Wilson Phillips: Hold On

So this week on Lyrics, Weakly we take another request, the Wilson Phillips song “Hold On”. This was the first single from their debut album, and it hit #1 on the US charts in June 1990, and was actually the #1 single for the entire year. The album as a whole was a huge success, going quintuple(!)-platinum and spawning four top-five singles, three of which hit #1.

And really, as you listen to the song, you can understand why. Wilson Phillips is made up of Carnie and Wendy Wilson, daughters of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and Chynna Phillips, daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas. That’s a lot of harmony in their bloodlines, and as you listen to them, they certainly live up to it.

So the harmonies are sweet. The songwriting? Not so much. So cue the cheesy 80s ice piano, and…

I know this pain
Why do lock yourself up in these chains?

Dude, don’t question it. Some people are into that sort of thing—live and let live, that’s my philosophy.

No one can change your life except for you
Don’t ever let anyone step all over you

Wait, i’m confused. So you’re saying that i’m strong enough that nobody can mess with my life, and so i should keep people from stepping all over me? But if i’m really that all-powerful, and the only one who can change my own life, then, logically, i really shouldn’t care whether they’re stepping all over me—it’s not going to actually mess with me.

And besides, what if i like having people step all over me? What then? Your platitudes don’t seem so perfect then, do they?

Just open your heart and your mind
Is it really fair to feel this way inside?

Is it fair? I think it is—but maybe i’m just not understanding what you’re asking. I wonder what your basis for comparison is.

Oh, some day somebody’s gonna make you want to
Turn around and say goodbye
Until then baby are you going to let’m
Hold you down and make you cry

So you’re saying that i’m in some sort of relationship with someone (romantic, friendship, whatever), and one day they’re going to do something that’s going to make me want to leave the relationship. Yeah, stuff like that happens every day—saying it will is a pretty safe bet, actually. But in the meantime they’re holding me down and making me cry? But wouldn’t that make me want to say goodbye right now?

(Well, unless i’m into that sort of thing—see above. But if that’s the case then yes, I certainly am going to let them do that to me.)

Completely seriously, this song has pretty opaque lyrics for being such a transparent thing. I mean, if you listen to the whole thing it’s clear that this is one of those “you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh-darn it, people like you” songs. No problem—there’s a place for stuff like that in this world. But then you start looking at the details of how that’s being said, and it all starts to feel a little darker.

Don’t you know?
Don’t you know things can change
Things’ll go your way
If you hold on for one more day

Help! I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!

Can you hold on for one more day?

Like i said earlier, bland happiness and then sudden darkness. I particularly like the way this line is delivered, with the can you that turns it into a question muttered more softly than the rest of the line, in an apparent subliminal attempt to undercut the confidence of the person they’re singing to.

Things’ll go your way
Hold on for one more day

Really, could y’all make up your collective minds? Are you questioning whether things are actually going to go my way, or are you expressing certainty? ’Cause i’m getting mixed messages here.

You could sustain
Or are you comfortable with the pain?

Okay, i give up. I’ve been trying to write something about this couplet for several minutes now, and i can’t come up with anything.

The main reason for my mindblock, i think, is that it makes absolutely no sense. I mean, you try it. Imagine a friend coming up to you and saying “Here’s what i think: You could sustain, or are you comfortable with the pain?” What would your reaction be? That’s right, it’d be “Huh?” You know why? Because that’s not something anyone would ever say! In fact, i suspect it’s not even a sentence that would ever occur in English—it appears to follow the grammatical structure of some other language. Mses Wilson and Phillips all grew up in Southern California, so maybe this is actually an example of the indigenous language of that region.

(Warning: Turn down the volume for the last ten seconds or so of that last link if you’re at work, or around your parents.)

You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness

I really hope that when pop/rock songwriters go to school, this line is used in the class on rhythm and meter as an example of what not to do.

Oh, what’s that? People don’t go to school to become pop/rock songwriters? Well, that explains lines like that one, then, doesn’t it?

No, baby, you got yourself into your own mess
Lettin’ your worries pass you by
Don't you think it’s worth your time
To change your mind?

See? Darkness again. Apparently it’s time for tough love, as we get told about all the horrible things we’ve been doing, particularly by ignoring all the things that could have been worrying us. But wait…I’m confused again.

After all, it’s not that long ago that these very singers in this very song were talking about how we’re letting ’m (seriously, i can’t tell if they’re singing ’em or him, which bothers me a little bit) hold us down and make us cry. That doesn’t sound very much like letting our worries pass us by—it sounds like an emotional crisis, something you can’t let pass you by because it’s right there, taking all your attention.

