Rating My CD's: WOO-HOO!

8. Blur -- Blur

The first time I heard Blur was sometime in college, during their Parklife phase, and I responded to them with active nausea. For some reason "Girls and Boys" was the most irritating song I heard that year, and I had no problem with making my feelings on this subject well known to any of my friends who were Blur fans. I'm still not a super-fan of the song; there's something in that rubber-band bass that just triggers the gag reflex, to say nothing of that wretched "always should be someone you really love" line, which can't decide if it's being cheekily naive or ironic. But where once was loathing has come now a kind of quiet understanding, if only because I endured far worse in the long dark rut of late-90's glam-disco sloppy-seconds.



And then there was a song that had no name, a song with only a number, the little song that could. I'm not sure if I really did despise "Song 2" when it first came out, or as with Nirvana, only pretended to. I do recall that the eponymous Blur disc that it came on was one of the first, maybe the first, contemporary rock CD's I ever bought, and for a long time it was one of my absolute favorites. Even now, though I'd barely listened to it in years, I recall how awfully damn fine some of these tracks are. A few favorites:

• Beetlebum -- sparse, scratched-out rythmn riff that builds by the chorus to a perfectly passionate and surprisingly complex opener. Basically the same idea as REM's "Leave" but shorter and better.
• Country Sad Ballad Man -- This song is ridiculous. The guitar riff sounds like a jews-harp, the vocals are oddly fey and the lyrics are opaque. So why do I think its absolutely perfect after Beetlebum and Song 2? Maybe it's the outro.
• On Your Own --  There's so much going on in this song, and it's all flying apart, and it's all working together, and back in the day it made me feel okay about walking my own path and at the same time making my pine for parties I'd never attend. Which brings me to:
• Death of a Party  -- I like this song so much that it made my never-finished list of the 20 Greatest Songs I Happened to Like Right Now back in 2005 over at The Essayist (the last three were "Liberty Calls" by Mike Watt, "Beat City" by the Raveonettes, and "Sins of My Father by Tom Waits, in case you cared). Rarely does melancholy sound like so much fun.

Now, if I was honest, I'd say that a lot of the glam-dreck I so deeply despised can be found here. Glam is basically the music of machines, especially in the late-90's version, and there's more than a touch of Krautrock in this album. But this album has an honesty and freshness that very few rock bands had in 1997, when Smashing Pumpkins was swirling the drain and nu-metal was taking over they earth. In other words, there's no ghost in the machine, whirring and whining away like in the more unpleasant Neu! tracks; there's a full-fledged human heart, pumping its will onto the Matrix that surrounds it. That meant a lot to me when I was graduating college, and unlike other things from my past, I'm nowhere near being ashamed of it.

Grade: LL