Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Crimpshrine and Fifteen songs often interpolate or play with the idea of reworking/reusing lines from earlier famous songs within the lyrical and musical framework of songs, Ott's and Jack Curran's melodies are deceptive because they bury them in layers of distortion. However, just as their lyrical ambition often tells complex stories through the framework of deceptively simple choruses, the lyrics hide Easter eggs within simple love and relationship songs. Crimpshrine's "Tomorrow" borrowed lyrics from "Tomorrow" from  Annie , but Ott has continued to include popular lyrics in interesting ways. Pop melodies were common in many of the bands that played with Fifteen at 924 Gilman Street in the 1990s, but Ott's hardscrabble songs stand out because of their wordplay and insistence on melodic invention.  Other bands that played with them reveled in wordplay and definitive walking East Bay basslines, but generally fitted into different frameworks. While th...

 This is the second part of a summer series of Track This entries that will focus on lesser-known power pop songs. Oklahoma's The Dwight Twilley Band's debut album Sincerely is an undersung power-pop classic that borrows heavily from the Beatles early 70s modus operandi with sweet melodies and understated guitar. The deceptively simple title track follows that pattern as Twilley harmonizes over lead guitar that would not feel out of place on The White Album , although there is a slight southern feeling in its bittersweet revelations, but it never kicks into full gear. He sings "sincerely, I got what you need" as the guitar meanders in and out. The lyrics are metaphysical and lovelorn with Twilley's voice wavering about the death of love and how a "starcold soldier feels." The simple song repeats a basic pattern of understated instrumentation that leads to a call and response between Twilley's vocals and the meandering guitar. Nothing is resolved ...

What is classic rock anyway? Sometimes genre specification make me wonder, especially when I listen to music from numerous genres as I work. However, I often believe the genre, rock music, is not so much a genre as a catchall category for most types of guitar-based music made after 1965. Just like alternative rock, such subgenre categories as hard rock, have become close to meaningless. Those who have suffered through my endless diatribes about certain periods of music know that I reserve specific definitions for other genres: rock 'n' roll to me is a very specific type of music drawing from Sun Records luminaries like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Indeed, bands who play rock 'n' roll today follow this template. Yet it is more about rocking out on bass, guitar, and drums than exploring guitar solos. Rock 'n' roll is also an attitude like punk that gets the job done fast and dirty with little indulgence. In the last couple days my musical ex...

Matthew Sweet's "Sick of Myself," the first track from 100% Fun is the type of pure power pop mastery that is good for whatever ails your tired old soul. From the palm-muted opening to the first full clean power chords, the song makes its intentions known, rocking heavily with tight drumming and blasting guitars. The song was a call-to-arms in 1995, and its even better now. Sweet's everyman vocals have a bit of sweetness to them, and it sounds like he's having so much fun. The track harks back to 20/20, the solo work of Chris Bell, and the like, but there is a larger guitar presence, if not a Phil Spector attention to detail. Sweet doesn't take himself too seriously and even with the backing of guitar legends Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, both members of the far artier, yet no less explosive Television, the song maintains a ramshackle vibe. Listen to the sloppy, but spectacular, solos. Sweet's lyrical bent is pure power pop love and loss. His word ...

The first time I read Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , I hunkered down for the long haul on the floor of the bathroom at my old house and read and read and read. Bangs' manic prose and uncompromising taste enthralled me, sucking me deeper into rock critic fandom. It was definitely the late '90s, and I was in the early, heady stages of compulsive record collecting. I had already worked my way through a large chunk of the Greil Marcus catalog, but I was mostly known for my love of Flipside , MRR , and later Punk Planet , the bigger punk rock fanzines, which I would read front to back in study hall, poring over obscure record reviews and tantalizing columns, not forgetting the letter page. As I read over his many obsessions that night and into the early hours of dawn, while I should have been preparing for some exam or other, I felt like a kindred soul. Though I never entirely agreed with Bangs, or always understood just where he was coming from, I un...