So the other night, Janet and I sit down to watch The Departed. But no sooner do we settle in on the movie couch and hit “play” than we hear the opening riff of “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack. (In the past, some have described this soundtrack as “killer.”)
“Wait just a second,” I say. “This is Scorsese, isn’t it?”
“You know damn well it is,” Janet says.
“Well, what the fuck is up with this shit, then?” I say. “Does he have to use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes?”
“He doesn’t use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes,” Janet says.
“Oh yes he does,” I say. “He used it to suggest a kind of deadly intensity in Casino and he used it to suggest a kind of scary intensity in Goodfellas and he used it to suggest a kind of otherworldly intensity in The Last Temptation of Christ.”
“All right, I call bullshit,” Janet says. “Martin Scorsese did not use ‘Gimme Fucking Shelter’ in The Last Fucking Temptation of Christ.”
“Oh yes he did,” I say. “When Willem Dafoe is getting it on, fantasy-sequence-wise, with Barbara Hershey, it’s all like ‘love, sister, it’s just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.’ I swear you can’t fucking miss it.”
“You are so fucking making this shit up,” Janet says.
Readers, I parried her. But she had a point: Martin Scorsese has not, in fact, used “Gimme Shelter” in the soundtrack to every movie he has ever made. He refrained from using it in The Color of Money, which featured important Adult Contemporary talents like Eric Clapton and Phil Collins instead; he refrained from using it in The King of Comedy and Raging Bull (but check out the young Joe Pesci as Joey La Motta!), and, most amazingly, he refrained from using it in Mean Streets — though he did use “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which amounts to the same thing, because. . . .
This is not actually an Arbitrary But Fun Martin Scorsese Film Soundtrack post! It is, instead, as its title suggests, the long-delayed and much-anticipated and surely controversial Arbritary But Fun Songs That Have Great and Even Electrifying Openings and Don’t Go Anywhere From There post. You know, the one I promised to write in some comment thread long ago, which was probably lost to posterity when Amanda decided to throw all my old posts off the sled back when she was being pursued across the Internets by Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin.*
And as I suggested in that comment, the Stones catalog is full of songs that have great and even electrifying opening sequences but don’t go wind up going anywhere, because (for obvious reasons) the Stones wrote a great many songs around simple (but compelling, even electrifying) guitar riffs — or sitar riffs, as in the case of “Paint It Black.” The Beatles wrote a few of their own: even though their songs were usually written as songs and worked and reworked to an incredible degree of high-gloss polish (as the second Anthology CD makes clear in its juxtaposition of the raw-cut Lennon-on-acoustic-guitar version of “Yes It Is” with the final cut), things like “She’s A Woman,” “Day Tripper,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” are basically written around one (brilliant) repeating guitar line. One way you can tell when you’re dealing with a Great But Not Going Anywhere song: there’s no middle eight, because the song is so dependent on (or so deeply dug into) its central riff that it can’t imagine going anywhere from there melodically.
Twenty years ago, my musician friends and I used to argue about whether Hüsker Dü’s cover of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” fell into this category. There’s no question that it’s an intense, even visceral song that takes the anarchic possibilities of McGuinn’s Coltrane-inspired guitar work and translates them into a nice frenetic thrash. But after the initial headbanging shock of the first twenty seconds, Larry Gallagher insisted, the rest of the song has nothing to offer but more incoherent screaming. It’s a great song and one of the great covers of all time, mind you, but over the course of twenty years I’ve decided that Larry was right. The song doesn’t really go anywhere.
“Gimme Shelter” is, admittedly, on the cusp. The opening really is tantalizing; it speaks of promise and menace all at once — but mostly of menace. Charlie enters with two snap-to-attention quarters on the snare, and off we go . . . into more of the same. Except that Merry Clayton shows up for the last verse and tears the song to shreds, crying, “rape, murder,” so you really can’t say that the song doesn’t take all that intensity to The Next Level. It does. Whereas despite Pinko Punko’s delusional sense that “Monkey Man” is “perfect I tell you — perfect,” the truth is that “Monkey Man,” like “Satisfaction” and even like “All Down the Line” (which almost kicks itself into a higher gear at the end of the first chorus), is an incandescent song whose incandescence exhausts itself almost immediately. The afterglow is nice, yes, but it’s an afterglow, and let’s not fool ourselves about its candlepower.
