you know who I am?" She smiled coyly and took a gold tipped cigarette out of her Halston purse. "No, English not so good." As flecks of red wine spittle spew from his mouth, he screamed "Schoolhouse Rock!" She replied, "well you look ... how you say? Like Potato, American Potato!" The wheels in this rocker's mind spun quickly. Business cards were exchanged and they were in studio the VERY NEXT DAY laying down the track. Yeah, said animator may have taken on an Italian name "Guido Manuli" for artistic credit, but we all know that's not a real name.
When the tape was released, Guido's friends back at home chastised him. "What are you trying to teach man? That potatoes grow in the earth? Let's not get started on the tobacco sequence. That shit better not see the light of day in our U.S. of A." But Guido had got to spend a whole two days with Rita, and that was all that mattered.
Everybody has days when they want to bury their "head in the shit at the bottom" of a lake. The urge is universal, a vestige of the reptile brain, meaning that basically anything with a spine has experienced the sensation: you say something hurtful to your turtle friend, or you get embarrassed in front of the stegosaurus you've been crushing on, or your garter snake buddy sits you down and lays some hard truth on you; then the pit forms in your stomach and you want to go find a damned lake already.
What lake? Any lake! A lake you can dive into, so you can start burying your head in the shit at the bottom. Sure, there's a name for that shit, but you're not Percy Bysshe fucking Shelley over here. Your brain-stem is in charge now, and it doesn't give a crap about whether the metaphor speaks to the sublime, or what shit happen to be called, only whether can be used as a burrowing place for your stupid skull.
This raw expression of life's occasional, simple lousiness forms the basic thrust of Wild Light's catchy first single, and smartly the band leans so heavily on their sing-along "shit at the bottom" chorus that you've already heard it twice before you stumble upon the first verse. By the time they start to get specific about which pile of regrets is responsible for the moment's anguish, we're already on board, caught up in the feeling of collective remorse, while jangly guitars strum enjoyably and a mournful, Petty-esque harmonica answers the lead vocal.
What makes the chorus really special, though, is that there's a second universal urge embedded in the back half of it, namely the ancient, evolutionarily-tested need to tell the State of California to go fuck itself. "Fuck today, fuck San Francisco/Fuck California," sings Jordan Alexander, whose warbled yearning recalls Phantom Planet's Alex Greenwald. "California on My Mind", in fact, could just be the other side of the coin for "California", brutal reality setting in for those same Phantom Planet-eers who'd so hopefully driven down the 101 on their way to The OC's Teen Choice Awards party a few years back. Now the show's canceled, those idiots from The Hills are famous, the state's bankrupt...you know what? Give me a lake.
When you think of cool kids in the 1960s, The Turtles aren't the first band to come to mind, or the 6th or even the 18th. In fact, if VH1 did a count down for "cool" 1960s artists, I doubt The Turtles would crack the top 50. BUT they hung out with the cool kids and at the end of the day isn't that what counts? During the golden age of Laurel Canyon, The Turtles partied right along side all the important players. I have no doubt Howard Kaylan was licking the same LSD sugar cube as David Crosby. I'm sure that when Jim Morrison was wobbling over the toilet puking pure whiskey, Mark Volman was the one to hold back his precious locks.
So who really cares if The Turtles turned their backs on psychedelia and folk rock to create deliciously catchy pop? OK, full disclosure: this author has a strong dislike for most of Bob Dylan's recordings. I know, I know, he's a great American poet yada yada.... but those vocal tones aren't dulcet. I like my Bob Dylan like my vodka: mixed with something... anything... to dilute the bite. The Turtles' break out hit cover of "It ain't me babe" gets that job done. In an Alternate universe where Oceanic Flight 815 does land in Los Angeles, I like to imagine what it would be like if Bob Dylan was born without a tongue so only others were able to record his music. In that Alterna-verse, The Turtles original version of the song "it ain't me babe" would hit the spot that much more because you wouldn't realize what a passive aggressive number they were about to lay down. The song starts all sickly sweet. Mark is crooning in his teenie bopper voice to that be-bopping girl in the front row, and then he smacks the chorus on her like the big ol' truth bomb that it is: "IT AIN'T ME BABE." While Dylan sounds like he is about to jump off a bridge as soon as he completes performing the song, The Turtles sound like they are about to leave for spring break in Cancun! And that, my friends, is actually quite cool.