Not to mention that the entire message of this song, at least as far as i can tell, is that if you can just hold on for one more day everything’ll get better. So basically, they’re saying they’ll yell at us for doing whatever it is that we’ve been doing all this time, and then when we take their advice to just hold on for one more day—which would involve letting our worries pass us by, one would think—they get to yell at us for doing so and getting ourselves into this mess?

Sorry, but i don’t need to take this sort of thing from you.

Wait a minute…Unless the ’m who’s holding us down and making us cry is actually Wilson Phillips, and this is actually one of those cases where they’re expressing contrition and working on reconciliation, just so that they can come back and abuse us later on. Yeah, that’s right, i’m on to you! You’re not going to get away with it this time!

But then the chorus gets repeated, and we get distracted by those sweet, sweet harmonies.

I know that there is pain
But you hold on for one more day and
Break free from the chains
Yeah, I know that there is pain
But you hold on for one more day and you
Break free, break from the chains

Seriously, what is it with the chains and pain? I mean, you know, other than the obvious answer—that they keep using those words ’cause they rhyme and they couldn’t think of anything else to use.

And really, it’s a bizarre idea, anyway. I mean, think through what they’re saying logically: They’re saying that if you’re in chains, even though it’ll hurt you should stay in them for one more day, ’cause then they’ll go away. Sorry, but that’s not the way people who chain you up and torture you generally work.

But then we get the chorus again with its amazing harmonies, and we get to forget for a moment how utterly silly this whole song is.

Don’t you know things can change
Things’ll go your way
If you hold on for one more day,
If you hold on
Can you hold on

Really, this is an utterly innocuous feel-good song—but there’s no law against innocuous feel-good songs making sense, is there? Well, maybe there is—who knows?

Frankie Valli: My Eyes Adored You

This week Lyrics, Weakly moves into dangerous territory: criticizing an Italian-American from New Jersey.

The 1975 song “My Eyes Adored You” was actually recorded by the Four Seasons with Frankie Valli as lead singer, but their label wouldn’t release it. (Many other labels rejected the song after that, by the way. It’s somehow comforting to know that stupidity isn’t new to the music recording industry—they’ve been working on getting things wrong for a long time.) Frankie Valli bought the rights to the song, and finally got it released—but the label that released it didn’t want it released as a Four Seasons song, they wanted it released as a Frankie Valli song. As a result, it was Frankie Valli’s first solo #1 hit, even though it wasn’t actually a solo recording.

Confused? Yes? Well, welcome to logic, Recording Industry Association of America style.

Incidentally, while Frankie Valli was still working on getting himself established as a singer, he worked as a barber as his day job. I’ve got nothing to say about that, really, except that i find it both highly amusing and actually pretty cool.

Anyway—this song is actually pretty nice to listen to, if you’re in the mood for overt sappiness. (And aren’t we all, every once in a while?) Just make sure that you don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics when it comes on the radio. I mean, the weirdness starts with the very first line:

My eyes adored you

From Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary:

Main Entry: adore
Pronunciation: \ə-ˈdȯr\
Inflected Form(s): adored; ador·ing
1: to worship or honor as a deity or as divine
2: to regard with loving admiration and devotion
3: to be very fond of

So Frankie Valli’s eyes either worshipped this woman, regarded her with admiration or devotion, or were very fond of her.

The odd thing is that such actions generally require a brain. The idea that Frankie Valli’s eyes might actually be independently sentient and capable of acting on their own frightens me, for some reason.

By the way, all this talk about worship and eyes is reminding me of what is easily the creepiest song the B–52’s ever recorded.

Though I never laid a hand on you my eyes adored you

I don’t get the cause and effect relationship here. That is, this is set up as something where you’d expect a cause and effect relationship (one’s eyes would normally adore someone precisely because you laid a hand on the object of the adoration), but it’s a twist where the effect occurs even without the expected cause. You know, like if someone said “Though i’ve never liked coconut, i adore piña coladas”.

Well, that’s all well and good, except that there is no such expected cause and effect relationship between laying one’s hands on someone else and adoration. Basically, Mr. Valli, you’re fulfilling metrical requirements at the expense of logical requirements.

Oh—and what exactly does Mr. Valli mean by I never laid a hand on you? ’Cause to me, that means you hit the person you’re talking to, and that’s just not cool, not to mention a very unlikely situation to have linked to adoration.

Even if you’re talking about a softer, more romantic touch (and next time you talk about sweet caresses, please choose a different turn of phrase), there’s still no cause and effect relationship, or at least not in that direction—generally, one desires to touch someone else because one adores that person, rather than adoring someone because you have touched them.

I have to admit that when i started this blog i didn’t expect that i’d be giving out relationship advice.