Liz Phair’s “Supernova” is in this category too (play it and see! and look, no middle eight!), but the single most disappointing song in this genre, for me, has to be David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit.” (It’s on Aladdin Sane. Play it and see! And look, no middle eight!) Every time I hear that opening — the guitar churning out that Bo Diddley beat, the congas, the sense of urgency — I think something amazing is going to follow. And it never does. But that’s OK! It’s just one of those songs. Someone should use its first twenty or twenty-five seconds in a movie sometime, to suggest a kind of potentially psychotic intensity.
____
* This is a joke. In fact, it is a double joke, because (a) it is a reference to the full-blown wingnut claim that Amanda deleted old posts that were actually lost in a server switch and (b) none of my old posts were, in fact, deleted, as the relevant hyperlink makes clear. A double joke, you see. Extra extra funny!
69 Responses to “Arbitrary but Fun Sunday: Special Songs that Have Great Openings but Don’t Go Anywhere Edition!”
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Hmm. I’m thinking of two songs that I love, songs of great opening intensity that, by the criteria I’ve picked up here, should be thought to “go nowhere,” but I love them, maybe perversely: Wire’s “Strange” and the Rolling Stones “She’s a Rainbow.” Make of that what you will.
Come on, you can’t really talk about Stones songs that start out great but fizzle without its ultimate expression: “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” I mean for the first two minutes it’s a total masterpiece, but then it keeps going on for another five minutes of nonsense after the song has all but ended. A very frustrating tune.
Sure, this isn’t a specifically Stones-themed thread, but you’re right, they’ve got several. Since they are now dominating my head I’ll have to come back with examples from other artists…
I don’t know if it counts, because the whole song is awesome: “Reflections” by The Supremes. That crazy psychedelic oscillator in the beginning totally trips me out. It used to frighten me when I was a kid. They insert it in some random places in the song, but the only place they really use it is for the opening.
I know it was the theme for China Beach…did Scorsese ever use it? I feel like he did but I can’t remember for what.
Beethoven’s fifth symphony. He just kept repeating the same damned four-note sequence.
Possibilities include:
Simple Minds, Waterfront.
Roxy Music, Same Old Scene.
Shihad, Pacifier.
Rammstein, Amerika.
Fatboy Slim redoing Cornershop, Brimful of Asha
Corey Hart, Sunglasses at Night.
Cake, Comfort Eagle.
Blondie, Call Me.
Barenaked Ladies, One Week.
Arcade Fire, Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)
Alan Parsons Project, Eye In The Sky
From which we can conclude that I (i) have far too much 80s music in my playlists and (ii) don’t know what I’m talking about.
False Palndromes by Andrew Bird. As much as i love the song it can’t possibly live up to that phenomenal synth sitar opening.
I should have thought that this commentary on Gimme Shelter was obvious after the remake by Sisters of Mercy.
Add to the list, Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus and anything by Eddie Money (just because I HATE him and I work with people who listen to him…yes, I’m on a new level of hell).
“Gallows Pole” from the Led Zeppelin III album.
I always thought it opened really well - just the right touch of anticipation, dread, and melancholy. Really nice acoustic work on guitar and mandolin. But the song doesn’t go anywhere, and the ending leaves much to be desired.
But the first couple minutes are chilling.
Really, the whole album is frustrating that way. Several interesting homages to classic acoustic blues combined with several other odd pieces. “Immigrant Song” was the “hit” off the album, and it’s pretty piss-poor compared to most other Zeppelin hits.
It’s sad when when great musicians almost make it but fail miserably in the end…
“Layla” by Eric Clapton - which is still a great song, but does not live up to the promise of its opening 24 seconds or so.
-MH
I agree with Dan Jacobson, when you first suggested the idea, I immediately went to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”
Jefferson Airplane had more than their share of great openings, some of which they delivered on (”White Rabbit” & “Volunteers” for instance), but I think one of their best is somewhat wasted in “We Could Be Together” - well, other than the line All your private property is target for your enemies - musically the rest of the song doesn’t measure up to the opening.
To me “Smoke on the Water” is a pretty insipid song, but as proprieters of guitar stores everywhere know, that opening sequence does tend to stick.
