Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 3

Sucked Out- Superdrag
Mockingbirds- Grant Lee Buffalo
Everybody Hurts- REM
Debonair- The Afghan Whigs
Queen- Melvins
Talk Show Host- Radiohead
Down to This- Soul Coughing but this is even better!
Bull in the Heather- Sonic Youth
Down by the Water- PJ Harvey
She Don't Use Jelly- The Flaming Lips
The Distance- Cake
Live Forever- Oasis
Loser- Beck
Human Behavior- Bjork
Piggy- Nine Inch Nails
Hurt- Nine Inch Nails
Bulls on Parade- Rage Against the Machine
In the Meantime- Spacehog
Possum Kingdom- Toadies

I should maybe call this the "120 Minutes Volume". Many of the songs here remind me of that show on MTV which I watched pretty much every Sunday night in high school. 120 Minutes would always play the best videos, or at least the ones I was most interested in seeing, but they could not get a good host for that show! It was just painful. Matt Pinfield and Lewis Largent were responsible for some of the most awkward interviews and video intros ever recorded! But, that too, was part of the "alternative" rock schtick that was so popular at the time. It's "umbra" if you will, to use a recent Word of the Day.

This volume could also be "The Volume of the Riff". Many great riffs here, "Queen"(from the Melvins, the masters of the riff!), "Talk Show Host" (and here Radiohead was entering entering another phase growing creatively by leaps and bounds),"Piggy", "Possum Kingdom", all great riffs that were quite potent to my blobby teenage brain.

One of the interesting things that starts to arise when listening to these songs again are similarities I didn't notice before. Such as the songs "Possum Kingdom" and "Down by the Water", both songs which on a surface level are seemingly about the same thing, murder down by the river. Both songs are part of a long tradition of rock songs about murder at the river, see Neil Young's "Down by the River". His 1969 version, appropriately, follows from a blues and folk tradition of songs which was reflective of that era of song writing . But these songs, some 25 years later, are great examples of the evolution of pop music and the culture as a whole to an acceptance of art (or "art") to go to a darker and more psychological place, and certainly that is in part due to previous artists such as Neil. "Possum Kingdom" now takes us inside the head of the killer, which appears to be some sort of serial killer a la Silence of the Lambs. However, PJ Harvey one ups them all. Her tale of murder, takes a more poetic, symbolic, and possibly darker (depending on your interpretation) tact. She takes that common theme and turns it a little bit. Is it filicide or is it metaphor for the loss of innocence, or something else? Anyways, it would seem that pop song lyrics and themes were evolving and exploring new aspects of common themes during this time.

And, yes, "Everybody Hurts" may be the most depressing song (and video) ever written!

Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 1

No Rain- Blind Melon
Bound for the Floor- Local H
Friends of P- The Rentals
Undone (The Sweater Song)- Weezer
Buddy Holly- Weezer
One Headlight- The Wallflowers
6th Ave Heartache- The Wallflowers
Beans- Nirvana/Kurt Cobain
D7- Nirvana
Opinion- Nirvana/Kurt Cobain
Fell on Black Days- Soundgarden
Black Hole Sun- Soundgarden
Unsung- Helmet
Stars- Hum
Pepper- Butthole Surfers
Longview- Greenday
Today- Smashing Pumpkins
Selling the Drama- Live
It's a Shame About Ray- The Lemonheads
Cumbersome- Seven Mary Three


So that's Volume 1 of 4 so far. These are the songs that are once again pervading my existence. I didn't choose these songs so much because I liked them or not. The criteria was more about the songs being in someway connected to a memory. Take for instance "Cumbersome", not a song I cared for at the time, but the rock radio station I listened to occasionally in Killeen, TX played them all the time. So like it or not I remember that song being on the radio on a warm Texas night (still my favorite nights of any place I've lived. There's just something in the air) as I drove home from my first job in my first car, a 1964 Chevy Bel-Air. So it is connected to that time of new found freedom and that looming sense, and uncertainty, of "the real world" being just around the corner. So memories like that.

I did have to draw the line at Alanis Morissette, Madonna, Janet Jackson, etc. Even though their songs were everywhere back then I just couldn't do it. These songs are closer to defining me in some sense, even if I didn't like all of them at the time. Actually, I'm finding that it's the songs I didn't like so much are the ones that take me back to the time of '93-'96 most, probably because they act as a sort of time capsule since I haven't listened to them since.

Of course I was discovering other music, too, during this time. I spent a lot of time combing through my dad's record collection listening to The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Roling Stones and just starting to get really into The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper at first, and then The White Album just blew me away and is still one of my all time favorites). However, those songs were not quite connected to the rest of my generation and that moment in time. So these songs are sort of a bridge between me and what was going on at the time in a larger sense.

Don't worry, there are still three more volumes to go, but this should be enough to get us all going for now.