Like a million miles away from me you couldn’t see how I adored you

It amazes me how easily logic got thrown out the window so that the meter would work in the previous line, but then meter gets completely ignored here. Go figure.

Oh—and it isn’t really all that hard to see things that are a million miles away. I mean, the sun is over ninety million miles away, and it’s so easy to see that it can blind you.

So close, so close and yet so far

Random cliché!

Carried your books from school
Playing make-believe you’re married to me

I myself am a married man, and though i can’t presume to speak for all married men, and certainly not for married women, i don’t spend a lot of time carrying my wife’s textbooks. In fact, i didn’t do so even when she was actually recently in (grad) school.

Essentially, Mr. Valli, no matter how much you may have been into this girl, she was calmly and rationally analyzing the situation to determine whether you would be an acceptable partner in a long-term relationship. However, since you didn’t act in ways that might have matched her expectations of such behavior (might i suggest that a neck rub when she was looking tense or a friendly hug when she was feeling sad might have been a better choice than never, ever touching her in any way at all), she never reciprocated your desire. Sorry it didn’t work out for you, better luck in the future.

You were fifth grade, I was sixth

Two things:

First, a quick memo to Benny Mardones: If you’re gonna go after minors, it’s better to be eleven than to be thirty-three (or more). Just sayin’.

Second, is this the way they really talk in New Jersey? ’Cause for me, there’s a missing preposition (namely, ‘in’) before each of the ordinal numbers in that line. I may be wrong in this—and it’s entirely possible, since in the New York City conurbation, including at least much of North Jersey, people often wait ‘on line’ rather than ‘in line’, so there are other prepositional things going on there already—but unless advised otherwise, i’m going to attribute this to being an instance of ignoring English grammar in the slavish service of metrical faithfulness.

When we came to be walking home every day over Barnegat Bridge and Bay

Well, except, of course, when meter gets ignored.

Really, Mr. Valli, could you just make up your mind whether you want the metrical pattern of this song to be regular or not? I’m having trouble keeping track.

Anyway, Barnegat Bay is supposed to be a fairly scenic place, and so conducive to this sort of unrequited desire, i figure. Oddly, i can’t find a bridge on or near Barnegat Bay named “Barnegat Bridge”. As far as i can tell, though, this line is a tribute to a wooden bridge that was replaced with the (now structurally deficient) Thomas A. Mathis Bridge in 1950.

No snark in that last paragraph, just the results of a brief bout of geekery-inducing internet research. Sorry—i’ll try not to lapse into seriousness any more.

Til we grew into the me and you
Who went our separate ways

Obligatory Journey reference!

(Not to mention this highly amateurish but rather endearing version, and this much more professional but thoroughly hilarious one.)

Then we get the chorus again.

Headed for city lights
Climbed the ladder up to fortune and fame

See also ‘Metaphors, mixed’.

I worked my fingers to the bone
Made myself a name

I never realized how lucky i was that my parents simply gave me a name. I can’t imagine having to build my own—i mean, where would i get the materials?

Funny, I seem to find that no matter how the years unwind,
Still I reminisce about the girl I miss
And the love I left behind

You know, it really sounds like you stayed in love, and she never was in love with you. Therefore, you didn’t leave it behind, since there was nothing to leave behind—in fact, if anything, you brought it with you. As a result, Mr. Valli, i’m afraid that i’m going to have to recommend that you be placed in Remedial Logic 099.

(I’ve never actually been a student or a teacher at a college that offered Remedial Logic, but i’m thinking that it would have to be the most horribly frustrating class to teach ever. “No, Frankie, saying ‘But i’m right’ more often than the person you’re arguing with doesn’t constitute well-formed evidence for a claim…”)

And then we get the chorus again, again.

All my life I will remember how warm and tender
We were way back then, oh baby

Dude, she just wasn’t that into you. I know it’s harsh to hear it, but really, it’s time to get over it and move on.

Though I’m feeling sad regrets I know I won’t ever forget
You, my childhood friend

And then we’re given one last bizarre cause-and-effect relationship to mull over. I mean, Mr. Valli is saying he won’t ever forget some girl he knew when he was a preteen despite the fact that he’s feeling regret? Seriously, how does that connection between those things even work? I guess, hypothetically, he wouldn’t be feeling regret if he’d forgotten her, but then it’d be something like “I’m feeling no regrets though i haven’t managed to forget” or somesuch—really, the opposite of what he’s saying. I think he’s trying to say “I’m feeling sad regrets because i know i won’t ever forget”—but that doesn’t work with the meter, and as we’ve already learned, this song is all about throwing logic out the window in order to preserve the meter, except of course for when the metrical pattern gets completely ignored.