In more recent times, I think much of The White Stripes’ oeuvre can be characterized as great openings lookiing for songs to be on the front of.
or sitar riffs, as in the case of “Paint It Black.”
I’ve always thought that “Paint it Black” was based on the drumming rather than anything else.
“Immigrant Song” was the “hit” off the album, and it’s pretty piss-poor compared to most other Zeppelin hits.
Ah, yes, but without “Immigrant Song,” we wouldn’t have Viking kittens!
“Layla” by Eric Clapton - which is still a great song, but does not live up to the promise of its opening 24 seconds or so.
Talk about a Scorcese song — I can’t hear that song anymore without thinking of corpses in pink Cadillacs.
Interesting to note: Scorsese’s next film is a “career-spanning documentary” about —- THE ROLLING STONES.
Just to let you know.
Led Zeppelin are the true masters at this. “Immigrant Song”, definitely. “Misty Mountain Hop”, same problem. I think it’s the issue that Robert Plant is good in small doses but wears thin very quickly.
“No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age is a contender. Oh, that gorgeous haunting rift that starts the song and the dread that sets in when you realize there’s a solid chance they’re going to play it to death. The dread kind of adds to the song, in a weird way.
The song that is most anti-this-tendency might be “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, a perfect song of building fury.
Sometimes I think that the Minutemen did write all their songs like that. There’s probably some secret stash of “the rest of the songs” by the Minutemen somewhere. They probably wrote hundreds of 5 minute songs that started great and went nowhere and realized, in a stroke of genius, that the only solution was to make the beginning of the song the entire song. Double Nickels On A Dime is like 30+ great openings without putting you through the rest of the song, or rushing you through it so as not to distract you from the opening. Utter genius.
Minutemen on YouTube:
“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor surely fits this.
A current example of this syndrome is Wolfmother’s “White Unicorn”, which starts with an delicate and haunting riff and some interesting lyrics, and then seems to fall apart as the song progresses.
It’s a mess, but that opening is still very intriguing…
“Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello…but that opening is what they play in my dreams when I come up to bat at Dodger Stadium.
“Cadillac Ranch” (strangely) never goes anywhere after the opening, but I love to sing along anyway.
“Panic in Detriot” is a favorite of mine but the lyrics are dreadful in an ominous, fever-dream way. And help me out, because I’m not a musician. Wouidn’t the part of that song when the tempo changes and the lyrics start,
“Putting on some clothes I made my way to school
And I found my teacher
crouching in his overalls
I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine
And jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights”
that is evenually followed by repeating the opening riff,
be a middle 8? If not, what is it?
The Sex Pistol’s Pretty Vacant always does this to me. The first 30 seconds–the tense guitar plucking, then the drums crash in, then another guitar riffs over top–you think it’s going to keep building and just crash all over the place, but then they switch off into a totally different feel for the rest of the song and it doesn’t really live up to the beginning.
OT: Normally, I’d never say anything about the ads, but the “stripper with cartoon bestiality” tower that’s going on right now (bullz-eye.com whatever that is) — is making this post seriously NSFW and I have a very permissive work environment. Just FYI.
Back on topic: Yay! IMS that I can understand. :::sits at the feet of the masters to learn:::
Zuzu: Viking kittens, hee!
The Smiths’ “Barbarism Begins At Home” fits nicely here as well. I’m guessing it really only ends at all because Andy Rourke passes out from fatigue, but even then it’s about 3 minutes late. But that beginning has so much promise…
Also “100%” by Sonic Youth. And Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s version of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” With that one it’s like… it’s awesome, it’s awesome, it’s awesome and then…fizzle.
Though it marks me as a complete musical philistine, I’m going to offer “Enemy” by Days of the New (though a quick Google search tells me I have to specify the version with the guitar intro, not the electronic intro). They’ve got a decent musical and lyrical theme building in the first 45 seconds, and then they just repeat it again and again for four minutes. Oh, plus a bridge that feels like it came from a completely different song.
Elvis Costello, “Pump It Up.”
Sorry, thought I’d lost the first comment for the second time.
OMG. Viking Kittens is way better than Gay Bar.
They probably wrote hundreds of 5 minute songs that started great and went nowhere and realized, in a stroke of genius, that the only solution was to make the beginning of the song the entire song.
