Nobody else sounds like Morphine. This is due partly, of course, to their instrumental lineup: drums, 2-string slide bass guitar, and baritone sax. But it’s also because they struck a weird balance between desperation and contentment, hunger and satiation, happy and sad.
Frontman Mark Sandman was as enigmatic as the music. Rumors of addiction thrust upon him simply for the name of his band, Sandman was never willing to divulge much about his personal life. But talk swirled about Boston/Cambridge that he was, in fact, a junky.
Morphine recorded two albums considered classics, but Cure for Painstands alone as their best work. It’s an album of incalculable pain, but a pain constantly tempered somehow, as though a fix comes through each time the sickness begins to creep in. The title track perfectly encapsulates the feeling of contented addiction, much the same way the The Velvet Underground‘s “Heroin” did many years before. Rarely, if ever, will you hear such an ebullient expression of enslavement.
So in this series we’ll explore the tendencies of contemporary pop (hint: catchy), evaluate the authenticity (or lack thereof) or an artist making a “hit”, and investigate exactly what makes a song popular.
Gotye, “Somebody that I Used to Know”
This is Wally de Backer. He’s a Belgian-born Australian who generally makes cut-and-paste electronic music under the stage name Gotye (gau-tee-yay). He’s been somewhat successful down under but has just scored his breakthrough hit with an undeniably catchy tune called “Somebody that I Used to Know” featuring a guest verse and backing vocal from Katy Perry some woman who sounds just like Katy Perry. Take a listen, then read on…
The track is undeniably catchy; the following elements all contribute to that:
-The xylophone line (I had pretty much forgotten this instrument exists)
-The sparseness of the instrumentation (at a time when the consensus in pop seems to be “bigger is better” the fact that this song is uncrowded is startling, in a good way)
-The chorus hook: “But you didn’t have to cutttttt me outtt, (blah blah blah) never happened and no, we weren’t nothing”
-He sounds like Peter Gabriel.
-The guest verse and backing harmonies from a different voice, bolstering the final chorus (though these may just be catchy because she sounds like Katy Perry, and Katy Perry is catchy like Eliot Smith is depressing)
Now, before we make a determination on whether the song is catchy and good, or just catchy, let’s look at the things about it that are decidedly not good:
–First and foremost, the lyrics, which are banal to the point of irony, but sung with too much conviction to be ironic:
“Now and then I think of when we were together
Like when you said you felt so happy you could die
Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember” barf.
–The guest verse: this is good and bad; good because it adds some sonic variety and the harmonies over the last chorus are excellent; bad because, come on, that’s seriously not Katy Perry? It makes me question the validity of the entire song that this woman is trying so hard to sound like someone she’s not. This is not to say Katy Perry is the gold-standard of female musicians, but be yourself Kimbra.
(She even kinda looks like Katy Perry)
If you’re keeping count, the catchy outweighs the bad, and here we come to heart of the question “Is this song good, or just catchy?”: every catchy song is good, unless it isn’t. Songs can beat you over the head with an infectious melody until it’s stuck in your head for days (apropos: my mom had Deep Blue Something‘s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” stuck in her head so badly she lost sleep, not exaggerating), but if what surrounds that melody is contrived or if that melody is annoying, it does not a good song make.
Stay tuned for further discussion of the “Catchy, Good, or Both?” issue and for now:
Happy Music Sad Music 