(15) Liz Phair, "Fuck and Run"
I actually sang this song in karaoke one time a couple years ago, and I have to say it was a weird experience. “Fuck and Run” has a weird affect for a karaoke choice—it’s just delivered so drily, and the lyrics are dark, but yet the music is upbeat, a combination that I’ve always been fond of, and I didn’t really think it through before taking it on. Then I found myself singing “I want a boyfriend / I want all the stupid old shit / like letters and sodas,” in which these courting clichés are both desirable and mockable at once, and are in fact both desired and mocked. This was in the Music Box, Thursday night, I think, in Tucson, after hitting the roller skating rink for Adults Only Night. I was just shocked to see the song on the list at all, and I will always sign up for a song like that just to see what happens. Hard to approximate Liz’s delivery, apparent hardness, or the serious well of sadness beneath it. I didn’t feel good after singing it, and I can’t imagine anyone else did exactly either. I mean, you’re drinking your shitty PBR and waiting for something to happen, finally something interesting is going to happen on a night like this, and there you are listening to some guy sing “Fuck and run / even when I was seventeen / even when I was twelve.” As Allison points out, one way of considering this matchup is to consider that these singers are each writing their songs about the other, which we have to admit is a weird idea, but also a phenomenal one. Thinking about it in that way might just level the playing field a bit.
vs
(2) Radiohead, "Fake Plastic Trees"
WHICH IS SADDEST? WHICH SHOULD ADVANCE? VOTE BY 3/6 at 9am
Radiohead is a power program with a legacy and a championship look, but Liz Phair is a tricky first-round matchup. I can’t imagine picking any song in this bracket matching up strength to strength against the fragility and soaring grandeur of Thom Yorke’s vocals here, but Phair isn’t playing the same game, is she? Radiohead’s methodical and technical, seemingly impervious: see how the song moves from delicacy to assertion? How it isolates its vulnerability and turns on it and multiplies it by beauty and becomes anthemic? “Fake Plastic Trees” is a Goliath, perfectly assembled for a deep run in the tournament, if it doesn’t stumble into its David here.
WHICH IS SADDEST? WHICH SHOULD ADVANCE? VOTE BY 3/6 at 9am
Which song's sadder?
I buy no one's irony, okay?
ReplyDeleteReally? No one's? Not even Chloe's?
DeleteNot sure that what Liz is going for is irony here. For what it's worth, though the voting on the blog is seriously leaning Radiohead, the voting on Twitter is seriously leaning Liz Phair. At this point it's anyone's game...
ReplyDeleteRadiohead could field four #1 seeds. Unstoppable sadness.
ReplyDeleteQuite a few of the high seeds (Cure, Elliott Smith, Joy Division, REM, Smiths, anyhow) could have been multiply represented here with no loss of quality. When you've got the sad you can go to the well and go to the well and it don't run dry. We didn't include multiple songs by a band because more variety seems better. Radiohead could have had several songs off The Bends (High and Dry, anyone?) or OK Computer (No Surprises was in the play-in against Fake Plastic Trees), anyhow; or, whatever, even the singles from Pablo Honey. The more interesting questions are the one-offs, who had one spectacularly sad song and that was it. Phair's no one-off, obviously, and if you're following the twitter voting too (we do two polls, one on my twitter and one here, and they'll be aggregated*), it's almost even at this point between Liz Phair and Radiohead, which is shocking, but there's a long ways to go. This is the only really competitive matchup in the first day of play.
ReplyDelete* Because it turns out non-twitter users can't vote on twitter polls, we thought it better to have two polls and combine them.
For me, Liz isn't asking us to be sad, exactly. I think she wants me to say, "damn" or "me too" or even "is this what eventually caused Funstyle?"
ReplyDeleteIt's a hair I'm splitting here, but such is the nature of this matchup, one where I think folks are probably weighing in, good or bad, on how they feel about Radiohead's body of work.
Or how they feel about big sad sensitive boy rock…
ReplyDeleteWhich is probably coterminous (though you raise a good point; I voted Radiohead despite souring on big sad sensitive boy rock mainly because it seemed disingenuous to my body of fandom not to own it -- and that video still hits me where my big sad sensitive boy lives).
ReplyDeleteMy entire comment here would have been avoided if I could have just liked your comment.
I think when it comes to sadness you got to vote your heart, not your head. For instance I remain susceptible to a lot of the things I've always been susceptible to, and you know what, I'm voting that shit all the way, though intellectually I understand they are in some way adolescent and also losing propositions.
ReplyDelete