And I’m of course reminded of what they did to (with?) ‘Ain’t Talking About Love.’ Brilliant.
Oh, that gorgeous haunting rift that starts the song and the dread that sets in when you realize there’s a solid chance they’re going to play it to death.
To shoehorn the Stones in, there’s also the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony.’ Does the same thing.
Then there are songs whose beginnings suck rocks but shock you with brilliance the rest of the way. I’ve only one to offer right now: ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ by the Koobas (which I understand has since been covered). I like it best after I’ve chopped the first bars off the mp3.
“James Dean”, The Eagles. I still like the guitar intro, but the rest of the song is a painful disappointment. It might have worked, had they been a scrungy bar band, but it does not function for their patented 100% California White Boy sound.
Viking Kittens FTW!
And no has yet mentioned “Paradise City”?
I don’t know — flying puppy brings the cute. It’s a tough call.
And now that I know viking kitten plushies exist, I’m not sure I’ll be OK until I own one. Damn my consumerism.
Two words: “Crazy Train.”
This is going to be obscure, but:
“Hips, Tits, Lips, Power” by Pigface. The very beginning is a little drawn out, but it builds up and then, right around 1:00 the song explodes and is awesome until about 2:30… and then it just devolves into incoherence and repetition until it ends somewhere around 5:00.
I still like to play that little 1 1/2 minute sequence though
.
“Kick Out The Jams” by the MC5. There’s no way to deliver on the promise of the opening.
I always thought that the first 30 seconds or so of No Doubt’s “Sunday Morning” was an energetic masterpiece followed by 4 minutes of a merely ok song.
The first sixty seconds of the Coltrane/Ellington “In a Sentimental Mood” is my favorite sixty seconds of music ever, and I always feel a little let down by the rest of the piece.
I guess that’s kind of a different category, though.
Odd. As soon as I saw “Rolling Stones”, I thought, “Sympathy for the Devil” which has an engaing riff to opem, and then goes… not very far with it.
Of The Supremees, Reflections seems like a good choice, although Love is Here and Now You’re Gone alos promises something weirder than it delivers.
I’m kinda torn as to whether Gladys Knight and the Pips You Need Love Like I Do (Don’t You) meets the criteria.
Also Diana Ross’ I’m Coming Out is never quite as percussively dynamic as its opening implies.
As for songs that payoff on their promises, I’d point out the I Saw Her Again Last Night has a lot to live up to, and does; also almost anything by Prince.
Oh yeah, Gladys Knight and the Pips. There always seems like a really interesting lyrical hook in the middle of fairly shoddy musical craft.
that was worded funny…shoddily crafted music??
bah, i guess i’ll never make it as a music reviewer.
The problem with “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” folks, is that the song is much too short. If only it had gone on another eighteen or twenty minutes, then it would have gotten somewhere.
Jim 7: Yeah, I forgot that part in “Panic in Detroit.” I guess it counts as a middle 8. Regrettable lyrics, yes indeed.
But “Pump It Up”? “No way,” I thought at first. But then, upon further reflection, I decided “yes way.” The contrast with “Lipstick Vogue,” which starts off incredible and just gets incredibler, is kinda painfully obvious.
Amanda, I was trying to think of anti-anticlimactic songs, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came first to mind. Weirdly, the Stones also have one of the better gradually-building-to-somewhere tunes in “Sweet Virginia.” And I’ll always love the way Bowie stacks vocal upon vocal upon vocal at the end of “The Man Who Sold the World.”
And then there are songs that take a decent idea and beat it into the ground and then beat it into the ground some more, like the Buzzcocks’ “I Believe.” Door prizes will be awarded to anyone who can sit through all eighty-four repetitions of “there is no love in this world anymore.”
The A-number-one example of this in my mind has always been “Kind of a Drag” by the Buckinghams.
That building, crescendoing, exciting horn intro and then — “Kind of a drag…”
The choruses give it back a little bit, with the fast backup singing and harmonies on “Anyway,” but what is with that intro?
Zuzu that cracked me the fuck up.
Maybe it was just free associating off the mention of “Gallows Pole” (about which I agree), which is Led Zep at their most Hobbit Rock-y, but it strikes me that Jethro Tull has a large number of songs like this, e.g. “Up to Me” (heck, just about every cut longer than 2 mins. on Aqualung).