(And then, just to mess with us, Mr. Valli closes us off with one final repetition of the chorus during the fadeout, so as to remind us that his eyes have achieved sentience and are capable of emotional reactions—like you hadn’t been properly creeped out by that idea yet.)

The Shangri-Las: Leader of the Pack

So over here at Lyrics, Weakly central I’ve been hanging out in the 70s for the past few weeks, but today we’re going even further back—back to 1964, when the teen tragedy subgenre of doo-wop music was at its peak, shortly to give way to Beatlemania. And what better example of teen tragedy than the Shangri-Las’ #1 hit, “Leader of the Pack”?

If you’re not familiar with the song, it’s summarized rather neatly on its Wikipedia page. The summary doesn’t do the absolute incoherence of the story justice, though—for that you have to go to the lyrics themselves. So let’s do so, where we start with some forebodingly minor piano chords, leading into a conversation, presumably at the corner ice cream shop, or wherever it is well-groomed clean-cut white kids gathered back then.

(By the way, the narrator of this story is named Betty, and one of the singers in the Shangri-Las was Betty Weiss. I have no idea if she was the lead singer on this song—and what little i’ve been able to find seems to point to it being her sister, Mary Weiss—but i’m going to call her Betty just to make things easier for myself.)

Voice 1, spoken: Is she really going out with him?
Voice 2, spoken: Well, there she is. Let's ask her.
Voice 3, spoken: Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Betty, spoken: Mm-hmm.

So there’s the setup, with Betty wearing Jimmy’s ring. This apparently was a big deal back in the late 50s and early 60s—it meant that you were “going steady”—and the smugness in Betty’s closed-lips affirmative is palpable.

Voice 1, spoken: Gee, it must be great riding with him.

Her friends, naturally enough, are impressed. Not only does she have a boyfriend, he has a motorized conveyance (a motorcycle, as we find out later from the sound effects) with which he can drive her places.

What more could a middle-class girl want?

Voice 2, spoken: Is he picking you up after school today?

And he appears to no longer be in school. Betty done found herself an older guy!

Betty, spoken: Unh-unh.

And with this sad little verbal shake of the head, the first cracks in Betty’s absolutely wonderful world start to show.

You’d think that the response to such an answer would be “Really? Why not?” That’s what i’d ask, anyway—it would keep the flow of the conversation going. But Betty’s friends refuse to submit to such hidebound conventions.

Voices 1, 2, and 3, spoken: By the way, where’d you meet him?

They were hoping that Betty would give a simple answer like “At that bar in Chelsea” so that they can follow up with another non sequitur along the lines of “Incidentally, what color is his hair?” Instead, the singing starts. (I’ve put background vocals, done by the remaining three members of the group, in parentheses.)

I met him at the candy store.
He turned around and smiled at me.
You get the picture? (Spoken: Yes, we see.)

At the candy store? I’m imagining the candy store in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a bunch of ten-year-olds milling around and buying Wonka Bars while some motorcycle-riding tough guy tries to pick up any high school girls who accidentally walk in. Not that that would be remotely creepy, of course.

That’s when I fell for (the leader of the pack).

A guy looks at you in a candy store, you fall for him right away? I only hope he bought you the big box of chocolates.

But despite such an auspicious beginning, things aren’t all sex and cookies for the loving couple.

My folks were always putting him down (down, down).
They said he came from the wrong side of town.
(Whatcha mean when ya say that he came from the wrong side of town?)

Apparently Betty’s friends don’t understand certain common idioms used in the English language, so to answer them: It means that Jimmy resides in a section of the town that is generally associated with a lower socioeconomic class, or possibly even a criminal element.

In other words, Betty is calling her parents classist prigs—you know, Power to the People! and Down With the Man! and all that. Oh, and the main message of this song, too, which is True Love Starts in Candy Stores!

(And i’m not even going to mention the insanity of trying to fit the question into the meter of the song.)

They told me he was bad,
But I knew he was sad.
That’s why I fell for (the leader of the pack).

Okay, i realize this is being narrated by a teenage girl who’s recently had a pretty severe shock (as we find out later in the song), but that’s no excuse for this sort of narrative idiocy. I mean, let’s break this down, shall we?

First of all, being bad and being sad are not mutually exclusive, no matter what Betty seems to think.

Second, why would being sad be so utterly attractive? Really, i just don’t get it—“Oh, you look depressed, let’s go out” just isn’t the way my brain works. Apparently, though, Betty is made of sterner stuff than i am.

And finally, this is the second time it’s happened, but what’s up with the motorcycle revving here? There are some sound effects that make sense in the context of the story later in the song, but we’ve already established that Jimmy and his motorcycle aren’t coming to pick Betty up, so why are we hearing it now?