Nice guys finish last. AMIRITE LADIES? Nice isn't sexy. Pulp's Jarvis Cocker on the band's magnum opus "Different Class" is not some nice guy. He's a bad boy. In 1995, way back when cholos still ruled Echo Park with an iron fist, and before single gear bicycle freaks inundated the orthodox Jewish population of Williamsburg, Jarvis Cocker invented the look of the modern day hipster. Except unlike the modern day hipster, Jarvis Cocker exuded* sex appeal. Although his appearance is scrawny and deathly British-white, his voice is another matter entirely. His voice is pure sex. Girls love Pulp. Hetero guys that I've talked to don't really have an opinion on the matter. Asking a guy about Pulp is like asking him what kind of white wine he prefers.
The album Different Class is all pretty ridiculous and over-the-top, but "Pencil Skirt" takes the cake. Jarvis purrs each line and even the guitar riff seems naughty. He's already seduced you even though you've got a fiancé and the song is just there to make you feel guilty because it turns him on that you feel bad but are...you guessed it, still turned on. He's tapped it before, and he's making sure YOU know he's got you in the bag. In fact, he's got your WHOLE FAMILY under his seductive spell since he's "kissed your mother twice, and now I'm working on your dad. oh baby!" Oh baby indeed. Astonishingly, Pulp never hit it big time on the American charts like contemporaries Blur and Oasis. I'm pretty sure that's due to the fact that U-S-A! U-S-A! in 1995 was and still is an uptight crowd. Yeah, we got gangta rappers that shout to the high heavens of their sexual prowess, but they are so impersonal about it- pluralizing their exploits ("so many bitches") and not really pointing to specific encounters ("when I hit the town..."). "Pencil Skirt" gets into the devilish details. So dudes, when you are putting together that mix CD to make a girl think you are a mysterious dashing gent, throw on "Pencil Skirt". You know that I know that she knows its turning her ooooon.
*I use the past tense because modern day Jarvis is, in fact, quite asexual. Later Pulp songs are about old people and trees (literally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bZjKC0EaY0 AND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEAtpuZJtu4). In this writing I am referring solely to mid-90s Pulp.
Arena rock is one of the more critically maligned genres of rock music, mostly for reasons that were intrinsic to its very being. It was great big music meant to be played in great big spaces. Your style can’t be subtle when you need to reach all the way back to the cheap seats. And if you’re going to fill up a sports stadium for some reason other than sports, your lyrics have got to be as universally relatable as possible. If you’re gonna go big, you’ve gotta go commercial. Grandeur – at least the human-made variety – doesn’t happen without cash.
Has there ever been a more thoroughly average grandeur than that of REO Speedwagon? On the surface they fulfill all the major arena-rock checklist items. Big fist-pumping choruses! Dramatically ringing power chords! Cigarette-lighter-ready ballads! But listen carefully, to what they’re actually doing. None of this stuff is all that hard to play. The melodies are usually fairly simple. The guitar solos rarely leave much of an impression. It certainly doesn’t require the jazz-trained chops of Journey. Any competent band could do this. (Of course, it was the misfortune of many competent bands to not have done this.) Kevin Cronin’s vocals lack the range, power, and supple elasticity of the incomparable Steve Perry – and if you can’t hear the contrast, just try singing one or the other at karaoke. Now, there’s no law that says great music requires great technical ability. It’s only that REO Speedwagon’s chosen, grandeur-obsessed idiom would seem to demand something above…average. Here is an average band of average Midwestern guys, constantly reaching for the stars, yet the spacecraft they’re using to get there is more akin to a model rocket.