And, free associating further, there are also a number of songs by Cream that fit into this category (”Politician,” “Sunshine of Your Love”…though to be fair to Cream, the monotony was usually broken by a pretty incredible Clapton solo).
Hmmm…The Stones, Zep, Cream, Tull…depending on how you look at it, blues-based English rock bands of the long 1960s were either very good at starting songs, or not very good at finishing them.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the anti-anti-climatic song made me think The Pixies. “Gigantic” perfect example of constantly shifting dynamics. Layering and building and then peeling back and flat out stopping.
I’ve gotta disagree about Layla. It more than lives up to its opening. It all builds up to a climax just before the piano coda where the guitar is made to sound like a violin wailing the theme. This is a song about requited sex: it opens finally with fluttering hearts of the lovers realizing they are going to consummate their love, furious lovemaking and the wailing orgasm, followed by the long piano coda of cuddling. There’s a reason that this song has gone to number one several times over the decades.
The problem with “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” folks, is that the song is much too short. If only it had gone on another eighteen or twenty minutes, then it would have gotten somewhere.
Yeah, you’d need the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd to truly do the song justice - or maybe forget the first part and go right to The Ventures for the second.
And for anti-anticlimatic songs, I think “Because the Night” fits well.
(And there is also this song I hear on the radio a lot and I think they played it at prom, it starts kinda acoustic and just builds from there and sort of takes you upward to this rockin’ finale. Can’t remember the name though, maybe someone here will know it.)
A second vote for “Crazy Train”
Aw, in the olden days “Crazy Train” was one of my faves for “2am last call” at the bar in Amherst- that and J Geils “Whammer Jammer”. (but I’m almost as old as dirt)
“Kick Out The Jams” by the MC5. There’s no way to deliver on the promise of the opening.
Conversation should end right there. This is the perfect example, and probably the reason I’ve always enjoyed thinking about the MC5 more than I’ve enjoyed listening to them. Consider the virtual cake taken.
You are so right. I haven’t seen the movie for this very reason.
Maybe that is not true. What is true is that the amazing “Gimme Shelter” worked OK in “Wild Palms”- remember the Twin Peakish miniseries- but was officially played out after that.
Go used what should have been a cliche remix of “Magic Carpet Ride” to good effect, and finally, I have the feeling Zodiac would have done better with contemporary indie/stoner/psych rock that nobody has heard. You can get the same vibe without resorting to something too easy, something too blatant.
“Kisses are as wicked as an M16 and you….”
I don’t know, Michael, you literally are one of the only people on the internets in whose hands I would rest my life in argument with the Devil, but I lose confidence in this crusade you have against Monkey Man!
I must admit, however, that I find a certain repetition in some songs to be an attractive quality, and do not get bored. I counter with many James Brown songs. Not to directly compare the two, but sometimes you just kind of ride the riff, because where you are going you already are, you just enjoy it for the next 3-7 minutes.
I counter with many James Brown songs.
As James said, the difference between funk and disco is that disco stays on top of the groove whereas funk gets in there and works it. I could listen to “Doin’ It to Death” for the next three to seven hours.
And the reason I go after “Monkey Man” is that its opening is really, really good. Not “Kick Out the Jams” good, but still — enough for the remainder of the song to be a letdown after a few moments of great promise.
My only problem with the anti-”play the opening riff to death” argument, is that without that, we wouldn’t have the Velvets or krautrock or Stereolab, all of which I consider good things. Granted, they aren’t built so much on “killer” openings, but there’s some type of sublimity (is that even a word?) to be had in that repetition. Sister Ray is far and away one of the greatest peices of music committed to vinyl in the 20th century, I say.
Of course, if you want to go back further to about 1929, you get Ravel’s “Bolero”.
At first you think, “this is pretty good”. Then you think, “Is he going anywhere with this?” Then you realize, “He’s not going anywhere with this!”
When even the most hopeful of souls has given up, we are usually only about a third of the way through it.
Of course, if you want to go back further to about 1929, you get Ravel’s “Bolero”.
Aww, I’ve always really liked the way he builds the orchestration, though I do understand.