Speaking of the motorcycle sound effect, it was put to much better use on the Detergents’ parody of this song, “Leader of the Laundromat”.

One day my dad said, “Find someone new”.
I had to tell my Jimmy we’re through.

As the father of multiple daughters, part of me thinks that i should play this song to them over and over while they’re sleeping so as to subliminally convince them that if i disapprove of one of their boyfriends all i need to do is say “Find someone new” and they’ll break it off. They’d probably actually just laugh at me, but a man can dream, can’t he?

So anyway, Betty heeds her father’s advice, and so our good doormat protagonist goes to find Jimmy and break up with him. (My guess is that she just followed the sound of the gratuitous motorcycle.)

(Whatcha mean when ya say that ya better go find somebody new?)

Okay, the background singers maybe had an excuse not understanding the idiom they questioned earlier in the song, but this one just proves they’re being difficult.

He stood there and asked me why,
But all I could do was cry.

Besides, she realized how lame it would sound to say “Because my dad told me to.”

I’m sorry I hurt you (the leader of the pack).

The next bit is all spoken, for what it’s worth.

He sort of smiled and kissed me goodbye.
The tears were beginning to show.
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow

Twisted Sister, of all people, had the best treatment ever of the drove away on that rainy night line—look carefully at 2:04 in the linked video for the win!

Whether he heard, I’ll never know.

This is the big foreboding line—if the minor-key piano chords hadn’t clued you in already, now you know that something very, very bad is about to happen.

(No! No! No! No! No! No! No!)
Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!

This is accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle driving away and crashing, in case you still needed the tragedy of the moment pounded into your skull.

So Betty’s standing there in the rain, and Jimmy’s now dead. Pretty rough for her—so let’s go to her reaction (which is sung—the moment that’s so dreadful that it merits speaking is past).

I felt so helpless, what could I do,
Remembering all the things we’d been through.
In school they all stop and stare.
I can’t hide the tears, but I don’t care.
I’ll never forget him (the leader of the pack).

Pretty rough for her—except, um, back at the beginning of the song, she was so blasé about everything, that it kind of undercuts the pathos of the moment for me. I mean, i’ve never had a significant other die on me, but i’m pretty sure if someone asked me “Is [name of dead person] picking you up after school today?” i’d most likely do one of two things: Say “No, [name of dead person] is dead” or, probably more likely, burst into tears. (Maybe both.) Betty is apparently much more of a tough girl than i’ll ever be—she just responded back with a simple unh-unh.

Maybe she’s just in shock in the memory of all the things they’d been through—you know, all that stuff that took up so much of her time that her friends, um, had no idea whether she was dating Jimmy at all. Yeah, all those things they’d managed to go through in two hours spread over three days or so, apparently.

And yes, i do recognize that i overanalyze song lyrics. Still, i suspect that this bit of emotional inconsistency would really bother me even if i didn’t, and i figure i can’t be alone in that—can i?

And then, in case you didn’t get that Jimmy’s dead, we get the following on a repeat and fade:

(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!
(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!
(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!

Well, at least “Leader of the Pack” doesn’t have the utter sappiness of the whole class ring idiocy in Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel”—so we might as well take the small victories, right?

Starship: We Built This City

Rock and roll has a long tradition of self-referential songs. (The pinnacle, of course, was the song “Bad Company”, from the Bad Company album, by the band…erm, Bad Company.) Rock isn’t alone in this, of course—hip-hop does it even more, and blues has been steeped in the practice since before the era of recorded music.

So it comes as no surprise that twenty years after Jefferson Airplane was formed, Grace Slick and company, now working under the name Starship, decided that they were established enough to talk about how great they were. The best part of all this, perhaps, is that they did this in the mid–80s, which means they made a really, really stupid video for the song—and we should all be glad that they did, because if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have the opportunity to mock it.

True story: Back when i was in my late teens i went through a classic-rock period, which included, of course, getting heavily into classic Jefferson Airplane. During this time i insulted a friend terribly by telling her she looked like Grace Slick. Unfortunately, it took me quite literally years to figure out what i’d said wrong. Now, though, i understand—while my familiarity with Grace Slick was largely mid– to late–60s Grace Slick, her point of reference was mid– to late–80s Grace Slick. There is an important difference. (Oddly, mid– to late–00s Grace Slick has recovered some of her former attractiveness. Forget frying pans—maybe the visual history of Grace Slick is all that’s necessary to combat drug abuse.)

Further news: Blender magazine rated this song as the worst hit song ever. Probably overly harsh, but i can sympathize.

Anyway, with all that as background, let’s get to the lyrics.