“Average” doesn’t mean “bad.” The Speedwagon (as they no doubt affectionately dubbed themselves) aren’t that great at anything – they’re just good enough. Perhaps there is no better illustration of their mundane everyman stabs at transcendence than the big ol’ ballad “Take It On the Run,” which went Top Five in 1981. It’s instantly catchy, right from the opening lines – “Heard it from a friend who/Heard it from a friend who/Heard it from another you’d been messin’ around.” But this is as much a function of the repetition as it is the tune. When I was a young man, I saw a commercial for a car stereo with a detachable face to deter thieves, and I still remember it to this day. Why? Here’s how it went:
GUY 1 (showing the product): “It’s a detachable face for the car stereo.” GUY 2 (confused by the novelty of this concept): “A detachable face for the car stereo?” GUY 1 (pleased with his avant-garde consumption choice): “Yeah. A detachable face for the car stereo.” GUY 2 (nodding as the light of understanding dawns): “Ohhhhh. A detachable face for the car stereo!”
For the remainder of the song, the Speedwagon (whose nickname contains the same number of letters as their full name) reveal their thoroughly average pedigree in much the same fashion as modern-day reality TV stars. That is, they prove incapable of expressing all but the most basic thoughts without the aid of clichéd stock phrases. Why does Kevin’s baby have to “take it on the run”? Why, because she’s “under the gun,” of course. This is also why she tells “white lies” and then puts on “bedroom eyes.” O, the maddening hypocrisy!
But we all know that lyrics don’t really matter in arena rock – hooks do. And if the Speedwagon’s hooks are simpler than competitors like Journey, Boston, or Styx, it doesn’t mean they aren’t memorable. If nothing here is challenging, it is comfortingly familiar. And if the song’s tale of betrayal might have held more menace or anguish in the hands of a more versatile vocalist, it would also lose Kevin Cronin’s perennial nice-guy presence. No matter how angry or disappointed the lyrics get, Kevin sounds like exactly the same aw-shucks fellow who’s gonna “Keep On Loving You.” Yes, everything here is good enough.
So an average band of average musicians, with aspirations of grandeur, gets to the point where, through dedication and hard work, they can come reasonably close to grandeur. What does this mean? Is it a sad commentary on American mediocrity, that people are only admiring the great big aspirations of common folks they recognize, and can’t judge the substance of the results anyway? Or should we be inspired, that through good old American stick-to-it-ive-ness (i.e. touring and recording for an ENTIRE FUCKING DECADE before everything suddenly clicks and we make a really catchy album that sells NINE FUCKING MILLION COPIES), we can rise far beyond what our natural limitations may have seemed to be when we started out? Well, your answer probably depends on how successful you’ve been at what you wanted to do, and how easy it was to attain that level of success.
Me? Well, a few years back, thieves broke into my car to steal my Sony Discman (which lacked a detachable face). They also took my flashlight and my Andrew W.K. CD. They did not, however, take my REO Speedwagon tape. Whether that was because of the format or the music contained therein, I say, it’s their loss. Keep on rollin’, Speedwagon.
What stretches limits of human endurance? The marathon? The 52 mile super marathon? Magic man David Blaine's attempts to submerge himself in cream soda for a record 7 minutes? Anyone interested in testing these limits should consider subjecting themselves to all 15 minutes of "The Adventures of Super Rhyme" by hip hop pioneer Jimmy Spicer, a song dealing with the then-controversial subject of "Every single thing Jimmy Spicer could think of in the space of 15 minutes."
When this song first came on, I had no idea what an arduous journey I was in for. It starts out with the same Chic-esque disco groove as "Rapper's Delight." Rapper Jimmy Spicer actually has a better command of the microphone than the Sugar Hill Gang, and the beat is spiced up with some fresh conga breaks. I was into it, figuring I would hear a few lines about waving my hands in the air like I just didn't care and the like and be on my merry way. What I didn't know is that i was about to hear a man rap in a dracula voice about Superman's "fine as wine" girlfriend "Lois Line," a rambling anecdote about Aladin using his wish to travel to the year 1983 to pick up a freak at the disco, and a brag that Spicer has more rhymes than a lemon limes. Does a lemon have limes? Is that what Spicer is going for? Or has he, perhaps, actually run out of rhymes... something that may have happened many minutes earlier, in the first verse, during the whole "Lois Line" thing?
