Jon Savage wrote in England's Dreaming that after Punk, "pop time became forever splintered, post-modern". What he means by that is that not only do the classics never go out of style, nothing ever does, not really. Deep within the shaggy fury of the Grunge 90's, for example, 80's New Wave was merely sleeping, waiting for its chance to revive blazers and treble. I have students who weren't even born in the 80's who get very offended and hurt when I say bad things about Journey. And why shouldn't they? Journey's still releasing CD's (of Greatest Hits) and DVD's of Concerts all the way to 1997. They haven't really gone anywhere, except from the Latest Edition of What's Cool Now!, which you could argue they were never really on.
The truth is, there are only four Styles of Rock: Mod, Rocker, Hippie, and Geek. Rocker is the oldest, and has a direct line of descent from Chuck Berry straight through to the Hives, in which it has deliberately changed hardly at all. Hippie is anything involving folk styles, acid dreams, and spiritual ponderings. Geek runs the gamut from the virtuoso noodlings of a Steve Vai or Jeff Beck to the almost religious fervor that bands like Rush, Weezer or the aforementioned Journey evokes from the nerd set.
Oh, shut up. I'm getting to the song.
These four styles can be freely used by bands or even scenes; the Jam Band movment, for example is equal parts Hippie and Geek. Punk was a lot of Rocker and a bit of Mod. New Wave was mostly Mod, with a touch of Geek. Metal is Rocker attitude, Geek stylings, and a lot of neo-Classical pretensions. Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.
But what is Mod? Mod is Urban Rock, cool and detached, poetic and trebly, sharp and oddly sad. The Beatles were a Mod band before they turned Hippie, and even then they could never completely shake their Pop roots. The Who are the archetypal Mod band, who went down the Beatles path, then tried to be Rockers, and stopped being interesting a long time ago. Early Mod owed much to Rocker, and current Mod bands like Interpol and the Strokes owe a lot to Television.
"Glory" from their second album, is especially noteworthy as a forerunner of sounds to come. You can tell that the Strokes copied their guitar antics from Verlaine's and Lloyd's up-and-down, theme-and-variation routine. The rythmn section however, is not ignored, indeed, the soft funk of Fred Smith's bass and Billy Ficca's drums are propulsive and soothing throughout. The combination of these creates a joyful noise. It's pretty, the way Kind of Blue or Radiohead is pretty; it twinkles and grooves and smirks.
Tom Verlaine regarded himself as a poet, and wanted his lyrics to be a step forward in the movement of Rock Poetry. However, his voice reminds one of a tortured goat, so I've never paid much mind to his lyrics. I recall phrases like "lips so red" and "blah blah blah", but the real standout is the chorus:
When I
see the glory,
I don't
gotta worry.
Hardly genius, but it's got a certain touch to it; the longing for the eternal, the beautiful, the true, the 1/3 More FREE! That puts it outside the mostly self-involved subject matter of New Wave. For that, and for it's sweet tone, it makes the list.
#17
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