Greatest Songs: #17

The Reverend Horton Heat - "The Devil's Chasing Me" (1992, from The Full Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat)


Pop genres are stupid. The difference between Muddy Waters and Franz Ferdinand is utterly minute, scarcely more than a nuance, yet they are treated as though one is watercolor and one is expressionist sculpture. And subgenres are even stupider. How anyone is supposed to tell the difference between hardcore, slo-core, grind-core, or death metal, and black metal, or electro and hip-hop, and talk about it intelligently for more than two minutes is beyond me. They're all marketing categories, and while they may be useful for communicating to consumers, they're meaningless in terms of evaluating artistic merit.

For example, "the Devil's Chasing Me" by the Good Reverend H.H. Some call it Rockabilly, some call it Psychobilly. The latter name exists because people associate Rockabilly with the 50's, and the 50's are bad, mmmkay? Also, Psychobilly is low-fi, dark-imaged, and makes gleeful noise about unpleasant things, which is why Screamin' Jay Hawkins is Psychobilly. Except he's not.

Right, the song, the song. Beautiful reverb guitar wash, great swingin' backbeat, and a tone that shifts from Robert Johnson horror-of-the-soul-on-the-lost-highway to winky-wink devil-in-velvet imagery. Most of the Reverend's tunes are about being delightfully naughty, a big heaping plateful of sex, drugs, and big fast cars burning a hole in your eardrum. This one isn't. It's about the cost for all that wild living, the sinking suspicion that no matter how much you stuff into yourself, it will never be enough, that you'll lose the taste for everything you thought you wanted, that no matter how fast you run from the devil, if you don't change yourself, you'll run right into his mouth.

Do I contend that RHH had such in mind when he penned the song? No, but I don't contend otherwise, either. For all I know he heard Jimbo lay down a baseline, felt chills up his spine, and then listened to some old blues 78's to get ideas. It's such a well-worn groove that anyone could probably come up with something along those lines. But if Good Charlotte did it, it would be a parody, unintentional or not, and it would sound terrible. This one doesn't, because it has too much soul, which Good Charlotte confuses with volume.

That's "soul" in the sense of bouncy groove and soul in the sense of rational principle of life, and soul in the sense of that which remains after death. This song has it, in spades. It may be a sorrowful, lamenting soul, that sounds like it won't ever escape what it's done to itself, but sometimes that's the only way to know a soul is there.


#18