We may never know. Jimmy Spicer hasn't released a commercially available song since 1985. It's my guess that he perhaps used up all his rhymes in his initial 15 minute rap hit. America wasn't ready for hip-hop songs to reach the lengths of side-long prog rock tunes, especially when they don't make any sense at all and name drop Howard Cossell instead of designer labels and code words for cocaine. Jimmy Spicer, at around the 12 minute mark, tells us that he "freak[ed] it to the east, freaked[ed] it to the west, freak[ed] it to the girl with the biggest chest." He is now freaking it to the post office, where I'm guessing he works, testing the limits of how much OT he can do during the week so he doesn't have to pick up a Saturday shift.
I have hated the Eagles since way before it was cool*, and with much more passion than you could possible imagine. In fact, I can say with some confidence that if someone pointed a gun at my head and told me I must choose between listening to an album by the Eagles proper or a solo album from a solitary Eagle, I would instead choose the sweet Eagles-free embrace of the grave. But if that someone were to then turn the gun on a loved one- and I mean a real loved one, not some throw away cousin or great aunt- I would grudgingly ask to listen to whatever Don Henley album has “The End of the Innocence” on it.
I do not think “The End of the Innocence” is a great song, or even a particularly good one. Sure, that light piano lick Bruce Hornsby plays throughout is ever so slightly atonal (compared to the Eagles’s and Henley’s usual clinically bland sound this slight atonality is the sonic equivalent of Bruce Hornsby shitting on your grandmother’s birthday cake) but this tiny gesture isn’t enough to save the song from being dragged down by all the maudlin lost innocence claptrap.
What does save this song is the fact that, on approximately the 50,000th time I heard it, after 49,999 listens wherein it instantly melted into the sonic background, it surprised and shocked me. One day, while shopping for deodorant in my local Walgreens, the song started playing over the store’s PA. For the first time I really heard what Henley meant with the “lay your head down on the grass” part. (You’ve heard it so many times I’m sure you can conjure the chorus so I won’t waste time typing it out here.) Think about it- Don Henley is vowing to take the innocence of a girl in a field of grass by force, after overcoming her best defenses. That’s pretty raw stuff, especially coming over the speakers at Walgreens.
Since the girl in the song is a ham fisted metaphor and not supposed to be a real person, it’s safe to say there isn’t any real danger of anyone getting raped. But the idea that Don Henley snuck this song about sexually assaulting a metaphor in a field onto lite rock radio put a smile on face, one which lasted long after I’d paid for my deodorant.
I know I’m grading on a serious curve here, but if an Eagles solo recording can do something besides make me want to pour Clorox in my ears, it deserves its place on this august list.
* Like clowns, the Eagles were immensely popular for years and years, and then, seemingly overnight, everyone decided to hate them. I believe the turning point for clowns was the highly rated 1990 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It, which featured a clown who, unlike most real world clowns, did not manage to successfully kill all the children he ever came in contact with. I believe the Eagles made their transition to hated in 1998, after the scene in The Big Lebowski where The Dude is kicked out of a taxicab for professing his hatred for the band. Many viewers were unaware until that very moment that it is acceptable- or even possible- to vehemently dislike musicians who sound so incredibly innocuous, and suddenly freed of all prior restraint, began to hate the Eagles with a white hot passion previously reserved for Seals & Croft or Air Supply.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that every single human being, living or dead, knows this song. With arguably the most memorable opening guitar riff in recorded music history and a maddeningly hummable melody, experts estimate that it's been played on every tv station in the universe an average of six times per day over the last forty years. And its ubiquity is not simply due to the wiles of the cockeyed tv syndication market—spiritual leaders and obstetricians suggest that the blood rushing through vessels surrounding the womb plays this song ceaselessly for the entire mammalian gestation period.
So, granted: everybody and his ugly cousin knows this song. And probably 117 people, total, know the title, and about 15 are overly familiar with the lyrics, since only the version played in the Robert Altman movie contained them. As mentioned, the song is called "Suicide Is Painless", but it might as well add "...Compared to the Pointless Horrors of War, That Is!" The basic subtext of the song is that life is a series of empty exercises in misery, you're going to die anyway, so you might as well exert some control over the situation. To wit, the chorus:
Suicide is painless It brings on many changes And I can take or leave it if I please
A lot of popular songs say a lot of dumb things, but "It brings on many changes" might lead the field in sophomoric understatement. Most of the verses don't do much better, crammed full of fake poetic phrasing ("A brave man once requested me/to answer questions that are key"), embarrassing, high school creative writing-type metaphors ("The sword of time will pierce our skins"), and adolescent angst masquerading as grown-up depth.