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
We built this city on rock and roll

I really have to wonder what a city built on rock and roll would look like. In my observation, cities are generally built on foundations made of things like large rocks and reinforced cement pilings, with the occasional high-tech substrate thrown in (particularly in seismically active regions). All of these things share an important feature: They are solid materials.

Rock and roll, on the other hand, being sound waves, is not a solid material. I would expect, then, that a city built on rock and roll would be subject to sudden and calamitous collapse. Apparently not, though, since the good people of Starship built an entire city on the stuff, and it’s solid enough to sing about. All hail the genius of the firm of Baldwin, Slick, Thomas, Chaquico, and Sears, Architectural Partners! Take that, Frank Gehry!

Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place

Okay: I don’t know you, or recognize your face. Further, i don’t care who goes to that kind of place.

More seriously, these lines have nothing at all to do with the rest of the song. In fact, exactly what kind of place is “that” kind of place remains completely unanswered, which bothers me more than it probably should.

Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night

This song has so many idiocies in so little space, it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches for a blog like this one.

I mean, i can kind of understand knee deep in the hoopla—Starship was really, really good at self-promoting, they sold a bunch of albums, they sold out large arenas regularly, they were arguably the first big-name band to use the internet in any real way. So fine, that makes for an opaque but catchy self-reference, and i’m willing to give them a point for that. But then to follow it with sinking in your fight?!? That’s a pure non sequitur, and not in a good way. Sorry, you lose that point, and i’m going to have to take another one away for fear you’ll break it.

And the thing about runaways? I don’t have the strength to even start.

Marconi plays the mamba

This one line may be in the top five most mocked lyrics from the 80s—and for good reason.

I mean, so they bring up Guglielmo Marconi, widely thought to be the inventor of radio. (Not true, but he’s the one who figured out how to make it practical.) Fine—they’re singing about rock and roll (and building cities), so they reference the way most of us still listened to rock music in the dark age of 1985.

But the mamba?!? The mamba is a venomous snake, which means that if Marconi were alive enough to play the mamba, he’d be dead by the time he was done playing it. (I just got a brainflare of Zombie Marconi playing a guitar with a mamba as one of its strings, like in that episode of The Jackson 5ive where they go to London—see the bit starting at 3:24 in the linked video—and they have to get through…Sorry. I’ll move on to other things now.)

Anyway—maybe they originally had something more musical, like Marconi plays a samba, but then they realized Starship doesn’t play anything remotely like samba, so they changed it. Can’t use Marconi plays the conga, doesn’t rhyme, maybe bongos? No, still not. How about mambo? It’s a dance, and it more or less rhymes—yeah, i know, this isn’t a mambo, but it’s not like the kids pay attention to it. What? You mean you’re uncomfortable advertising competing styles of music, since this is an ode to rock and roll? Fine—how about mamba? It doesn’t rhyme, but it’s not some other style of music—so let’s go with that.

(By the way—one of my sisters plays the marimba. Beautiful-looking and beautiful-sounding instrument. Doesn’t fit thematically or metrically there, but at least it would have made more sense.)

Listen to the radio

Sadly, drawing Marconi’s name through the slime was done entirely to set up this line.

Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll!
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll
Built this city, we built this city on rock and roll

Yes, i remember perfectly well—you told me just a few lines ago.

Not that i believe you, but i certainly do remember.

Someone always playing corporation games
Who cares they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page

This is where Starship gets a little bit defensive and, perhaps not coincidentally, a little hypocritical.

First of all, there’s a bit of a whine here about how it’s not a big deal when names change. This from a band that had just changed its name (to Starship from Jefferson Starship) after some years before changing its name again (it was one of the bands to emerge directly from the ashes of Jefferson Airplane). So see that haters? Corporations do it all the time, so it’s no big deal!

But it’s not like we’re corporate or anything, even though we keep changing names just like a corporation! No, it’s the corporate types who try to keep us down, writing us off the page, calling us irresponsible. We just want to dance here, wherever here is! We’re cool, we’re with it. We’re, like, totally tubular and gnarly and those other words these crazy 80s kids use.

Bonus movie gambit: The 1978 film FM does a similar thing—it’s set up as a radio station standing up to The Man (big corporate ownership) and playing whatever it wants—but what it wants to play, apparently, is completely corporate mainstream rock of the late 70s. (And the movie completely ignores the existence of punk, which just makes it even sadder.)

Really, it doesn’t work—Starship, you weren’t fighting The Man in 1985, you were The Man. You had been assimilated at least a decade earlier. Just deal with it honorably, okay?

(Then we have some repetition of the stuff about Marconi and remembering, which i’ll skip.)

