The Bangles to The Beach Boys

The Bangles
The Bangles were part of the vanguard of the 'Paisley Underground,' a 1980s Los Angeles music scene spun out of 1960s West Coast pop and rock. A kind of antidote to the Sunset Strip/glam metal era, they paid homage to hippy-dippy trends sonic and sartorial - a little far out, man, but nothing too dangerous.

Because America loves nothing but a good old fashioned dance craze, the band is most commonly associated with the asinine "Walk Like A Egyptian" (which experienced new life through anti-Hosni Mubarak sloganeering). But close behind in the hit parade are soulful ballads "Eternal Flame" and "Manic Monday."

"Eternal Flame" unfurls with a sparse arrangement and the one of greatest triangle accompaniments in rock history, providing a downy-soft canvas for a giant Susanna Hoffs vocal that's powerful but never overpowering.



Zach Galifinakis' interpretation:



Written by Prince, "Manic Monday" brings on a chorus of well-wishers to embellish the comparatively dour routine of the song's working girl protagonist. In terms of workaday cheeriness, it's no "Walkin' on Sunshine"; in fact, it's just a couple clicks north of slightly depressing, which makes its fantastical production sound even more sublime.



Barenaked Ladies
Who is BNL? For many people, the awfully simple answer is "the guys who did the speed-rapping 'Chinese chicken' song."



Having an unavoidable pop smash like "One Week" is fine if you are trying to become an arena-filling sensation, but the Barenaked Ladies' goals have never been that quotidian. Or that cogent. Whereas the world recognizes that BNL is "One Week," the BNL world is like an alternate universe where "One Week" was a tossed-off piece of album filler (there remains a possibility that that's what the song actually was). And thanks to the indefatigable loyalty of Canadians and geeks everywhere, BNL is one of a very small number of artists that can ignore its biggest hit and thrive financially. They'll fill arenas, all right, but only with the people that they want to be there. Anybody who spotted the upright bass and the orange-tinted glasses in the "One Week" video and pegged the Ladies as pure late-90s alt-rock need not apply.

But delving into the sprawling nerdy comic opera and creepily committed partisans of the BNL-verse, well, it can be easy to see why people will stop at "One Week." It's the only thing that saves listening to the Barenaked Ladies from being an all-or-nothing proposition. Accepting them means accepting all their different guises, which can be somewhat frustrating - are they the folkie jesters of "If I Had A Million Dollars"? The sensitive wise guys of "Pinch Me"? The mournful troubadours of "Brian Wilson"?

"Brian Wilson" is my favorite Barenaked Ladies song because it is one that stops winking long enough to suggest why these guys love music and felt compelled to form a band. For once, we get to a hint of the complexity and the pain behind the goofy personas and restrained album-oriented pop. It was unexplored country again until the 2008 cocaine-related arrest and subsequent departure of Steven Page, one half of the band's creative compass along with Ed Roberston. It turns out that BNL was a mess like dozens of other successful bands despite appearing to have the lowest scandalization quotient this side of Coldplay.



Much of BNL's trademark humor involves gentle self-deprecation but there's little in that schtick that might attract serious ridicule in the grown-up world. "Brian Wilson" is an artistic gamble that might have given the band something to really be embarrassed about if it wasn't their greatest triumph.

Barry Manilow
People who were proud to bypass the excesses of 1970s rock - the type of folks who thought (and not entirely without merit) that rock could never nurture a more creative lifeform than the Beatles - are the precisely the reason why an old-school lounge singer could become a global superstar. The irony is that many of Barry Manilow's songs ooze the same sleazy showbiz artifice as the compositions of his roach-smoking, concept-album-creating nemeses. This is an ideal time to make the obiligatory observation that Manilow did not write "I Write the Songs" (regarding the song's claim "I am music," scientists are still working to verify that Manilow is the very manifestation of the perceptual process of and engagement with sound).

I was going to joke that "Copacabana" has just enough detail to form the promising threatening narrative skeleton of an all-Manilow musical revue, until I discovered that this already exists. It's a decent signature tune, a weird hybrid of a disco beat and salsa breakdown (eat your heart out, Miami Sound Machine) that's an actual Manilow song for roughly three of its six minutes.

"Looks Like We Made It" and "Mandy" fit the little man-massive emotions template; I find them enjoyably cheesy rather than simply enjoyable. But I can make an exception for "I Can't Smile Without You" with its rush to a climax that seems to last the entire song. So far it's the only tune from the Hellboy II soundtrack that has inspired impromptu duets with my mom.

(in Italian...the magic starts at 0:36)



Basement Jaxx
Advertising is once again the sad origin of an entire band's contribution to my collection. The fat bassline of "Red Alert" is catchy and lands on the right side of abrasive and is apparently perfect for your Coca-Cola campfire raves. "Do Your Thing" is a tastefully-constructed dance song that earns its euphoria with a piano sample that disappears into wailing synths and an energetic guest vocal from the elusive Elliot May; I think it was in some sort of computer ad.



Unfortunately, the skull-rattling cacophony of "Where's Your Head At" seems too typical of an electronica band that spells part of its name with a double-x. It was only used to sell everything.

The Beach Boys
A nice thing about the Beach Boys is that they aren't interested in wasting your time. I remember being able to flip the Endless Summer (a title chosen to gingerly avoid calling it a "Greatest Hits") cassette three times in little more than an hour. Somewhere along the line I must have decided that even this was too much Beach Boys; of the teenybopper hits I favored as a kid, only the teenage romanticism of "Don't Worry Baby" and the pleasantly shallow "California Girls" remain. The latter still bugs me for giving short shrift to Southwest and Mountain and Pacific Northwest girls, but I guess it has saved us from three more superficial compliments (note that Mike Love doesn't dig Northeast girls for their hardy constitution and affection for participatory politics). I guess there's also "Good Vibrations" which you know as the famous gear-shifting "pocket symphony" that's the best-known example of the genius that the Barenaked Ladies sang about.



"Barbara Ann" is charming in its roughness, a rarity in the Beach Boys' early, regimented teen idol days. I get my perception of this stifling era (which brought us the raucous call to arms "Be True to Your School") from the 2000 TV movie The Beach Boys: An American Family. The film probably deserves its own post devoted to my half-lucid memories of campy moments like a terrifying ad break where Charles Manson stands at a window and screams something like "You can't ever leave the family!" to a fleeing Dennis Wilson. Good times.

Clearly, my knowledge of the Beach Boys is not entirely academic but at least I'm clever enough to recognize the superiority of Pet Sounds and its monolithic influence on the Beatles' late-60s work. "Sloop John B," "Caroline, No," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows"...for a brief shining moment it seemed like there could be a real transatlantic competition to push the pop envelope with lush, bittersweet songwriting genius.



It's possible that America wasn't ready for its favorite prom kings to leap into adulthood - Pet Sounds was a smash in the U.K. but a comparative flop in the U.S. - and we weren't about to let the Beach Boys stick the landing, even if it would prove to be the beginning of the end for the band. Listening to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" I get a sense that the Beach Boys are pop music's answer to Dorian Gray (or Tuck Everlasting for you fans of children's literature), missing the adult grace that could validate their genius in a way that eternal youth just can't.