Thankfully there's a very good reason it sounds like the theme from M*A*S*H was written by a teenager: the lyricist was Altman's 14 year-old son, Mike. Altman once noted that Mike earned over a million bucks for writing stuff like "The game of life is hard to play" and slapping it on top of Johnny Mandel's well-crafted tune. Put another way, Altman was bragging that he was such a big shot that he could set his kid up for life by re-purposing a C- from 9th grade comp for his Hollywood movie. Which...I guess no argument here.
Listening to the theme song to most any hour-long television drama, one is often struck by how the producers, in an attempt to engineer music that appeals to everyone, have created something that appeals to nobody. It's odd how a kind of music, focus-grouped to within an inch of mercy to give Melrose Place an everyman appeal delivers a peculiar style of sound which does not, in fact, have any real-world corollary. It certainly suggests rock music. All the parts are there, save for everything that matters, as though an alien from Venus has decided to give rock music a go after only reading a detailed description of the form written by an alien from Mars. In other words, nobody in possesion of a beating human heart listens to the theme to LA Law and thinks, "God! where can I get a whole album of THAT."
But then, that can't be true. A short trip to any foreign land is proof enough that every horrible kind of music has it's audience, and such is apparently the case with the vanishingly smooth sounds of the network television drama. As evidence I give you Shawn Lane.
To be clear, Shawn Lane didn't actually write television jingles. Rather, the sound of the mid-ninties television jingle is simply where his muse took him. He was a driven independant musician who spent his too short life lovingly crafting with passion the kind of glistening schmatz that has led legions of dead-eyed Hollywood session men to hard drugs.
I only know about his existence because I had a subscription to Guitar World magazine in high school. This magazine acts as a portal between our world and a world were the likes of Slash, Kurt Cobain and The Edge stand shoulder to should with the likes of Allan Holdsworth, Eric Johnson and Al Di Meola. I was reading "GW" back in the days when you had to purchase your music before you could listen to it, and since none of these guys were on the radio or Mtv I'd end up buying a lot of albums simply because I wanted to hear what "Shawn Lane's masterful avalanche of cascading notes" sounded like. Thus I found my curiosity satisfied completely by Lane's solo debut "Powers of Ten" or as I liked to call it "Power Soften".
Listen to to Shawn play his crowd-pleaser "Get You Back" live before what we can only assume was an actual crowd. This song is like Harry Hamlin's magnificent jawline translated directly into notes...thousands and thousands of notes. Whoever Lane needed to "get back" I'm sure it was mission accomplished. If she wasn't won over by buttery main riff which dominates the first two minutes, then perhaps he had her with the following breakdown, built on a series of key changes terraced like the snowy tiers of a wedding cake. If not that then the next section, where the softer side of Shawn takes over, must certainly have sent the titular "you" collapsing nude into Shawn's arms in a sexual frenzy. Or perhaps it was the four minute outro solo culminating in a masterful cascading note avalanche which sealed the deal?
But I suppose it doesn't matter. Whether or not Shawn won back that wandering heart, the song endures to delight another generation of curious guitar twiddlers. It is a moment frozen on time, a document of music, as music was never supposed to sound.
We are a diverse team of musicologists who have developed an exclusive algorithm we use to determine the one million best songs ever written. We then leverage the extraordinary power of advanced computational technology to bring the top one million to you, listed in precise order, via this web log.
Current estimated completion date for this project:
As with virtually all music once accused of inciting inappropriate sexual arousal in days gone by, 1959's "Teach Me Tiger" sounds tame today. Of course, the erosion of mores in our society is generational. April Stevens' breathy cooing was followed a decade later by Robert Plant's fake orgasms, and fourteen years after that astronauts aboard the Challenger, upstanding golden paragons of American virtue to a one, requested "Teach Me Tiger" as their day 3 wake-up call while in orbit around God's Green Earth. The "millennials" probably already think we're a bunch of lame-o's for ever getting worked up over pantomime fellatio and Trent Reznor saying exactly how he wants to fuck people. Unless "lame-o" now means "super cool" and "cool" means "hot" and whatever the hell.
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