It’s just another Sunday in a tired old street
Police have got the choke hold
Ohhhhh and we just lost the beat

So are they saying that police violence is so commonplace in this tired old street that it’s “just” another day when it happens? Or are they saying that the peace of a Sunday has been shattered by the ultimate symbols of The Man? Or are they just spewing lines with no connection to anything, knowing that payola works and they’ll have a hit anyway?

I know my vote.

And the we just lost the beat bit would have been cool if they really had played some game with the rhythm of the song, maybe shifting the vocals just ahead of or behind the beat. Do they do this? Of course not! And why? Because that would be different, and different means you don’t get incessant airplay on the 50,000–watt stations.

Who counts the money underneath the bar
Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars

I would actually assume that the answers to these two questions are different. Either way, i’m willing to help those guitars get wrecked.

Also, if you listen to the song, the stress pattern on into our guitars is all wrong—for years i thought it was actually into parked guitars because even though the stress pattern is still wrong for that phrase, it’s not as bad.

Don’t tell us you need us, ’cause we’re the ship of fools

Don’t tell you i need you? Gladly.

And can i just say how happy i am that you called yourselves a ship of fools, so i don’t have to?

Looking for America, crawling through your schools

This is creepy. Nothin’ but creepy. I get an image of a drug-addled late–70s to mid–80s Grace Slick doing a belly-crawl along the linoleum floors of my old high school…Great, now i need some brain bleach.

Don't you remember

And then we go into a bizarre bit where there’s what sounds like a radio announcer talking about San Francisco (without naming it). Maybe it’s Marconi.

I listened primarily to Washington DC radio stations as a teenager, and they dubbed over that section so that it referred to DC. I was quite seriously surprised when I found out later that’s not the way it sounded on the album. I assume that other markets did the same thing.

Looking back on it, that’s actually kind of pathetic.

Anyway, then we get more about Marconi and the mamba, and (by my count) seventeen repetitions of some variant of the sentence “We built this city” Yes, that’s right—that phrase is now burrowed so deeply into your mind that it’ll take a listen to Benny Mardones’s “Into the Night” to get it out of there. Have fun!

The Beach Boys: Little Saint Nick

So Merry Xmas to one and all!

True story: I was going to start this blog sometime after the turn of the year. But then i realized that if i waited until January to start this i’d have to wait a full year to deal with this song, which would easily be deserving of a Grammy nomination for Worst Non-Comedic Xmas Song Ever. (Worst Comedic Xmas Song Ever? “Reggae Christmas Eve in Transylvania” by the otherwise-amusing Count Floyd, no question.)

So no, i’m not a fan of this one. At all. And yet it remains in heavy rotation every year when top–40 stations across the country switch over to Xmas music sometime in November (maybe in October in some markets, the way things are going). At least it’s only two minutes long.

(By the way, if you’re not familiar with the song, you can have it burrow into your brain, as well, by following this link. If you absolutely must.)

What makes this song even worse, though, is that it was written by Mike Love and Brian Wilson. Yep, that’s right, universally acclaimed musical genius Brian Wilson was part of writing this utter horror of a song. Now, i’ll admit that i’m not a huge Brian Wilson fan—i don’t get what was so great about Pet Sounds, to begin with—but even so i can see (hear?) that Wilson was pretty good putting at together a single.

On “Little Saint Nick”, though, his genius took a holiday.

First of all, it’s a blatant act of self-plagiarism, since it essentially steals the tune of the really amazing California-surf-rock “Little Deuce Coupe”. This wouldn’t be so bad if Wilson and Love had been able to come up with decent lyrics to fit the tune.

What’s that? You don’t think they did all that bad a job? Well then—let’s go to the lyrics themselves, then, shall we?

Well, way up North where the air gets cold
There’s a tale about Christmas that you’ve all been told
And a real famous cat all dressed up in red
And he spends the whole year workin’ out on his sled.

Not the greatest opening ever, but not the worst. I mean, some of the lyrics are weird (Santa works out on his sled?—were the Rocky movies actually some sort of elaborate homage to this?), but nobody outside of Motown could do harmonies like the Beach Boys, and so we can let a little bit of that sort of thing slide just to listen to them.

For now.

It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)
It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)

In all fairness, we learn later that “the little Saint Nick” is Santa’s sleigh. However, given the preceding verse, you’d be forgiven for thinking it refers to Santa himself—and, for those of you who aren’t up on your English grammar, English grammar doesn’t allow articles (that is, a, an, or the) before proper names or phrases standing in for proper names. For example, you wouldn’t be able to say “Hey, mom, look! It’s the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!”

Like i said, it resolves itself later (in the very next line, in fact), but there’s a moment of grammatical whiplash there. Cracks are starting to appear in the façade of Brian Wilson’s lyrical talent, i fear—and they’re only gonna get wider.