This Velvet Glove by RHCP. Great hook….and, and, and…aw hell, nothing.
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by the Eurhythmics rides a riff right into the ground, but stays ominous somehow.
And in the vein of Viking Kittens, “Gay Bar” by Electric Six kind of fits this as well.
How about John Cage’s 4′ 33″?
Striking opening…then just the same thing for over four minutes!
How about John Cage’s 4′ 33″?
At firs,t it was about the revolution, but the revolution kind of sucked.
How about John Cage’s 4′ 33″?
No middle eight — it fits the pattern.
I was going to respectfully disagree with Amanda regarding “Kick Out the Jams,” but I can sort of see her point. It’s not that the song is lame, it’s just that the opening is positively transcendent - there’s no way it can be overcome.
I’ll go even more obscure on ya.
Klaus Schulze, one of the members of Tangerine Dream, had a solo album called Mirage (1977) with two thirty-minutes “songs” on it. Both of them were like this, but especially the piece on the second side, Crystal Lake. Still I like it for the same reasons I like gamelan.
If you have ever listened to Javanese gamelan music, you could say the same thing about it. There is a style of gamelan where a phrase is played very slowly, then repeated ever faster until it all “comes crashing down” at the end. Considering the other structural elements (where high-note gongs are hit two-or four times more often than medium gongs, all the way down the scale, so that the largest gongs are hit only every 64th note, for example), it actually makes for a hypnotic effect.
I hope I’m not too far off topic by not talking about “pop” songs, but really, there are almost too many of them that don’t go anywhere to mention. I wanted to point out, as someone did above, that sometimes the repetition does serve a purpose.
“Guess I’m Fallin’ In Love” - Velvet Underground. One long lick played 3 times. And the live clip from the Bathouse? Maybe my favorite 3 minutes of VU…
What with Mick claiming to be a “cold Italian pizza” in the first verse, Monkey Man would qualify for this ABF if it opened with the first eight bars of “Muskrat Love.”
The greatest gap between intro and song quality remains the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”– the greatest guitar intro EVER, and then moronic sub-CCR wanna be swamp BILGE, utterly pointless and stupid. That intro still tears a hole into the fabric of spacetime though.
Trivia bit: what everybody thinks is “that amazing intro to Gimme Shelter” is listed on the original innersleeve as “Hard Knocks and Durty Sox”. Look it up.
Bad Brains, I love I Jah has a great opening, but then it just fizzles out. Maybe because the rest of that record is so ferocious that you expect them to do something innovative with this traditional sound, but they never do and it turns out to be a very middle-of-the-road reggae tune. Come to think of it, I don’t know if Big Takeover lives up to it’s opening, either.
For an example of a great opening that does go somewhere, Toots & The Maytals’ 54-46 Was My Number just goes from strength to strength. There’s that awesome opening, and then the “give it to me one time…” part and then they go into the chorus and it’s the greatest 1 & 1/2 minutes of ska ever and it never fizzles out…well, except that it does fade out, but that’s ok.
If this is a problem, then you really have to just toss out the entire Rolling Stones catalog. And all of Elvis Presley, Phillip Glass, and basically all of Western music of the past 60 years that isn’t serialist or (in many cases) jazz. It’s overwhelmingly (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly) beholden to “the riff” and ever-higher production quality, and speaks to the reality that pop culture is far more about marketing than actual culture (i.e. someone with the means to mass produce finds something simple and repetitive that they can churn out in huge quantities, and the rest of us think it’s brilliant; as opposed to ideas getting passed around and refined by whole communities until it’s actually well thought out and has some depth). That’s all really hippyish and oversimplified, but damn, folks, rock music is pretty frickn simple and repetitive and designed to hook you just long enough for you to buy…something (a record, a movie ticket, a t-shirt, etc.). If that’s a problem, there are other kinds of music.
Rush’s “Limelight”–great opening, lame-ass song
weboy with “Sympathy for the Devil”, FTW.
I had a couple of songs thought of before you mentioned that one. I sang back-up for a RS cover band for a short while, and that was the most BORING song to perform! I used to actually find some enjoyment in it, but sing it every performance, even just for four or five gigs in a month, and it wears HARD on the nerves.
That and Midnight Rambler. Sheesh. Those first 16 bars or so are great, but only the first time.