Just a little bobsled, we call it ol’ Saint Nick

Just for the record, here’s the disambiguation on the name of the sleigh. Weird name, but fine. Whatever.

But she’ll walk a toboggan with a four speed stick
She’s candy apple red with a ski for a wheel
And when Santa hits the gas, man, just watch her peel.

This isn’t just an example of your basic, garden-variety stupid lyrics. This is mind-bogglingly, insanely stupid. I mean, what? The whole street-racing thing went well for you, so you decided to throw random automotive descriptions into the mix?

Let’s go through this logically, shall we?

First, we have a line that makes no sense to me at all—and it’s not a matter of misunderstanding the words, since this is one of the most clearly-sung lines in the entire song: “But she’ll walk a toboggan with a four speed stick”. Huh? I mean, i get that it’s got a four-speed manual transmission (keep that in mind, by the way—it’s important later on), but “But she’ll walk a toboggan”?! You can’t make up incomprehensibility like this!

And even if i actually am mishearing things, the only alternative i can come up with is “But she’s like a toboggan with a four speed stick”, which makes nearly as little sense, since as far as i can find toboggans are not normally outfitted for manual transmissions, let alone transmissions of any kind, as would be necessary for such a simile to work.

In comparison with that line, the second line is amazingly clear: “She’s candy apple red with a ski for a wheel”. Well, the color makes sense (and fits traditional descriptions of Santa’s sleigh), but “with a ski for a wheel” is, well, lacking. First of all, cars have four wheels, not one—so does this sled have one ski, or three wheels plus one ski (that is, one wheel having been replaced by a ski)? Maybe it’s a unicycle that’s been retrofitted with a ski for winter maneuverability. Oh, and a transmission.

At least the last line there lets us know it goes fast—and apparently there’s an engine there, since Santa Claus “hits the gas” to make it go.

It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)
It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)

More on the name of the sleigh.

By the way, did anyone else notice that the refrain calls it “little Saint Nick”, but the preceding verse said they call it “ol’ Saint Nick”? Well, which is it, Misters Wilson and Love? You’re being inconsistent here!

Run run reindeer
Run run reindeer ahhhhhhhh
Run run reindeer

This is a pointless little lyrical interlude, but it’s got the Beach Boys providing us meaningless but sweet, sweet harmonies, offering us a respite from the semantic train wreck that is the rest of this song.

But then…

Run run reindeer (we don’t miss no one)

…it gets a little creepy.

They’re talking about driving fast, and reindeer running, and they throw in “we don’t miss no one”?

Remind me to stay off the roads when Brian Wilson or Mike Love are driving. Or maybe they’re saying that they’re driving around, gunning for Santa’s reindeer? Either way, this is just weird.

He’s hauling through the snow at a frightenin’ speed,
With a half a dozen deer with–a Rudy to lead,
He’s gotta wear his goggles ’cause the snow really flies
And he’s cruisin’ every pad with a little surprise.

I’m not even going to comment on the “with–a Rudy” issue, ’cause there are larger problems here.

Consider: If Santa’s sleigh has that powerful an engine, mated that well to its transmission, and it moves that fast, the reindeer in the lead are, by this point in the song, dead—and, most likely, Santa’s windshield is shattered and his radiator is punctured.

At least we know why they don’t miss no one. Run, run reindeer, indeed.

It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)
It’s the little Saint Nick (little Saint Nick)

This little refrain isn’t sounding nearly as innocent any more, is it?

Ooooooo, merry Christmas Santa

I do like the fact that they’re wishing Santa a merry Xmas—he doesn’t get a lot of thanks, despite all he does for the holiday—but it does lead into…

Christmas comes this time each year!

…the dumbest line of the song—and this song has a lot of dumb lines.

Apparently Misters Love and Wilson think we’re too stupid to look at our calendars and realize it’s time to buy gifts for our friends and relations, so they feel the need to remind us. (Hey kids! All the cool kids are giving their friends The Beach Boys Christmas Album, now for sale!)

Well, either that, or they decided to give up before they came up with some sort of more meaningful sentiment to fill in the same meter. But that can’t be it! Brian Wilson’s a musical genius, right? He’d never be troubled by something like rhythm and meter gettin in the way of him saying exactly what he wanted to, right? (Pay no attention to the “with–a Rudy” behind the curtain, above.)

Ooooooo, merry Christmas Santa
Christmas comes this time each year!

And just to prove what they think of our collective intelligence level, they remind us one more time that they think we can’t be trusted to remember when major holidays happen.

It’s almost enough to make me want to sign on to the Kwanzaa thing.